Mysteries of Shittsburgh

OK, so my pal in bloggydom, Bewildered Housewife, tagged me for a meme. I think all I have to do is post about 6 quirks that I have that are personal to me. Um, I’d love to do that and all, but I really should keep this blog about my wedding. So, prepare to look behind the curtain into the 6 as-yet-unknown quirks about my wedding!

But you know, a lot of the non-traditional aspects of my wedding have already been revealed here. There’s not much more to tell, except maybe that I’m effing tired of planning this thing. Srsly. It feels like I’m single-handedly running a little town. If that town were a real place, I’d call it “Shittsburgh.” Not because planning a wedding is really that shitty (um, but it kind of is), but because I love how Sienna Miller famously insulted the city of Pittsburgh by labeling it thusly.

It was such a career-suicide move, but GOD was that some delicious faux pas. Sometimes when the beautiful people fuck up, it’s just dreadful and infuriating (Tom Cruise and every TV appearance he’s done in the last 3 years). But other times, it’s really humanizing. “Shittsburgh” is funny in the way that one of my friends could have said something like that to a PA resident by accident and caught the same case of foot-in-mouth disease. I love it. I’d totally have a beer with Sienna Miller. Anyway, onward:

Pretty: Ur Doin It Wrong

I honestly find it shocking how often people need to be told what looks good and what doesn’t. I’m talking, of course, about the most alarming trend in the bridal world this side of baby’s breath: the Used Kleenex Dress.

My White Whale: Call Me Ishmael, Yo.

  Ask any bride what she went through in order to find her dress, and the answer you’ll never hear is, “I walked into a store. I saw a dress. I liked it. I bought it.” Ohhh noooo. That is not the way of it. The buying of the Dress of Your Life is never such a simple, pedestrian affair. Nay, the arrangement of one dressmaker making, one store selling, and one consumer consuming belies the epic, Melvillian odyssey that is the quest for the One. The stalking and procuring of the garment encompasses every plot conflict in the literary world: Man vs. Man (have you ever been to a bridal shop? Claws at the ready, people), Man vs. Nature (while dress hunting, it’s as if the whole world- the flora and fauna, the atmosphere, the very firmament of heaven all conspire against you), and -most assuredly, Man Vs. Himself. Or, as Disney chose to put it:

Please to be getting your sea legs on, for after the jump, we board the Good Ship Nuptualus and decend into a madness as deep as the fathoms of the Sea.

It’s All About the Benjamins, Baby

Now tell me:

What y’all wanna do? Wanna be ballers? Shot-callers? Brawlers?
Who be dippin’ in the Benz with the spoilers?

(Look, I know that ‘Benjamins’ Is a Puff Daddy song, but I couldn’t find any good 90s-nostalgia-trip pics of Puffy. But mostly, I just really love this pic if Fiddy, and I’d be loath to do a post about money and *not* use this spectacular image. Please take a moment to really observe the look on this man’s face. He’s got a fistfulof dollars and is trying to look hard, but he’s just not pulling it off. I haven’t seen a more benign visage since Alan Thicke as the patriarch of the Seaver clan on Growing Pains. Really, it looks like Fiddy is giving his son a scolding. “Now boy, I may have a panty on my head, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to listen to what I say.” )

The average American wedding costs $25,000. Think about that for a second. My entire college career cost, like, 10 thousand less than that. Over the course of five years (shut up, OK?), whereas the average couple blows all that cash on ONE DAY. It’s kind of a mindfuck, isn’t it?

And then think, pop culture offers up shows like Rich Bride, Poor Bride, Platinum Weddings, and My Big, Fat Fabulous Wedding as a kind of consumer porn spending-orgy. Uh, needless to say, I’ve seen pretty much every episode of these shows. Yeeeeeah. I like to think these shows keep me grounded and stop me from spending insane sums on bullshit like hologram-monograms and cinematic lighting concepts. But the fact remains, until today, I had no idea how much I was actually spending on this wedding…

Back-Alley Bride

(This is the first post by TheNot guest-writer Skinny Bones Jones!!)

Recently, the California Supreme Court overturned a ban on gay marriage, and in a few short weeks gay and lesbian couples all over the US can lawfully wed one another in our beautiful golden state. A few weeks after that, we will see whether or not the conservative Christian right has collected enough signatures on petitions which would introduce an initiative on November’s ballot that could, once again, rip the foundation of equality from under us, like so many SF weddings undone in 2004.

In celebration, hope and as a testament to my amazing loverbird and our unprecedented love, I’ve written a funny little story about the time she proposed to me three years ago.

Cake or Death: WTF? Interlude

This next post can best be summed up as: Things That Make You Go, “Hmmmm?”

   But please, don’t let my bad taste in 90s club music defer you from scrolling through my annotated gallery of crazy cakes I came across while researching my Cake or Death posts. The following cakes were not applicable to any of my CoD rants, but the’yre hardly rejects. No, in my book, the following cakes are ALL winners, and if I refrained from showing them to you, it’d make me a bad blogger. I think you need to see these cakes.  Your life will never be the same, trust.

   In writing classes (of which I need many, many more, thx), I remember being told that you have to start your story or whatever with a “hook.” Something to draw the reader in. Because the “hook” brings you back, I ain’t telling you no lie. The “hook” brings you back, on that you can rely. (ka-POW! It’s the one-two punch of bad 90s music up in here! I should be ashamed of myself, but I’m just not) Anyway, I you’ll agree that the first cake up on the carving station more than qualifies as a hooker (and on several levels, in fact!):

There are no words. Really, there aren’t. About the only observation I can make at this point is that the cake is shaved. (*retch*)

If That Ain’t Country…

    I’m not the only altar-bound woman at my place of business. Which is great, because if there’s anything in this world I don’t like, it’s too much attention. Besides, this chick’s wedding is a helluva lot more interesting than mine anyway (country wedding! Cowboy boots under the wedding dress! Leather & lace! I can’t wait!), so I’m flying super low under the radar at work. Yessss.

    As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m currently occupying nearly every hour of available free time in my life with wedding appointments. I have 5 appointments this week, each taking about 2 hours. So yeah, 10 hours of my time this week will be spent on the Wedding That’s Eating My Life. 10 hours is practically a job. Uh, or at least, that’s the amount of hours I used to get at Starbucks (“we guarantee 4 hours on your schedule, but if you want enough money to live on, it’s up to you to pick up open-then-close-then-open shifts that directly violate our employment policy. Smootches, sucker!” Srsly, do not get me started on working at Starbucks.) No working out for me, no leisurely walks with the dog, no time to prepare nice dinners, no showering (seriously, you don’t want to know). I’m really starting to wonder if it’s all worth it. I love Mr. Panda, he’s my best friend, and he makes me so happy. I just want to be married to him. That’s all I want, and yet here I am, sinking the GNP of a small country into this pretentious fucking party.

    Don’t mind me, I have good days where I’m soooo excited about my pretty dress, the thought of my man in a hot-ass suit, and the fact that I’ll be seeing all my relatives and old friends that I miss so much. But I also have bad days, too. This would be one of those. Anyway, back to the point of this post, the other bride at my office. Let’s call her “Fancy” (for no other reason then the fact that that Reba song is the hottest shit ever). Lately, I’ve been all “woe is me” about all the work I have to do for my wedding. Fancy’s wedding is in, like, 2 weeks and just the other day there was an exchange between Fancy and her mom (who also works here) that made me realize how good I’ve really got it:

Culture Clash Wedding: Korean Customs

   Hey guys, sorry I’ve not posted in a bit, but the wedding planning appointments have been piling up on me like yuppies at a Baskin Robbins free scoop night. And my Alaskan adventurer bridesmaid is in town, so I’m trying to make time to hang before she leaves me to go puke on the tundras and sleep with eskimos and shit.

(Yeah, you thought I was kidding. Look at all these freeloading-ass fools lining up for their complementary frosty treats. You wanna be like these people. You want free foods. You’re gonna crash my wedding for the free foods.)

   So, without futher ado, the conclusion to my epic 3-part series about my random-ass, culturally-confused wedding:

Culture Clash Wedding: Western Customs

Last post we explored the weird world of Cajun wedding customs. Now it’s time to tackle the nuptual rituals we should all be familiar with:

Exclusive! Breaking! Mariah Carey’s Wedding Dress!

Mariah Carey married Nick Cannon On Wednesday, and WE have the 1st pics of the blushing bride’s wedding dress. After the jump!