job news and dress news

It is now known to my boss, so let it be known to all: I found another job.

I will be back to working in Annapolis, commuting 40 minutes a day instead of two hours, it’s a LOT more money, and I will be doing genuine paralegal stuff instead of the monkey work I’m doing now. Drafting letters, case analysis, interviews, research, etc. I’m really excited about this, in part because one of my interviewers said of her own volition that it was a firm where “we like our employees to have a life.” Thank GOD.

Now is not the time to rail against the job I have had for the last six months, but perhaps another time I will. I feel no compunction about railing against the temp company who placed me, though, because I sent them an email last week telling them exactly what I thought of them. In October I called my contact, telling him that this job was not working out, that it wasn’t the job I interviewed for, and that I wanted a different placement immediately. He said he would keep looking for other opportunities for me and would be in touch within the next couple of weeks to keep me posted. I never heard from him again.

They also kept me as a temp for six months, when I was told that after only a couple of months I’d be offered a regular position with benefits and a pay raise. Must’ve been nice to keep getting a temp commission week after week, eh? During that time, no health insurance, no paid holidays, no job security. I think my contact just wanted to forget about me and my unhappy placement, hopefully forever. Instead I wrote him and two other people at the temp agency telling them all this. They tried to call me to discuss the situation, but I really don’t know what a conversation would accomplish, so I refused to answer, and emailed my other, nicer contact to tell her gently that I had spent all the time I was willing to on this agency and to please stop calling.

So that, by the way, has been going on all this time, even through all the stuff about the actual job that I knew was a bad situation for me after one month into it. Which I will either try to let go or talk about after the job is finished, which is one week from tomorrow. I start in Annapolis on the 8th. I am REALLY excited. It was the second of three jobs that I interviewed for over the past month or so, which by the way was exhausting to do while I was taking the biology class and teaching yoga and commuting two hours a day and working in one instance fifty hours a week. But I succeeded. And while I’m happy that I’ve knocked out one of the resolutions on my list, I think I did pretty good work on that get-used-to-constant activity item too.

So, YAY! The extra money is coming exactly when we need it, the commute will be a giant relief, and I can’t wait to work with these people and do this work. It’s family law, which virtually everyone has warned me away from because it’s so heavy on the emotions, but I’m really nosy about people, so I think it’s going to be fun, if emotionally exhausting.

On Thursday I went to the only bridal salon within a few hundred miles that carries Claire Pettibone dresses. I have the tendency to fall in love with clothing styles that do not suit me at all, such as floaty hippie tops that do not flatter my C-cup boobs and somewhat stocky torso, or thin and delicate sundresses that do not flatter…well, the same things. I was worried I was doing the same with Claire’s dresses, which are exactly, 100% the style that I want my wedding gown to be (unless I change my mind and go with the 50′s tea dress, which, Kathleen, I am still considering). No matter where I get the dress or what exactly it looks like, I am modeling what I want after her stuff. But I didn’t know if her stuff would look remotely good on me, so I made an appointment at this salon to check it out.

The place had terrible reviews on Google, saying that the staff was snooty as hell, so I walked in there a little apprehensively. I always feel my self-worth plummeting when I walk into Nordstrom, knowing I have no business bringing my wallet in there. But Google in this case was wrong: everyone was very friendly and helpful. (This might be because I was trying on $3500 dresses and said that I didn’t have a dress budget nailed down yet.) I tried on the five or six of her dresses that they had, one of which was so outlandish that the saleswoman asked her boss, “Has anyone bought this?”, and I tried on a few other dresses for good measure. The one traditional bridey dress I tried on helpfully reinforced my feelings on this whole thing: it had a full skirt and train, whalebone corset (or whatever polymer they use instead of whalebone these days), was made of thick, stiff satin, and was absolutely beautiful. I looked wonderful in it. And it was completely, utterly wrong.

I also got what I wanted out of the hour I spent there: I found out how Claire’s dresses look on me. I thought that they sometimes suited me and sometimes didn’t, depending on the structure of the gown. The one that the saleswomen could not shut up about how great I looked in it was a $4000 gown by another designer that was so heavy with beading I hated moving around in it. Luckily, it had some of the same structural details as the dress of Claire’s that I have my heart set on: this one.

It is so gorgeous to me that I can’t stop looking at it in my off moments. It is simple, just as I want it to be, and is mostly perfect – were I designing it I would ask for a different lace pattern (no roses will be incorporated into my wedding, so why would I feature them so prominently on this dress?), and perhaps a straight line across the decolletage, depending on exactly how low it is in real life. But it’s as close to perfect as I could have asked for from a pre-made dress.

It is also $2200.

This is an absolutely outrageous figure, a third of our budget for the entire wedding, and, what, five times as much as I wanted to pay, with the cost of the alterations chucked in on the top? I explained to BF that although I have a zillion alternatives, including taking detailed pictures and bringing them to a tailor, searching through the tens or hundreds of thousands of wedding dresses out there for something just as right,* and so on, I am actually considering paying that much for the dress, just because I’ve found it so early on and I love it so much. I also explained that I know I am a complete idiot for thinking this way, when literally every woman I know has told me about the great deal she got on her beautiful dress. Only fools and the wealthy buy dresses at such dear prices.

*And sifting through them all is really challenging when 90% of them are brocade and bridey, exactly what I don’t want. This salon, with a selection of probably 100 or 200 dresses, had about ten without full skirts, and I only reasonably liked two. I’ll never find what I want at David’s Bridal.

But, you guys, do you know how a bridal salon like this works? You order the dress, and then they measure you exactly, from stem to sternum, and then the designer manufactures the dress for you. In this case, with European silk and beading by hand. For me! And no one else! Ah, I admit that siren song is lulling me into thinking $2200 is not that much money.

But it is. It really is. I am fully aware of that.

So here’s what I did. This model of dress was not available to try on at the bridal salon, but it could be ordered as a loaner, at the cost of $100. Which I paid, gladly, just so that I could try it on. (Even my notoriously cheap mother thought that this was a reasonable expense.) It should be in by the middle of next week, when I will gather up MM and J and rush hungrily over there to zip myself into it. If I’m not a vision in it, I will think no further about it. If I am, well…I’ll have some more thinking to do.

My mother has a tailor in Birmingham that she trusts, so I’m thinking I might ask if she can make something very similar for me. Maybe. J said I should not trust a wedding dress to anyone I wouldn’t trust my life to, especially because the materials in designer dresses are so particular, so I’m still thinking on that. This model of dress, I found, is available used online, but I’ll still pay a lot more than I want to (half the new cost), and it’s not made for me, which means I’ll be paying what amounts to salon prices for a dress that’s not custom-cut to me. Plus, the alterations in that situation would probably be quite pricey.

Talk me out of it. Or tell me this dress is too perfect for words and I’m not nuts for considering it.

Sheesh, another 1500-word post. And I didn’t even tell you about Pennies from Heaven or the shepherd’s pie or gracelessly and thoroughly flunking Wednesday’s biology test. Ah well; another day.

bullying

A few days on, I still haven’t answered my dad’s email.

I’ve drafted the you-should-reconsider email, and I really like what it says. I’m just not sure I’m ready to urge him to reconsider. I really feel that just dropping him would not be a terrible idea.

BF and I spoke with his parents about this whole thing last night, and that conversation was illuminating. (They love me a lot, and were appalled, saying a lot of the same kinds of things you fine people said. I am so grateful to you for your vitriolic support, by the way, that I have no words for it, and actually choked up when telling BF how much my blog-friends mean to me. Thank you.) MM gave me much, much good advice. The way she came down on it, this is an absurd and horrible thing my father has done, but I shouldn’t close the door on him. She said I should wait a couple of weeks and then write him a letter, a physical letter rather than an email, and ask him to think it over before he refuses to come. She said not to mention anything about paying for the wedding, just to drop that half of the conversation, and especially not to mention anything about my mother so as not to stir the pot.

My intention with my letter is not only to tell him he should reconsider. I want to tell him that it would have been fine to tell me he wouldn’t pay for the wedding, but that the way he did it was unnecessary, petty, and extremely hurtful. I find it very important to put this in. MD thinks that in the week that I haven’t written back to him, Dad’s probably been getting more and more upset, since without any contact there is no control over me. MD may be partially right, but honestly? I think Dad probably thinks I’m just pouting about no money for the wedding. (It is clear by now that he doesn’t think much of me.) I want to make it absolutely plain that I don’t care about money for the wedding – in fact, I don’t care about money at all. What I cared about, before this email, was that my father was present for my wedding. If he could realize that, maybe there are more things he could see.

I also plan to start sending him $100 a month, no matter the outcome of our relationship. This is a majorly passive-aggressive thing to do, I know, but I am tired of him complaining about how much I cost and I think if I steadily pay him back, either I will have some ammunition against his complaining, or he will realize what an ass he’s being and will think twice about pulling this shit on my half-brother. In the past I’ve tried giving him money to repay him for various small loans, and he has tried refusing it, saying he doesn’t need to be paid back, which is YET ANOTHER little detail as to why this whole thing makes me so upset. If you don’t need to be paid back, don’t bitch about spending. In any case, I withdrew $100 in cash – cash so he can’t just put the checks aside and pretend to forget about it - and it’s been sitting in my wallet until I’m ready to respond to him.

There was a lot of talk last night about forgiveness being empowering. Much as I respect that, and believe it probably works for some people, I have never found redemption through forgiving those who have hurt me. I’ve forgiven my parents over and over again, and it’s only allowed them to hurt me further, which makes me feel like a fool, not empowered. I forgave Eric, and it has given me no peace about the awfulness of our relationship. I forgave KJJ repeatedly and it hasn’t changed anything. I’ve failed at a lot of friendships, but a lot of friendships have failed me, and nowhere in that process has there been empowerment, rather than merely a lesson grasped in my fist like a cold stone.

MD pointed out that I have persevered through asshole parents and become a remarkable woman, with maturity that my parents do not possess, and maybe that’s a little empowering? Yes, this is true, but I think I’d trade in some of that maturity for not hearing all the things I’ve heard them say about each other. In a hot minute, I would.

The thing that I found most interesting was what MM told me about the pattern I’ve gotten into with my parents. I’ve allowed them, over the last decade, to triangulate me into an unpleasant set of conflicts, and have acquiesced to them expressing their bitterness at each other to me, rather than cutting it off cold. I figured out while she was talking that they have bullied me, exactly like those girls in middle school bullied me, and frankly – sorry if this is disillusioning to any eleven-year-olds out there – there is no good solution to being bullied. You can try ignoring them, you can try talking to them, you can try fighting back, but none of those things are going to stop the bullying, or make you feel any better about being made to feel insignificant and despicable. None of those solutions have worked with my parents, either. I’ve just allowed them to say what they want to say, and not allowed them to bait me into saying anything myself. This is the ignoring solution, and no, it doesn’t work.

What MM said is that I need to just cut it off. If Mom starts going off about Dad, hang up the phone. If Dad starts blaming me about something with Mom, walk away. Children can’t disengage from bullies because they are stuck at school, but adults certainly can, because we are free. So I think I’m going to do exactly that: disengage from any kind of talk at all from one parent about the other one. “I won’t talk to you about him. I will hang up if you say anything further.” And then hang up. Simple. I’d thought of that before, but I figured I was being kind, and helping them to know that I was not taking the other parent’s side, by letting them go on to a small degree. But I was wrong; it helps no one and hurts me, and perpetuates an ugly pattern.

I called up a friend of my mother’s who is also a friend of mine, a Boomer-age man so interesting that this small cameo does him no justice whatsoever, and asked him if he was willing to help me tell my mother about what my father has done, via a three-way phone conversation. She is going to be very upset, and I want someone to be there for her as support for when she hears this news. I also want to be able to tell her and hang up without hearing too much nastiness about my dad, and have someone be immediately there to hear the flood of fury that she will need to release. MM advised me not to tell Mom about the list, because she thought that would just be stirring the pot and telling her dirt she doesn’t need to hear. I hadn’t considered this at all, but I think she’s right. To me, that’s just part of the package of the low way that my dad has treated me here, but Mom does not need more evidence of his character, and she’s going to be plenty upset about what she will already learn. She will just have to trust me that he made it Very Clear that he won’t be paying, without details as to exactly how clear.

This has been one of the most challenging, exhausting weeks of my life. And it’s more evidence that February is just a shitty month. It makes me sad, because this is also the month that BF asked me to marry him. (And it’s Kim’s and my mom’s and TB’s birthday month.) But boy, am I glad it’s the weekend. I’m going to watch Wayne’s World and forget about my horrible family for 90 minutes. With wine.

I have some other significant bits of news, actually (tried on dresses! good work news!), but I’ll post it all later this weekend. Thanks for sticking with me throughout this ordeal; it means the world to me.

this moment after midnight

I don’t even know how to start this post. I drafted it as a faux Dear Margo letter, but that was yesterday, before the email. No matter how you slice it, this is a long one.

Night before last my father called me to thank me for the very belated Christmas package that I sent to him and NW, which had jam, homemade jewelry, and the Ken Burns Civil War documentary in it. He then asked me some hedging questions about the wedding, including money questions. I put my head down and barreled ahead with my budget and plans, explaining how reasonable we were being about it, and tentatively asked if that was okay.

He muttered a little bit, and then said that he was likely not going to attend.

I asked him what he was talking about. He said he was in a special circumstance. This is true; NW will be having his son in June or July of this year, and that’s a little awkward since my mother does not know they are married. (I don’t want any kids at the wedding, so that’s not the issue to me.) I think he also doesn’t want to not invite NW to come, because that is an awful insult to NW, but he also doesn’t want to bring her, because he is petrified of seeing my mother and what she might do. He then explained that he worked 11-12 hours per day at his garage every day, and couldn’t just leave that for a weekend. I will skip right over this particular reason. He also explained that since flights to Vegas are expensive, going from a small airport to a small airport, he will be driving, from Kentucky to Las Vegas, and that would just take an awful lot out of him to have to do.

I know you are thinking this is absurd and terrible. Stay with me.

I reminded him that I was only planning on marrying once, and that I was his only daughter. He said he was aware of that, but that he had a lot of balls in the air right now. We changed to other topics.

I had a very bad evening, processing this information. BF was very supportive and appropriately angry for me, and I was so shocked I didn’t know what to feel. I knew that probably a big part of the reason for my dad’s resistance is my mother, and yes, he should grow the fuck up and accept being in the same room as her for a day, but I am telling you: he is an avoidant personality, this is the worst possible concept for him, being in the same room as her. I have a little sympathy. Not much, but a little. I can’t believe that this was his solution for when this day came, that he’d just not go. Of course, he probably didn’t plan on having a tiny baby and a just-getting-started business when this day came.

Okay, so the next morning I got up and I felt hurt about it for the first time. That why did you do that? kind of feeling. I went to work, and I spun my tale to a co-worker who has parents who are also challenging (similarly manipulative and neurotic mother, former alcoholic father who is dying rapidly of cancer and using that to talk her into taking in her deadbeat asshole brother and supporting him). She told me she thought I won the Challenging Parents Sweepstakes. Yay. I am teh winnar. I went through my day, did what I had to do, tried not to think about it, and came home a good bit late after an appointment.

I checked my email and found that my dad had written me. In Gmail, you can see the first written line of the email, and he had written something about how he’d done a lot of thinking about what we had talked about… and I thought, good, he’s come to his senses.

“The bottom line is that I simply cannot pay for a wedding and seriously doubt that I will be able to attend one in Las Vegas.”

Now, it’s not that I’m some brat whining for her daddy to pay for her princess wedding. We are talking modest wedding. And it’s also not that I insist tradition must be upheld and it’s his absolute duty to pay for my wedding. There are other things that bother me about this. The main one is that, as J put it, he’s known that this was coming for 28 years, and how he could be not ready for it, since BF and I have been together for four of those years, is quite the question mark in my head. The other thing is that this is just another example of money being the central axis for every way in which he reacts to me, something that has gotten awfully old in 28 years.

He went on, then, to reel off an itemized list not only of his current income and expenses, but of all the ways in which I have been an appallingly expensive daughter to raise. He told me to the penny how much of his retirement money my mother gets every month (due to the divorce contract, I think). He reminded me of my college expenses, of my high school tuition expenses, of paying for teacher training for me (and here I thought that was his first wholly generous gesture, since it’s been four months and I haven’t gotten grief about it yet), of other ways in which he’s paid for my care and keep, and of the amount that he paid for my mother’s Ph.D., which she’d obtained “against his wishes”.

He said he’d been working for other people his whole life, and he thought it was about time he did something for himself. He said his garage hasn’t yet broken even since he started it in October. (Um…it’s a new business.) He said NW is going to get hardly anything if he dies, and he only has twenty years left to spend with the new baby. All these things he said to me, to explain why he won’t pay for my wedding and probably won’t come.

As TB said, “Gee, sorry I was such a bad investment.”

I called BF, and he said he’d be home as quickly as he could (he was stuck in a very bad traffic jam), and then I sat on the kitchen floor for a while. The fan on the stovetop was on and I didn’t notice for about 45 minutes. I thought about all the things I wanted to say, all the things I wanted to do. I wanted to instantly write back and tell him to go to hell. I wanted to call my mother and tell her everything she wanted to know. I wanted to rob a bank so I could pay for my own goddamn wedding. There was so much running through my head, but it was mostly the pure idea that he would do such a thing, explain to me in currency why he didn’t want to be there for one of the seminal moments of my life.

BF came home, and he listened, and talked, and held me while I cried just a little. “He’s a bad father,” I gasped. “I haven’t wanted to think that yet. But it’s true.” I was thinking about my coworker’s father, an alcoholic – not a punchy one but still an alcoholic – and how she said I’d won, anyway. He’s never laid a hand on me, and he never tried to fuck me, and he didn’t walk away from me, but I can think of so few sweet moments in my life that are due to him, and so many ugly ones, like this one, in the kitchen.

The solution to the practical question (which of course made my brain go “No, we’re not going to fucking do Stone’enge!”, which made me feel a bit better) is that we will explain the situation to his parents, and to my mother, and see what can be done. BF’s aunt and uncle have offered us up to $4000 for our honeymoon, and we may just ask if they can spend it on the wedding instead. In any case, we will find a solution to the no-payment-from-Dad problem.

But, God. BF’s parents are going to be livid. My mother is going to be inconsolably livid. (Guess who’s going to bear the brunt of that?) The rest of BF’s family is not going to understand. This is such an enormous insult, for him not to come to the wedding, that I’m not sure it can be forgiven.

I mean, we can buy him a plane ticket. If he had just said he wasn’t going to pay for the wedding and didn’t know how he’d afford a ticket (which is bullshit, anyway), we’d find an answer for that. But for him just to throw away the possibility of attending is…atrocious, was BF’s word.

The thing that gets me – and this is something, in a twist of irony, that I strongly recognize from an awful conversation I had with my mother last year – is his inability to take responsibility for his choices. He chose to do all the things that have led to him spending so much money on me and my mother. (Whether or not he should be complaining about spending money on his wife and child is another matter entirely, one we’ll just have to table.) He chose to sign the divorce contract as it was, rather than holding out for something better. He chose to pay for my mother’s Ph.D. He chose to have unprotected sex with his childbearing-age new wife. He chose to send me to private school and pay for that. Part of being fucking adult is understanding that you take responsibility for your choices, good or bad, regrettable or not. I kind of can’t believe that he doesn’t understand this at 55, when I understand it at 28. I have made bad choices, and spent lots of money on bad gambles. But that money is gone, and it’s no use wishing after it.

So what I do in reaction to his email is what’s still up in the air for me. I told myself I’d sleep on it before doing anything, but if you look at the time this is posted, you’ll see how well that’s working out so far. I would also like to get MM’s advice, because due to her family background she is a much more forgiving person than I am. (About some things. But she does have a line that does not get crossed.)

I want to write to him and ask him to think long and hard about this decision before he makes it. Does he really think this will be an event he will not regret missing? Does he really want to join our family with BF’s with this sour opening riff? Does he really want to give my mother this kind of ammunition, which she will then use to shred me to pieces for the rest of her life? Are those the things he wants, to hurt all of us so badly and turn us all irrevocably against him?

But instead of that thoughtful, questioning answer, the response that keeps running through my mind is this:

“I’m sorry our relationship is defined by dollars and cents.
Take care.”

And that will be that. It’s only his heart surgery that has brought us back to having a relationship, anyway, and I have really had it with the selfish and miserly way he’s lived his life in the last decade. Frankly I’ve begun to wonder why he had me in the first place, since he obviously resents the money he spent on me, he didn’t attend my college graduation, and now he plans not to attend my wedding. What’s the point in having a child if you’re going to be there for her so sporadically? So I can just take care of that for him, and he never has to worry about me again.

But that’s probably a bad idea. He may relent. His wife may tell him what a complete asshole he’s being. His mother may do the same. Hell, BF’s mother and my mother may end up with some words for him, if I know them.

I just can’t think beyond what a horrible thing this was for him to do. I can’t think to a time when this will not matter to me, that he put his wallet before his daughter. I can’t imagine forgiving him for telling me he doesn’t want to attend my wedding because of a motherfucking plane ticket. So I’m thinking, right now, at this moment after midnight, of just walking away. If he thinks it’s about me pouting because he wouldn’t pay for the wedding, fine, whatever. As long as I get away from this attitude.

I’m going to try to sleep again. If I think of the generosity in the room whenever I’m around BF’s family, I might just make it.

wedding stuff, part 1 of 875

Here are the things I have to do today:

• Freelance story evaluation (yay, $120!).
• Grocery list/trip.
• Homework (quiz tomorrow, test Wednesday, totally not prepared, missed class last Wednesday, am feeling like class is slipping out of my control, kind of wish it was over with already and it’s not even March yet).
• This blog post.
• Laundry.
• Taxes, just to see lay of land and/or how fucked I am.
• Get started on reading Paul Grilley’s book. I don’t actually have to do this, as the workshop that requires it isn’t until June, but I’ve done a lot of other prep work for that workshop as I expect the rest of my spring to be hectic.
• Begin to formulate some kind of plan to talk to parents about wedding money.

This wedding thing is already overwhelming me, and I haven’t actually started the planning yet. Part of the reason for this is that I went to B&N and bought some wedding books – a book of lists, a planner, a Rough Guide (which is the best book, so far), and a book of 1001 questions asked on a popular wedding site. All the stuff in these books shows me that planning a wedding is absurdly complicated, which I admit I already knew, but the number of things to figure out and do and worry about is absolutely staggering.

After poking around on the internet for most of yesterday afternoon, I’ve decided that unless it’s blatantly out of our budget, I’m going to hire a wedding planner in Vegas. None of the ceremony or (particularly) reception packages that I found at various locations seemed right, unless they have a la carte options (and I don’t think they do), and there’s just no way that I can plan an entire wedding myself from half a continent away. There are too many things that I can’t be there to decide on and negotiate about, too many possible venues to evaluate, just…too much.

So I found a few planners on the internet that look okay. Since I’m looking at late March of 2011, it’s not really necessary to make calls for another couple of weeks (or, really, months), but that is me, trying to get to the planning as quickly as possible. I’m really curious about a planner will even agree to take on a wedding that will be as small and low-budget as ours will be – less than 50 guests, cocktail reception, no DJ, four-figure budget – but I hope the answer will be yes, because my other option is to accept a package deal that isn’t really what I want.

Aside from that big question, the other big question is how to deal with the money thing. My mother pointed out in our first conversation about this that I HAVE to get my DAD to PAY, which is something she’s been pointing out about all kinds of things in my life for, oh, about eleven years now. But she also said she would be paying some of it herself. My pride would like us to throw the wedding on our own, but it’s flat impossible. So my own proposal is for me and BF to pay for our clothes – my dress, shoes, etc. and BF’s tux rental – and for the invitations, and for a few other small things like my hair and makeup and the officiant’s gratuity and so on, and for Mom and Dad to pick up the ceremony, reception, food & drink, and planner costs. That’s the stuff we simply can’t afford. All the things I’m leaving to the planner, in other words.

In theory we’d like to pay for lodging for the guests traveling to our wedding, too, because we both think destination weddings are kind of shitty and want to mitigate that. But doing math that even I can do shows me that that will cost about as much as I want to spend on the reception. So I’m not sure it’ll be possible, unless his parents step in and offer to help with the wedding costs. Which they very well might.

As for my dress, which I’m sure all of you ladies are slavering to hear about, I have a good idea of what I want. I don’t want to spend more than $500, because spending more than that on a single garment is goddamn ridonkulous to me, even if it is a once-in-a-lifetime garment. (I will go a little higher for the perfect dress. But it better be fucking perfect.) I do not want a typical bridal dress, with brocade and a corset and a giant skirt and train and so on. Although I think those dresses are beautiful and love them as eye candy, they are not me.

In the past I had thought I’d go with an incredibly simple sleeveless satin sheath, floor-length, but that was when I wanted to have a beach wedding. Now I am thinking of either a tea-length full-skirted 50′s-style dress (I have a black dress in this style that is very, very flattering, so go with what you know works, right?), perhaps with an off-the-shoulder neckline, or something quite similar to Claire Pettibone’s gowns. (I cannot possibly buy one of her actual gowns, good Christ.) What I really want to do is find a tailor and have a dress custom-made. I think this’ll be a whole lot cheaper and I’ll get exactly what I want. The books all advise me to keep an open mind and look everywhere and try on dresses I think I won’t like, and I agree with all that in theory, but I don’t want a typical wedding dress. Don’t. They’re beautiful, but that’s not how I want to look (and not how I want to try and move around all day, incidentally). How I will find a tailor, and convince him/her of what I want, I do not know.

Gosh, that’s a lot of words about the wedding, when I wanted to talk about other stuff too. Mainly I feel overwhelmed and don’t know who to talk to, because I feel like there’s only so much I’ll be able to say to BF before he’ll say “HONEY! It’s more than a year away and in all likelihood someone else will be planning it. Enough already!” Because that, of course, is logical. But AAAAAGH I’M GETTING MARRIED AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO TO MAKE SURE EVERYONE WILL LOVE IT. Since there’s a lot about all of this that I’m fairly indifferent about: colors, officiant, BF’s clothes, even flowers (other than my bouquet). I really just care about what I look like, the music, and that everyone has a good time and no one is too offended. That’s all. So trying to figure out what to do about not only the stuff I care about, but about the stuff I don’t care about but which other people do care about, is hard.

Even though I’m STILL WRITING ABOUT THIS it’s terribly useful to be doing so because although BF and I have definitely talked at length about this in the last few days, there’s a lot of stuff I’m feeling that I haven’t really discussed.

Anyway. On another topic, I meant to mention that my partner yoga class didn’t go so well. In fact, no one showed up. Not one couple. J and I were all set and ready, dressed nicely, warmed up, and no one came. My feelings were terribly hurt, and I was embarrassed as hell in front of J, but I tried to just shake it off and move on. I haven’t been that successful. That and the fact that only one person has been coming to my 8:00 Sunday classes for weeks now has really lowered my morale about teaching yoga. I still feel great when I’m doing it, but I’d really love to be doing it for more than one person, you know? Especially when I’m being paid $7 for what adds up to about two and a half hours of work.

Yeah, I guess this is mostly about the wedding. I’m a little sorry. I’m not going to promise not to yammer about it here on the blog for the next year, because hello, I don’t have any girlfriends, so who else is going to listen but the internet?

self-explanatory

HAPPY

BIRTHDAY,

TB!!!

half-truths, music, and such

I played hooky from class tonight. I had an appointment that ran late, and I could either have showed up to class a half-hour late, or come home and had time for blogging, making myself a nice fresh BLT, and watching The Good Son (which I’ve been wanting to see, honestly, since I was about twelve). It was a very, very hard decision.

The nice thing about blogging every day was that it helped me to keep up with my life in real time. Now I find myself coming back after a couple of days thinking “I have 800 things to say and 40 links to put in and I watched 17 movies and I only have 20 minutes to post, okay, go!” Not as good. But I liked the time when the blog was more contemplative and less of a recording diary, so I guess I’ll try to transition back there.

There’s lots to say about the reaction to our engagement, but the sum-up goes something like this: “FUCKING HAAAAAPPPPYYYYYYY.” Part of me thinks that it’s just a great big family-style orgasm after four years of foreplay, but his family does genuinely like me a lot, as far as I can tell. The only fly in the ointment (aside from the cost and trouble of actually planning a wedding) was that my mother does not plan to tell her mother and father until after the wedding has happened.

I haven’t seen them since I was about seven, at which time my grandmother apparently threatened to kidnap me? Or something? And my grandfather was implicated in something quite ugly when I was a little older, something I’m not sure of the truth of. My mother says that my grandmother is a certifiable sociopath, but that too is something I’m not sure of the truth of, since my mother has such capacity for lies and half-truths and manipulations. In everything in my adult life, I’ve deferred to her to make decisions about what she’s going to tell and not tell her parents about my life – my address, what I’m doing for work, when I graduated from college, etc. My mom’s relationship with her parents is difficult and weird, and I didn’t want to do anything that might make it harder for her.

This time, though, we disagree. I don’t see the harm in telling my grandparents that I’m going to get married. It’s illogical to imagine that they’d travel for the wedding (my grandfather is eighty-eight and constantly ill, my grandmother a bit younger but also unwell), even IF they’d had anything whatsoever to do with my life for the past twenty-one years, and if it makes them happy to hear that I am to be wed, then great.

But Mom said that I shouldn’t tell them unless I want to be manipulated into having the wedding in southwestern Virginia, where they live. I told my mom that I found it unlikely they could manipulate me into doing anything at all, since, again, no involvement for twenty-one years. But Mom said no, bad idea, let’s just tell them after the wedding is over. I said I thought that was cruel, because it would be obvious that the choice was deliberately not to tell them before the wedding, which is a terrible insult. We argued kind of awkwardly about it for a while, and I gave in and said we should do what she thinks is best. I’m still not sure this is the right decision, but I have the smallest possible dog in this fight so I’m not going to push it. There are far better things to play the It’s My Wedding, Goddammit card about.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Outkast and Led Zeppelin lately. It’s an interesting combination. The conclusions I’ve drawn are that Outkast and Led Zeppelin are awesome, that a drug-free lifestyle makes for hip-hop with such clear and brilliant intentions it’s a wonder to listen to, that Zepp must have made Lawrence Welk-bred parents confused and terrified when they heard it coming out of their teenagers’ rooms, and that I love, love, love music. I’ve been tempering these with the Steve Miller Band, whom I also love. I turned to them the other night as I would have turned to Elton John – for comfort. “Jet Airliner” always makes me feel better. And I think “The Joker” is utterly unique in pop music: not another song like it out there, and never shall there be.

And finally, this video is extremely hilarious. My parents forced me to watch the news night after night after night when I was a kid, and I hated every minute of it and am so glad I never have to watch it again if I don’t want to. But anyone who’s ever watched the news will find this funny.

is there news? there is news.

BF asked me to marry him!

I said no. I don’t think our relationship is really going anywhere.

[cricket]
[cricket]

Naw, of course I said yes. He gave me a beautiful ring and we were watching Astaire and Rogers and it was just wonderful. (And it was not on Valentine’s Day, it was on Thursday, the 11th.) Our families and friends are all, of course, very happy for us. Pictures of the ring follow; it is an emerald-cut sapphire, which is such a deep and beautiful blue that the pictures of it don’t really show the beauty of the stone. The ring itself, which originally held a diamond, is a platinum estate ring that dates to the 1920′s. It is 100% perfect, and I am so happy with it, and so proud of BF for picking it out.

Our plan is to get married in Las Vegas in March of 2011. I have no idea how to pull this off, but I’m going to do my best. I can’t wait to be his wife and I am so happy.

Toldja a bunch of stuff happened when I decided to stop blogging. 

and on the fourth day, she returned

Wow. I decide to give up blogging for a week and ALL KINDS O’ SHIT happens.

First, the weather! OMG! I am here to tell you that, indeed, the amount of snow we got is astonishing for what latitude line this state is situated upon. Apparently we haven’t had such a snowy winter since 1899. My driveway is a bloody cave with my car in the middle, the snow’s piled so high on either side. But thank God I have a driveway at all. The poor saps who paid less for their houses and have to park in the spaces…oh, luck was not with them this week.

I stayed home from work on Wednesday, because although I have delivered pizza in blizzards like that one, I didn’t want to rely on Maryland to plow the snow sufficiently for me to get home. I certainly didn’t want to get stuck an hour from home – what the hell was I going to do? So I stayed home, and BF and I had the best day of all time. He brought his work PC home and attempted to work, but for some mysterious reason the game wouldn’t run properly despite all his efforts, so he worked a little bit and then spent time with me. I didn’t shower until like 4:00. Yaaaay.

On Thursday I got up and went to work, arriving only a half-hour late, and the building was locked. So I drove all the way back home and had another day off. I was actually a little unhappy about this, since I’m an hourly employee, and 2/5 of my paycheck for this week was officially gone, but I hope I can work some overtime next week to make up for it. Unfortunately we’re in a very slow time right now – it’s the first chance I’ve had to be bored at this job in four months – so I’m not sure what I’ll do during that overtime. If my boss goes home I might just sit there and read.

It’s Saturday morning, and my eyes popped open at 5:04 and didn’t let me return to sleep. I’m teaching a partner yoga workshop tomorrow afternoon, and frankly I’m pretty afraid it’s not going to go well. More accurately, what I’m worried about is that it’s going to be mundane, not interesting or memorable for the participants, and slightly worried that something is genuinely going to go wrong.

J is sort of assisting me with it, being my partner and demonstrating during the first half of the class, and I went over my plans with her at her house last night. She still intimidates the hell out of me, in a number of different ways, and I’m kind of wondering what it’s doing to me to try and form a friendship with someone who intimidates me so much. I try hard to feel adequate, in how I look, how I dress, how I act, how I practice, even how I clean my house – but I fail, and feel totally small, with bad taste and hair that sticks up and the tendency to say blunt idiotic things that fall dead flat in conversation. Southern women have always made me feel this way, and I’ve never really been friends with one before so I don’t know how to act to mitigate the feeling.

I submitted one of my books to a publisher I like and respect on Thursday night. I am not a little terrified about that, because I’m not sure the book is really ready for a publisher, but I am at a complete loss as to what I should do with it next if it’s not ready. I’ve lost the ability to have distance from it, I’ve read it so many times, and I honestly don’t know what further work needs to be done on it to make it publishable. So I made some final edits, threw up my hands, and hit send.

Giving up blogging, even for a few days, was an interesting experience. I found myself a little rudderless. I was continually thinking “I’ve got to remember to put that in today’s post” and then remembering that there doesn’t need to be a post for today. I had all the time in the world to write posts on Wednesday and Thursday, but I held to my break anyway, and found that focusing that energy externally (specifically on reading and watching material about yoga, cleaning, and baking) made me a lot calmer and less scattered than sitting down and dutifully banging out a post about myself when I felt like navel-gazing. I want this blog to continue to grow, but I want to be able to walk away from the computer for a day or a couple of days when I need perspective. So it was interesting to see what a self-imposed ban on blogging felt like on days when, unlike in recent months, I did have the time to blog but chose not to.

The birthday bug is going around, and I wish a happy one to Kim and an early happy one to my mom and to TB. Yay, another trip around the sun!

Today I’m teaching MD in the morning, and BF and I are going to stay for lunch. We have some news for them, and that’s part of what kept me awake this morning too. I don’t really know what’s going to happen today, and it’s making me nervous and feverish.

As for Valentine’s Day…my boss saw a big sign on a florist’s yesterday that said “VD Specials.” I think Tiffany and I both appreciate that a lot more than any sappy shit our significant others could conjure up.

thanks for all the fish

My little blogsters, do you know what today is? Today is the 365th day in a row that I have put a post up on this here blog. Yes, indeed, I have posted…something…every single day for a year.

And do you know what? I am TIRED. I am running on empty. I am sick to death of posting every day. It has turned into a major chore over the last few months, as my life has become ever more exhausting and difficult and hard to write about. There’s been a lot that I’ve had to muzzle myself about and I am sick of that, too.

So I’m taking a break. I promised myself a break after I’d managed to post every day for a year, and I am HAPPILY TAKING ONE. I think I’ll be out for about a week, but it might be shorter than that, since weekend posts are always a lot easier for me to manage. After that you can expect posts a few times a week, but I’m definitely, definitely not holding myself to every-day posts. It is just too fucking hard with my job and my class and trying to fit everything else in.

This next bit might be egotistical, and I apologize. I know that for a couple of you (at least two), reading my posts has become part of your daily routine, and I am sorry to fuck it up. I really am sorry, I’m not just saying that. But I am feeling like the little wagon in Oregon Trail that’s going at a grueling pace – pioneers are going to start dying of dysentery around here, seriously. Is that what you want so your routine can stay not-fucked up? For me to die of dysentery and be a little pixellated tombstone somewhere in the lonely frontier between here and Oregon? No, I didn’t think so.

For those of you who are a bit tired of hearing me ramble or reading sub-quality posts, I’m glad to oblige you with a break. Enjoy it while it lasts; since I’m posting less frequently, I’m betting my posts are going to be longer and more squicky. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to it.

Bye for now. Love y’all.

evolving beyond yang

My practice has changed a lot lately. A lot of the change has been mental and emotional, and the biggest part of the physical change has been that I’ve dropped back to barely doing yoga at all. I teach my classes, and I do 20 minutes or so of yin when I need to relax after a challenging day, and sometimes I get home early enough and make dinner quickly enough that I can do a whole practice one day a week, but I have been to a single class in about two months, and I do a real practice less than once a week.

This has caused other physical changes, which I’ve complained about recently on the blog. The tone on the sides of my waist is gone. My manly delts are gone. Some of the strength of my hamstrings is fading. My good posture is mostly gone and my leg pain has intermittently returned.

What remains: my balance, a good deal of my flexibility (although my shoulders are suffering), and all the knowledge and confidence that came with teacher training. My hips seem to limitlessly open even as my hamstrings shrink. My back is a little less flexible but feels a lot stabler (which is actually a relief). The exactness with which I do the poses has not changed, and this is the quality that I would pin down as the thing I’m proudest of about my practice.

But the way I feel about all this is…fine. I feel fine. Although I’m not content with the situations that have led me to do less and less yoga every week, and not content with doing it so infrequently, I seem to have lost the obsessive drive that took me through nearly the first two years of this practice. Suddenly I’m not so sure that it matters whether I can put my leg behind my head, whether I can do arm balances that elude me, whether I’m the most flexible or strong yogini in any given room.

I think what’s changed is that I somehow don’t care if my practice is impressive, even to myself. I admit that the person I was trying most to impress with my yoga was myself, to show myself that I was capable of doing all the things I wanted to do. But what others thought of my yoga mattered, too. Where I was in the strata of students, and then later of teachers; whether I looked awkward in poses because of a lack of flexibility, whether I was straining because of a lack of strength. But I think that’s starting to matter less to me.

The reflective yoga class I went to a couple of weeks ago was taught by a woman who was very low on the scale for both strength and flexibility. She would never have been on the cover of Yoga Journal. But she still taught beautifully, and she had an inner light and strength that was wonderful to see. For a while, in that class, I felt proud of my own abilities (as I usually do), but soon I saw they didn’t really matter much there. It was just about what you could enjoy, not how far you could go.

This has always been an attitude that I knew was there in yoga, and that I knew was extremely valuable, even as I scoffed at it just a tiny bit. I loved the peace and sweetness and energy that yoga gave me, but a small part of me wondered what the point was if you weren’t turning your body into rubber bands. That may sound terrible to those of you who are enlightened, but that’s what I thought, and yes, I still feel that way just a little. They say that the point is to find inner peace, but if that’s the case, why integrate a physical practice? Why not just meditate? You can be as fat as you want to meditate. Just ask Buddha.

But in beginning a small, inexpert yin practice, I’ve embraced a style of yoga that I never thought I would. Yin has always seemed unbalanced to me – way over on the side of flexibility, and without any strength. I also didn’t think my prana could flow particularly well if I just sat in paschimottanasana for a million years. I worried that I’d be thinking too much for the practice, that I wouldn’t be able to sit still either physically or mentally, and that the noise would intrude on the practice.

The thing is, it’s gone the other way, and the practice has intruded on the noise. Yin suits me perfectly at this very yang time in my life. And I’ve started to question all of my attitudes about yoga, started to wonder if how strong and fit I can make my body makes any difference at all. If I can enjoy a quiet, calm practice this much, and if I don’t need to be able to do jumpthroughs to feel good about myself, why on earth should I work as hard as I’ve been working in the last two years to get even better, even stronger? If I can still do yoga, and still teach, what the hell difference does it make if I can’t pike up into a handstand?

I still want to be able to do those things, of course. I still have goal poses in yoga. But to be very frank, I’ve met the goal that mattered most to me: full king pigeon pose. I can do it even semi-warm now. I am proud of that. But even that matters less than the happiness that doing yoga brings me when I get the chance to do it – even as I see my muscles shrinking, my flexibility waning. I still feel content. Because – even despite the fact that I gained those muscles once, and can gain them again in time, since life is long – I can still breathe, I can still move my limbs and feel the blood and the life coursing through them. If I have that, do I really need to impress anyone with my practice?

I think the answer is no. I think the path to contentedness lies in that no. And although it’s brought me a lot of instability and fear, because that is not how I was taught to live my life, I am so glad that I’ve found it.

I was talking to BF about this and many other things on Saturday afternoon. He told me that I have many paths at my feet right now, and it’s very hard for me to choose the one that’s going to make me happy. I’m confused. So the yin practice is teaching me to sit down by the river, under a tree, and enjoy where I am. Rather than climbing up a hill, or crashing through the woods, or striving in any other way as I have been, it is time to sit. And rest. And prepare for what’s next, so that I can make a genuine choice rather than picking the path of most resistance.