My Big Fat Priest Wedding

I've been mulling over for a few weeks now how best to address the upcoming nuptials here on Weeds. A close second reason for the low output these last weeks (the first being, of course, utter lack of time, and the abundance of stuff that was just more important) is a reluctance to turn this site completely over to romantic musings. I'm wary of falling into that girly trap of talking about my boyfriend all the time--I'm an intellectual dammit, I don't go in for that. Or so I'd like to think. Now that it feels as though my whole life has been swallowed up by wedding talk, it seems like a good time to give up that pretense and write a few girly lines. But thoughtful girly lines.

I'm gonna go ahead and register my support for the sort of girlish behaviour which leads young women (and a not a few keen tweens and toddlers as well, I'm sure) to imagine their wedding day down to the last marzipan-or-royal-icing, white-or-ivory detail: truth is, you never know how quickly you might have to put a wedding together. If called upon to do so, one would be thankful to have all such preferences, as well as venues for receptions & the song for the first dance, already picked out. I certainly was.

So that, fairly soon after Daniel and I, sitting on the couch one night of his visit, decided to get married (it was a sort of, "So, you wanna?" "Yeah. You?" "Yeah" kinda thing--no knees were dropped or rings proffered, nor, in retrospect, do I wish there had been) I could unscroll the vision for him, and set about making it happen. So that, a mere four weeks after the decisive moment and nearly a full four months ahead of the actual date, everything is more or less set, decided upon and booked. We have a date (though nailing that down was a bit of a comedy of errors), a chapel for the ceremony, a venue for the reception, a caterer, a cake-maker, a photographer, a live band, I have a dress and shoes, we have rings, I've chosen which flowers I want, we've made reservations for the honeymoon and found the apartment we're going to live in. That's right--I'm a five-foot, rock n' rollin', wedding plannin' powerhouse. There are two governing principles I've been operating with: one, I want this wedding to look and feel like us, and two, and I want to be able to stop thinking about its various aspects as soon as possible. This means that if I see something I like, I go for it, which enables me to quit thinking about that item and cross it off my list. I'm not a keep-options-open kinda gal (Hello? I'm getting married.) Of course it goes without saying that absolutely all elements of this to-do must cohere to make the night rock. And that it will.

Something we've heard a fair bit of while making the announcement rounds is, What's the rush? Why don't you wait a little longer? And while I would generally agree that prudence and caution are good things, and that waiting is nearly always a good idea, I just--we just (sorry Matthew--had to revert to couplespeak there)--don't think it's necessary here. I'm twenty-six, and have been waiting for this my whole life. Wouldn't you say that twenty-six years is plenty of time? (To be fair, I have in the past thought that the waiting was over, but turns out I was mistaken.)

By which I mean, just as the vision for the wedding was already set to roll when we decided to get married, thus allowing us to move quickly, so I feel that I was being prepared to meet Daniel long before we actually did, so that when the moment came, I was ready and I knew it. (And I'm not quite sure, when I write moment here, which I mean: when we started emailing seriously in November? When we declared our love in December? When we met in March? I dunno. All of the above, I guess.)

And so I consider myself a fairly calm bride-to-be. And I'm even ever-so-very-slightly resentful at how much time, care & talk this wedding venture is requiring, because for me it's not at all the main event on the horizon. No matter how excited I am about the day itself (just wait til you see the shoes), that pales in comparison to how excited I am about the prospect of having Daniel around everyday, of making a home and building a life together, of cooking and reading and laughing and walking and driving and playing chess together.

Now that is gonna rock.