one day I’ll sleep and dream of nice things

I slept very poorly last night, after sleeping poorly all weekend. I woke up around 4:00 after dreaming that BF and I were already married. I was writing a post wherein I explained that his handle would be changing from BF to DH (Dear Husband) when I woke, and I was immediately wracked with disappointment that we were not yet married.

I’m getting cold feet, you see. Not about the marriage – about the wedding. I feel so much pressure to make it right and beautiful and wonderful, and I feel such reluctance about the planning process that I need to invent a new English word for “exceedingly intense reluctance.” I’m starting to sincerely wish that we could just go to the courthouse and have done with it and not have a wedding at all. I don’t want to be the center of attention for this, and I don’t want to do all this work, and right now, this second, I don’t want a wedding.

I really want BF to be my husband. I just don’t want to have to go through all this to do it.

Plus, I’m at a loss as to what to do about my dad. Plainly, I don’t want to invite him, because I don’t want him to be there. But I also don’t want other people to know that I didn’t invite him. M says that if I invite him, the onus is on him to be a jerk and not me, but if I don’t invite him, he can throw that back at me in the future. She’s right, but I think that if I do invite him, once he sees it’s in New York and not Nevada, he’s going to choose to come after all. Not only is this hurtful to me because he’ll come to New York for me but not Nevada for me, because it’s the locale that makes the difference and not his daughter, but the fact is that I don’t want him to come. I don’t want to think about how much pain he’s caused me on a day that should be so happy. I don’t want to see his face, I don’t want to dance with him, I don’t want him to make conversation with my friends and my new family, I don’t want to cause my mother or NW any anxiety or pain, I just…don’t want him to come.

But that’s only a part of it. The bigger part is that I strongly and sincerely don’t want to do this, don’t want to plan and execute a wedding. I’m thinking seriously of turning the whole thing over to MM, because I know that she would be thrilled to do it – she is built for this kind of thing – and the wedding she’d put together would not be mine, but it would be beautiful and wonderful. I just feel like I have so much in my life right now, and adding this is going to be like taking the anatomy class all over again. Another extracurricular to exhaust me, make me feel rushed, make me feel like my life isn’t mine. I’ve wanted to keep it to myself so far for reasons that I’ve explained – I don’t want to say no a million times, I don’t want to look like a lazyass – but my desire not to do the wedding is starting to overcome my desire for the wedding to belong to me.

After waking BF up and talking to him about all this – because I really was too upset to sleep – I eventually drifted off again, and I dreamed that Tiffany was my wedding planner. She asked me when my wedding date was, and I told her, and she laughed and said I was already a month and a half too late to start planning, and I might as well call the whole thing off. (I don’t think she’s cruel in person, so I have no idea why it was Tiffany who delivered this message.)

This morning I brought in to work the list of vendors that the people at Chautauqua gave me. Florists, salons and such. I’m going to start making calls this week. I gotta. Even if I do decide to let MM do whatever she wants, I still have to at least give it a college try.

—

So, Sunday morning was pretty interesting. I went to the studio, getting there slightly before 8:00, to get ready for class at 8:30. I noticed there was a red car parked at the gas station across the street, which is closed on Sundays. After I opened the studio and pulled up the blinds, a young woman walked across the street and knocked on the (open) door. I opened it for her, and she said she’d locked her keys in her car and could she use the phone? I said sure, and she asked me if I thought that the police would be able to unlock her car for her? I said I didn’t know, but I doubted it. She tried dialing 911, but it didn’t work on the studio phone? I handed her my cell phone, telling her that I thought 911 would probably hang up on her because it wasn’t an emergency. They didn’t, they gave her a station phone number to call with her request, which she did. They couldn’t help her (yes, I’m surprised too, totally). Did I have a Yellow Pages she could use to call a car locksmith? I gave her the phone book, and she made a call, and found out that it would cost $85 (!) to pop the car, cash on the barrelhead. Starting to look panicked instead of just bewildered, she said she didn’t have the money, wasn’t going to get paid until tomorrow. I asked her if she had anyone she could call to pick her up so she could come back later. She said all the phone numbers were on her cell phone, locked in the car, and she didn’t know any of them.

All right, I said, watch the studio for a few minutes while I go to an ATM and get some money for you. She started crying in gratitude. I went to the ATM, took out $100, came back, gave it to her, advised her not to lock her keys in her car again, and went in to teach.

I didn’t do this because I’m a super-nice person. I’m not. Nor did I do it because I’ve definitely been there, down and out and stuck with no money and no one to call, although this is absolutely true. I helped her because I was annoyed. I wanted to solve her problem – wanted to solve each new problem as it escalated, from phone to cell phone to phone book to money - and get her out of the studio so that I could teach. I didn’t feel right about her being in there and using the phone when it was just me there – the front desk people should really have been the decision-makers there, I’m not even trained to take money from customers (not from lack of asking if I should be). I was also annoyed because this woman was so unbelievably helpless. She didn’t have a single important phone number memorized? She didn’t know that the police couldn’t help her if she locked her keys in her car? Even the way she made the phone calls – “excuse me, I have a question, how much do you think it would cost for you to unlock my car?” – spoke of someone who had no idea how to be in charge of her life. BF brought up later the possibility that she was a con artist of some kind, but there was seriously no way that was possible. She was so feeble. I almost felt like it would be a bad thing to do to walk away and let her fend for herself.

So I gave her some money, the highway robber locksmith came and let her into her car, and off she went. I don’t seriously believe I’ll see that money again, but I don’t care; I solved her problem for her, and I sincerely hope that she learns her lesson and either buys a key-keeper or – as I have done since locking myself out twice in college – feels around for her keys every single time before she closes her car door.

—

In other news, I read large swaths of Breaking Dawn yesterday, not actually reading the whole thing, and although I was looking forward to a hawt bed-eating sex scene I’d heard about, Meyer really wimped out. There were a couple of pretty awesome pages in the middle after [extremely spoilery plot point], but there was no big First Time scene, which bummed me out. I remembered that of course she’s writing for adolescents, and (theoretically) romance novel-style graphicness would be a bad idea, but MAN, I was really looking forward to it. Also, she writes very poorly. She takes pages and pages and pages and pages to explain the tiniest morsel of time. Show, don’t tell! First lesson in any writing class.

Of course, I’m quite a hypocrite. I can’t even get started showing again. I’ve been trying to get back to writing fiction, and so far my mind is right there and my will is miles away. Supposedly the blog is supposed to keep me in practice, but I think it’s really just taking up all my mental space for writing. I just don’t want to give it up. How else will I be able to complain about my wedding, complain about being a Good Samaritan, and complain about the lack of sex in a juvie novel?