You guys. Did you know their were BLOG CARNIVALS*? It's like a whole new world opened up to me. Anyway, I'm part of one on an awesome blog written by a awesome reader who I met in real life once.
It's a feminist blog carnival at that. Feminism & beauty. I KNOW. Go look!
*It's a bunch of links to amazing thematic content. I need to read it all... as soon as this darn blog is done.
Whoa. This from via the ever-smart Lauren, from the book Altared. Seriously. Read it all:
Weddings are not marriages, and I wish they were. Weddings are to marriage as a single bamboo shoot is to a jungle, as a seashell is to the ocean floor: nice enough, not unrepresentative, and almost totally irrelevant. Marriage is all about the long road, about terror and disappointment, about recovery and contentment, about passions of all kinds. Weddings are about a party-- which is why I think marriage should be approached with blinking yellow lights, orange safety cones, and all other signs of great caution, and weddings should be encouraged as things apart. Why should we expect that looking pretty in white (or the flattering color of your choice) and doing a credible fox-trot has anything to do with staying calm in the face of resentful indifference, selective deafness, Oedipal disorders, or horrible stepchildren? It should be enough, it seems to me, to look as good as one can and enjoy the party. Brides who cannot enjoy their own weddings are either possessed of too much knowledge (this marriage is a mistake) or too much something else (like women who scream when the bouquet has one too many sprigs of baby's breath). I wish that crazy, over-the-top weddings (doves dyed pink, twin elephants, wedding favors from Gucci, and Handel's "Water Music" played by Yo-Yo Ma) led to marriages that were extravagant celebrations of love, that the excess foretold a lifetime of generosity, sensuality, and matching elephants of kindness and loyalty. I wish that simple little weddings, barefoot in a cranberry bog, with ten friends as witnesses, would lead to a life in which less is really more and stays that way. Marriage requires common sense, self-awareness, compatible senses of humor (Jackie Mason will not be happy with Oscar Wilde, although Bernie Mac might be), compatible sex drives, and enough, but not too much, perseverance. Weddings, on the other hand, offer just a day's happiness, and require only a willingness to dance-- even badly-- and embrace the world and big love for a short time.
I wrote this post for Dana to run on Broke-Ass Bride a few months back. Then I sort of modified it for the new Offbeat Bride book. But I've never run it on APW, and I think it deserves to be here. It's one of the most packed-with-useful-to-me stuff posts I wrote after our wedding. Because learning about my and our relationship to money, ohhhhh boy. That's applicable to marraige. So, long overdue, what learned about money when planning our wedding.
First of all, I have to say that one of the reasons that I started my blog is because I felt like the only bride in the world with a sensible approach to money when I read wedding media. It sucked. While my partner and I are no longer broke (though, *boy* have we been) we still are fairly cautious with our money. Add to that the fact that we're a one bread-winner household at the moment (my husband is in law school) and, well, we don't have a money tree in the backyard. So we figured we'd throw together a nice wedding on a oh-dear-god-it-feels-expensive-to-us-but-I-guess-we-can-do-this kind of budget. Ha. Well, about two seconds into wedding planning I started to feel like the poorest and saddest bride on the planet.
I finally hit the wall when I read about a 'budget' wedding on one of those big-shiny-wedding-blogs. It read something like this: "Well, since we were doing a wedding on a budget, we obviously had to be very selective in our choices, and limit what we spent money on. That's why we decided to really limit things when it came to our music choices. In the end, we decided to only hire a string quartet, a gospel choir, and a rock band, to keep things simple and affordable." Continue reading What I Learned About Money While Planning My Wedding
So. It turns out I have several unpublished posts from the days leading up to our wedding. Things were hard, my mom was very ill, and I wrote stuff down, but didn't always feel strong enough to share it with the world. So I'm sharing it with you now. Because it's part of the story.
Dear Team Practical,
Big sigh from over here. We are (my Knot countdown says... I only go to the Knot to see my countdown) 40 days away from our wedding. My Knot countdown also says I have roughly 100 tasks un-done before the wedding, but it's incorrect on that front. Being a super organized ex-event planner, I wanted the last month of the planning to be as stress free as possible, so we have very few tasks left to go. And then my mom got sick... and that brings a whole different level of real world stress to our lives. I find that I'm so emotionally distracted that when people ask me things like what shoes I'm going to wear for the wedding, I sort of look blank and say, "Um. The ones I've got I think, I'm not totally sure."
So, what I find odd is that I keep ricocheting between this feeling of, "Oh my GOD I just want to be married already!" Because A) Real life is stressful right now and the wedding can be another layer of stress and B) as much as we've planned for the wedding, and as important as having a meaningful wedding is to us, it's our MARRIAGE that I'm really excited about. And then there are other moments when it feels like the wedding is really real and really close, and I think about wearing my homemade veil and walking down the aisle and dancing and dancing and dancing, and I want to jump up and down from excitement. Continue reading Wedding Undergraduate: 41 Days To Go, And I’m Feeling… A Lot Of Things
Hello All-
Are you getting error messages, and forwarding messages and all kinds of weirdness when you come to the site? Sigh. Well. We all are, and I'm sorry. It's a boring story, but in essence my URL is no longer owned by blogger/google, as we prep for the move, and blogger is, per usual, freaking out.
So. Never fear. We'll keep on keeping on this week, cranking out lovely content and cranking at blogger, and next week - new! pretty!
Soon, we are out of their clutches! Hang in there. And thank you.
x
Meg
When I got this email about self-catering from reader Mandy, it came with the disclaimer, "maybe this is stuff everyone already knows." And when I started reading it over, I thought, "No, but this is stuff everyone *should* know." This email takes me back to the no-nonsense vibe of the church kitchens of my childhood, or to peeling a 10 pound sack of potatoes with my cousins in England as we helped prepare Thanksgiving dinner for 70 people. By which I mean to say, if real life wedding planning is about hauling and lifting? Self catering is about endless peeling and cleaning and scrubbing. It's not glamorous work, but it is rewarding as h*ll, for those of you that take it on. And, no matter what anyone tells you, it can be done (but ONLY if you *want* to do it - don't guilt yourself into this one, no how, no way). Now, Mandy:
Back in December, we drove down to Georgia to attend my fiance's aunt's wedding. It was a second wedding for both his aunt and her new husband (they'd both been widowed years ago) and the entire thing was taking place on the same day as the annual family Christmas gathering. There were about sixty or so people at the reception, and around thirty-five of those came back for a second meal after the reception when the actual family Christmas party started. Needless to say...this translates to a LOT of food. And no joke, the bride cooked nearly all of that food herself, with some help from her sisters (and me, towards the end). So for those of you who think that it just can't be done...it can be done, single-handedly, by a woman in her sixties in a tiny kitchen. Granted, some of us are attempting to self-cater weddings with double or even triple that amount of guests, but I still find inspiration in remembering this particular experience, as well as a few guidelines I plan to follow when we do this in a few months. I don't normally like to break things into dos and don'ts, but it seems like the best way to simplify all I've got to say. Also, please note that I am not an expert, and no advice can cover every situation. This is just what I learned from helping with a self-catered wedding...plus a little bit of knowledge gathered from years of helping prepare large amounts of food for large amounts of people, otherwise known as "my family is huge and loves to eat a lot." Continue reading How To Self Cater Your Wedding, Part II
Hi, I'm Meg Keene and I live in San Francisco. I started this blog to talk about planning our 2009 wedding, but it grew to include a lot of grounded smart-alecky women talking intelligently about their weddings and marriages. My first book, A Practical Wedding, was released in January 2012.
*photograph by Emily Takes Photos
