We are all really the same person

One of the major things that I've learned while wedding planning and mainly while wedding blogging...is that we are all pretty much the same person. The similarities between wedding journeys is uncanny. We see the same posts written over and over from different perspectives. Yeah, sometimes its redundant. But sometimes it needs to be redundant.

We all worry about how our weddings are going to look (is it too WIC!? is it too Indie!?) We all try to have a wedding that is 'creative' and 'unique' (or as the Knot puts it so bluntly, 'wowing our guests') We all fret over our dress, shoes, accessories, hair, and makeup. We all consider whitening our teeth. We all put ourselves down about our weight and worry that we won't look good enough. We all worry about people having a good time at the wedding and enjoying themselves. We all cry and freak out at some point (more likely many points).

All this to say that our wedding journeys are uncannily alike and follow that very familiar arch of "I'm gonna do this thing! YEAH!" to "um...maybe tomorrow.." to "WTF, MY LIST IS EATING ME ALIVE!" We check out the WIC world, get freaked out, rebel, find blog land, give a big sigh of relief, and then settle in to the work of making the wedding happen.

And I love that this community is here to help us work it out. But the other major thing that blog land has done for me is to make me realize how similar we all are and how I'm not alone. And that is invaluable.

Its been major for me to stop judging myself, because come on, thats kinda what it all is. We are worried about other people judging us but if we weren't first judging ourselves it wouldn't matter what other people thought.

And we all want to fit in and feel 'normal' and blog land has made me see that (crazy as it is) freaking out about a wedding, no matter how 'practical' you try to be...is in fact normal.

So ease up, gal.

What do I do with this thing now?

At first I thought I hated my dress and would want to send it far, far away after the wedding (preferably for a price so that I could hate myself less for buying something so horrible). Then I altered it and fell in love with it and thought I'd want to hang on to it forever. Now that the deed is done...I feel like I'd be ok letting go of my Darling dress. (Especially if it went to the Sisterhood!) But I'm not quite sure.

Sell it?
Give it away?
Tuck it in the cedar chest with my mama's dress?
Use it to be a zombie bride on the Zombie Pub crawl?

What are you doing with your dress after the wedding?

The Dress!

Dear Blog Land,
It seems a bunch of us newlyweds are kinda disappearing around these parts, huh? I feel really bad to do it, but I think it might just be the way it is. I plan to continue writing and will let you know where. As for Me, Myself & Bride... well, I feel that she must fade out and let the next batch come through.

But first, I owe you all some recaps!

And a recap and MAJOR story that I totally forgot about...the dress! Oh, boy, the dress! Remember that epic sh*t storm of suck? Yeah, no good. No good at all.

I bought a dress. Then I regretted it. Then I was pep talkin to myself and all "I don't need no stinkin 'dream dress'! No dress can complete me! I complete me! GO ME!" and tried to make myself feel better. This pep talk worked for about...a minute. Then it sunk in that I really, in all honesty and truly did not like my dress. But I tried to remain calm and be brave and repeat "one day, one dress". This calm lasted a little bit longer, but alas was not meant to be.

At some point, roughly in the last week of July, a mere weeks before my wedding, I knew I needed to so SOMETHING. I broke down. I was dreading wearing my dress. I didn't want to talk about the dress or think about it. And the idea of wearing it on an important day such as my wedding just made me sick.

Not what you want to feel about your dress, ya?

So I reached out in a random last ditch effort. There had been a dressmaker who I had contacted previously about making a custom dress. At that time, she quoted me at $1,600+ for a custom dress - ouchy! But I wrote to her, telling her my sob story, feeling like a brat bride, and asked if she thought alterations on my dress might be possible. She did and she quoted me a very reasonable alterations price. *insert glimmer of hope here*

I scheduled an appointment ASAP and ran over there with my dress to find out that this lady was a heaven sent! She had a very simple plan and exuded complete confidence in being able to make it work! So I said ok, left her with my dress, and crossed my fingers.

Leaving her shop, I felt like a weight had been lifted! I felt free! I didn't even know if this was going to turn out, but I felt so much better already!

Well, to cut to the chase... it turned out. Splendidly! The dress was shortened to just below my knees and looked super cute! She even took the extra fabric and made the flower that I had been failing at making to put on the hip! Total win!

So you want to see it? You want to see what happened to the dress?

Ok, come back tomorrow for some pictures!!!


haha, jk. I'll give them to you now! I'll even throw in a few gratuitous photos of us looking all spiffy and cute! So, without further ado... Meet Darling! (as my dress has now been named.) (and here to refresh your memory is Darling back when I may have called her less kindly things...)





And because you've all been so lovely and patient, here are a few extras that are my favorites! We'd like to get one printed to frame and hang, but I have no idea how we are going to pick! (Note: many thanks to Chelsea Marie Photography - they did such a great job and were a pleasure to work with!)

On and on

I feel sad. I feel like its graduation and we are all getting married and then going our separate ways in blog land. I feel like I'm losing a wonderful little community that I was so happy to find! But I think its time.

Now that our wedding is done, I don't feel as drawn to wedding blog land. Those pretty pictures are not enticing but merely serve as a reminder to how glad I am to be done with it. Plus, they bring up the wouldas, couldas and shouldas and who needs that? not me!

I'll try to do some more recaping - especially since we should be getting our pictures really soon! yay! But I don't want to reminisce too much about our wedding.

It happened. It was a great day. But I'm too focused looking forward to many more great days.

Since I do love blog land, I am going to try to continue blogging in some way...I just have to figure out what that way is. I liked having the focus of 'wedding' to concentrate my thinking. If left wide open, I think my brain would just produce some word splatter worth nothing.

I'll keep you posted!

Peace,
Jen

Sentimental

Happy Friday!

Here is a darling song for you, this Friday. This was a friend's first dance song, and I've loved it ever since! There are two versions...I like the "sentimental" version (the one posted below) but take your pick!

Swept Me Away by The Avett Brothers

Peace,
Jen

My precious...

Want to see one of my favorite things ever? One of those small details that I loved and was so happy to have spent hours making just right?

Well, here it is! My handmade hair dodad!


Isn't she beautiful? This little lady is the result of HOURS of my time and much swearing, but damn...after all that, I'm in love!

I spent a long time looking on esty for a fascinator - and found many of them that were absolutely gorgeous! But I just couldn't bring myself to pay $80 bucks for some hair thing. No way. Plus, I knew what I wanted and I had my materials. I had fabric from cutting the train off my dress and some extra pretty green pearls from my necklace. So I went to it.

First, I searched for a good tutorial on how to make a fabric flower. Wow - so many out there! Its ridiculous! But of course, Martha came to the rescue with an easy and fabulous fabric flower how to. The how to is for a ring pillow but works just as easily for a hair fascinator.

It took me a while to get the flower to look right...somehow, depending on how you pinch the petals, it can come out completely different! One way makes really cupped petals, which make a super cute flower, but I didn't want this thing popping off my head. I wanted it to sit nice and smooth on my hair. So I worked and worked to get the petals to sit flat. Still not sure how I did it...but I did it!

Add the pearls in the center, some feathers, felt the back, super glue some bobby pins to the back and VOILA! What a beaut!

Choice and Trajectory

Now that I'm back to my regularly scheduled brain programming, I've got a bit to throw at you. I'm going to try to put it into words, but bear with me because sometimes this brain to fingers things doesn't work so well and I just spit out jibberish. But at least I know its jibberish that is trying to get somewhere and maybe will eventually! Jibberish with a purpose! (if I ever write a book...that's going to be the title!)

We had our wedding. It was great. It wasn't perfect. But it was great, and it was ours. Would I have done things differently? Yes, of course. But looking back... we did things the way we did for a reason. Some reason. Some of those reasons I can remember, some I can't. Some were stupid...some were very thoughtful.

All of this to point out the process. Planning a wedding, we are focused so much on that one day. Not even one day, usually, but a few hours in that one day. But when its all over, that one day is a bright flash and we realize that planning a wedding may be as much about the wedding as it is about the planning. That journey changes us as individuals, couples, families. And at the end of this journey, when you are done with the wedding, you are able to take a step back and look with wide open eyes at what happened.*

I want to run with two topics: choice and trajectory.

Choice
In my last post, I included a link to Barry Schwartz's talk about choice.** In one fateful comment section, Jenny posted this video. I watched it and it has since been continuing to blow my mind. Its a really simple talk and concept, but it has forced me to change the way I think about choice. Because I was that person! That paralyzed person in front of the salad dressings or the tooth paste going "WTF!? WHY ARE THERE SO MANY KINDS OF TOOTHPASTE!!!" and then I would read the labels, trying to make the best choice. Because there are so many! And one has to be the best, right!? And of course I want the best! AHH!!!

O_o

Phew. Ok, I'm back. Here is a quick summary of his talk (and by quick I kinda long...) in case you can't watch it.

So his talk basically says this: too many choices makes people unhappy. It does this in a few ways. First, with so many choices comes paralysis. When faced with that wall of toothpaste, I freeze! How to pick one tube out of that entire wall?!? Then, when you do choose that one tube, as Schwartz says, "We end up less satisfied than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from."..."The way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to"..."When there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen."

Next, with all these choices, we end up expecting more. If there is one option available, you get what you get. But when so many choices are present, you immediately expect more. Out of all these options of salad dressing, toothpaste, jeans, etc. there better be one that is the perfect option for me! Of course nothing is perfect, but we build up our expectations when we have more choice and those expectations are always let down.

Schwartz says, "The reason everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise." Yes, yes, yes.

His final reason why choices make us miserable (#4 below) is self blame. When there is only one choice and that one choice isn't perfect for you, who do you put the blame on? Whatever company, institution, group or whatever that limited your choice to that one pair of jeans. But when there are many, many options and the one chosen isn't perfect for you, now who do you blame? Yourself. You should have chosen better, should have found the perfect one, should have X, Y, or Z.


This totally rings true in my life. I'm always looking for better. I'm always trying to make the best choice I can. But am realizing that all of this is setting myself up for failure. I can't possible win this game.

On our honeymoon we were traveling around California - a new place for both of us - and I noticed that, while we were having a great time, nothing was a surprise. Nothing was blowing us away. There was no room for "experiences that were a pleasant surprise." I've seen too much on TV or in movies or in magazine that I expect AMAZING. I expect mind blowing.

I've jumped out of a plane at 10,000 feet and wasn't blown away. WTF!?

Ok, I'm going to stop here with choices before my head explodes. (even though that would be a mind blowing experience and a definite surprise!)

Trajectory
I had this friend, once upon a time, who was uber critical. Of the world, of himself, of everyone else. He was not very fun to be around at this time because he expected nothing less than saint-like behavior. If you weren't doing everything you possibly could to be a saint citizen, you fail. I got pretty upset with him and his expectations. Yes, people can do better, but no, you cannot expect then to make such sudden changes in their lives with just a little nudge.

We are all on our own paths. These paths are the cumulation of our choices and our past. And we will generally keep going in the same direction. That is our trajectory. It takes more than a little nudge, a little critical thought, to change this trajectory. It has to be a shift from one direction to another - not a jump to a whole new track.

Angie sent me a story the other night which is a perfect compliment to the thought about choice and a great example of trajectory. It describes how we naturally think about the story of our lives and are continually adjusting how we think the story is going to end.

We've reached a new chapter - marriage - and now I don't know what the end of the story is going to look like. There are so many choices and so many possibilities and I'm not sure how to proceed and where to go. I definitely have to let go and stop feeling responsible for making the 'perfect' choice. Its not about the destination, its about the journey, right?

But where do I want to journey to?

What story do I want my life to tell?

How do I make such big choices without freaking the F out!?!?


*note that I try to keep the wedding theme with this post but then never pull through with it! choice and trajectory would definitely be neat to explore in explicit wedding planning terms, but I'm going to go with the broad 'life choices' for this post. Now lets go tangent, shall we? **little plug for TED. With its hours of thought provoking videos, its like etsy for my brain.

Now what?

The wedding is over and my bride brain is slowly starting to fade away (Though I still have that knee jerk reaction a lot and keep thinking "oh! I could use that for x,y,z" or "That's a cute DIY project!" But alas, no more wedding projects for me.) So now comes the inevitable question around these parts... what next? What do I do here is bloggy world when I am no longer a bride to be?

Talk about married life as Me, Myself and Wife? Go back to being my normal, neurotic self and morph this space into randomville as Me, Myself and I? Or finish my bridal bit and than fade into the interwebs?

Do you care about my everyday biz? About the explosion of thoughts that go into my head and come out as incoherent messes? Should I end every sentence in this post with a question mark?

Well, we got some more time because I do have more recaps coming, but just putting the question out there. What are you interested in hearing about?

Here are a few of the things rattling around in my mind at the moment that may be making some post appearances:

• We want to move west. Specifically to a place with a ski mountain.
• What do I want to do with my career? Which direction to go, how to become something that sort of resembles a 'professional', goals, etc.
• Health. I've been doing pretty good in the health realm and am looking at doing a lot of things. We'd like to do more climbing. I am addicted to spin class. I want to try yoga for the strength, balance, and spirituality. And I've been poking around at the possibility of a triathlon next spring/summer... (Me, Myself and the Tri?)
• Books! My brain needs some new wrinkles. It has been full of white fluffy stuff for the last eight months! I need something more substantial to sink my gray matter into! (Any good recommendations?)
  
• Making friends. This is way harder than I think it should be! But a lot of my friends have moved around or we've grown apart and I miss having those bonding times with the ladies! Where are my Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha?
• Food! I loves it and I miss it and I want more! I'm specifically interested in baking. More specifically I'm on a quest to recreate this chocolate torte thingy that we had that totally blew my mind.

Way too many things going on in my head. All of them fighting. None of them getting processed appropriately. *sigh* Back to normal life!