Happy 4th of July!

Let the Eagle soar. Like she's never soared before...

The Hills (Bad Language Alert!)

Some of you may have heard that these are bad times for my industry of choice. Indeed. A week or two ago, I asked a former editor to chat for a couple minutes for some advice. Here's his response:

You don't even need a few minutes. Just read this:

RUN FOR THE FUCKING HILLS.

You're welcome.

And on that note, I'm off to Brazil. Rio and a couple days in the mountains. Our return ticket is for next weekend, but depending on how things go at the nation's oldest newspaper, perhaps we'll stick around a bit longer...

Dream Decoder

I have been having a strange recurring nightmare about weddings. It's the day before or the morning of my wedding and some piece has been left unplanned - we don't have a cake, or a person to marry us, or some other variation on the thing you shouldn't leave til the last minute. I wake up before it's resolved, but the upshot is having to throw something together at the last minute.

I say this is strange because we are ridiculously ahead of the game in wedding planning. We have a location, catering, cake, photographer and band. My bridesmaids already have their dresses. I got proofs for our invitations and save the dates in the mail last week, and have an appointment with a florist next week. Our wedding is 14 months away.

That's not so much by design or anticipation as a function of my Type A tendencies and a general desire to get as much of this out of the way as possible so we can have a good six to eight months (or more) to not think about the wedding.

Then again, if we were to cancel the wedding and just get hitched at town hall or on a remote beach somewhere private, I'd be thrilled about that too.  Prefer it, even. It's just that if we're going to have a wedding, I want it to be as (not going to say perfect) fitting and lovely as possible. 

So back to the dream. I'm not sure why the fear suddenly popping into my subconscious is of being unprepared for something we're already overprepared for, and for something I'm not even that invested in, to boot. 

Perhaps this is a typical dream, like the naked to class or unprepared for a test (neither of which I ever had)? Or perhaps I should rush out and finish the loose ends? Or chalk it up to a silly dream and move on?

Color Wars

Mystifying wedding concept alert: Wedding colors. What gives?

(If you have any suggestions, do share or [subtle plug] weigh in on the poll on the right side of the page.)

Apparently it's important to have colors for your wedding. Or at least it's something a lot of people seem to do. I'm not really sure why you need a declared scheme if you're not, say, having a Christmas or Denver Broncos-themed wedding. Can't you just make sure everything matches and looks basically pleasing?

If I got, say, blue bridesmaid dresses and pink flowers, would declaring our colors as pink and blue make those colors somehow more ours? Would everyone we know think of us when they see anything ranging from magenta to teal? Would the guests dress accordingly? Is it criminal if the dresses and bouquets don't match the table runners and cocktail napkins?

Or am I missing something?

Onion Vows

WEDDINGS

Evidently unaware 

that the anti-quated 

practice has virtually 

no benefit in today's 

society, William Curtis 

and Jessica Scruggs 

were married this week.

Jewish Mother Invite Fantasies

Some invite humor, thanks to (cover boy) Kevin. (I hope this is not a hint...)

Royal Inspiration

When Butterflies Attack: It's called fashion, apparently.

Princess Beatrice sports some serious hat at the latest royal wedding. Anyone want to wear this to mine?

The Divorce Industry

One of my favorite eyesores along the urban planners' nightmare that is Route 18 in East Brunswick: The Divorce Center.

It's just down the block from David's Bridal. I'm not really sure what you do at one, aside from the obvious, or whether they sell gum and magazines at the checkout counter to go with your petitions for alimony and parenting classes.

But there's something so...I'm not sure what...appropriate to our culture's current track record on marriage...about these storefront divorce shops. I mean, hell, at a Divorce Center, you can do it by mail! And, for you enterprising types, you can even open a Divorce Center franchise.

I don't think it's quite as lucrative as the marriage industry (a multimillion-dollar Connecticut divorce case notwithstanding), but is it any wonder people are trying to cash in on this end of the business?

The sanctity of commerce, at least, is alive and well.

The "Big Day" BS

An excellent column on the problems with the "your big day" concept and the assumptions that go with it.

To sum up:

Assumption One: It's My Big Day. That is, getting married is more important to me than to my fiancé. A corollary to this assumption, which we can now call the Big Principle, is that only brides want big weddings. Men, by definition, rise above such superficial feminine displays.

Assumption Two: It's My Big Day. That is, nothing else I do in life will be as important to me as getting married. ... don't get me wrong: it will be a big day. I've never been married before; neither has he; if all goes according to plan neither of us will ever get married again. So yes, it's important. But it does not represent the pinnacle of my ambition (sorry, sweetie). Getting my PhD was a Big Day; publishing my first book was a Big Day. Those were both achievements; a wedding is not an achievement, it's a party. Marriage -- now that's an achievement.

Assumption Three is the flip side of Assumption Two: It's My Big Day. That is, I only get the one. Enjoy it, sweetheart, and carpe diadem, because from now on all it's all about him.

Not that she's anti-wedding or anything - just that it has its place and context:

My reasons relate to ritual, history, and symbolic transformations. Happily, a wedding offers endless opportunities to challenge persistent assumptions about desperate women on the last-chance express.

Well said!

(Thanks to Erin for the link!)

From The Peanut Gallery

I'm not generally a fan of lace (or big stone crosses as backdrops), but I do think Jenna Bush picked an excellent dress. And hairstyle. I'm impressed.



I also found myself agreeing with the president during my morning perusal of the Times:

In March, Mr. Bush warmed up the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce by joking about the “difficult spending decisions” and “sensitive diplomacy” that are a part of wedding planning.

How true! Though hopefully he decided against invading the Hager family.

I've Been Meme'ed

I'm not so good with these newfangled technological thingies (I am a print media dinosaur, after all), but apparently there's some thing called Memeing, which Liz has just done to me. Hence, the below:


Here are the rules:

A) The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.

B) Each player answers the questions about himself or herself.

C) At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

1) Ten years ago I was…finishing my sophomore year of high school. The less we can say about this, the better.

2) Five things on today’s to-do list:
Laundry
Gym
Get a library card
Try on dress I ordered from Nordstrom
Return dress I ordered from Nordstrom

3) Things I’d do if I were a billionaire:

Hm...Endow some sort of public health organization. Endow some sort of omnipotent do-obvious-good-stuff organization. Buy a newspaper and run it responsibly. Buy a lot of books. Loan $11.4 million to my presidential campaign.

4) Three bad habits:
I play with my hair obsessively.
I am addicted to diet Coke.
I pick scabs.

5) Five places I’ve lived:
Chicago
Ann Arbor, Michigan
New Haven (twice!)
Manhattan
New Jersey

6) Six jobs I’ve had in my life:
Medical file filer, camp counselor, homeless-newspaper intern, childcare drop in center "recreation specialist," American Studies Department receptionist/copier/shredder/filer, newspaper reporter

Vows

I started reading the Times' Vows section a couple years ago, after I realized people I went to college popped up in there every so often. You can learn some really interesting tidbits about people you sort of knew from their wedding announcements, like one former classmate of mine whose family apparently owns a plantation.

I'll admit I don't dwell much on the articles or personal stories; I just skim for basic details like age of bride and groom, where they went to college, whether I might know them (or of them), and what investment banks their fathers run. Not a high-minded activity, but interesting nonetheless.

One thing about this has started to bother me. There's something jarring in the way the announcement blurbs read. An example (names changed to protect the innocent):

Sarah Marie Weisman, a daughter of Judith Weisman and Allan R. Weisman of Summit, N.J., was married on Saturday evening to Samuel David Hirschman, the son of Linda and Robert Hirschman of Princeton, Mass. Rabbi Shlomo Levi officiated at a service on a private estate owned by the bride's family.

Mrs. Hirschman, 28, was until March a senior manager of loans at Merrill Lynch. She graduated from Dartmouth...

There's nothing but a space between paragraphs one and two, but suddenly, in a few milimeters, Sarah Marie has made the transition from high-powered, working Ms. Weisman to the jobless Mrs. Hirschman.

Of course, the sudden name change is far more common than the abandoned career, though that creeps up far more often than I would have thought among highly educated, successful women of my generation.

I suppose the one-line space in a newspaper column is a fairly appropriate way to describe these transitions. They're weirdly sudden. Not that the wedding ceremony described in paragraph one isn't a major threshold crossed, based on months of preparation and years of courtship, but it's still a strange thing. One minute (or paragraph) you've got one name, the next, you're someone else. One minute you're a rising star on Wall Street or some other industry, the next you're wifey.

Weird.