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.