Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,

These are the kinds of emails B sends me during the day:

To which I replied:

To which he replied:

I am marrying this man. YES. TEN POINTS TO GRYFFINDOR. 

WOO SPRING BREAK

It is 79 degrees F, 27 for those of you who are celsius-inclined. Dresden weather is always a shock. Even after nearly four (OMG) years here, I'm never used to the speed at which it changes.

Weather. HOW EXCITING.

Anyway. This past week I've been pretty busy on the wedding-planning front. I vowed never to be one of those people who plans things down to the length of the fork tines, and I have been pretty successful so far. My cousin's getting married one month after me so we compare to-dos and things like that. I know if she's doing something, I really need to get it done, so she's been a huge source of motivation, especially since I'm a lifetime member of the Procrastinator's Guild. She mentioned invitations and I was like, crap. I looked at a couple sites and realized $300 for 100 invitations was just not something I wanted to spend money on, especially since I didn't want to waste paper, wasn't planning on doing mail RSVPs, plus there was a big chance my mom was going to be the one to stuff envelopes and I just didn't want to do that to her. Therefore I killed a couple birds with one stone by "making" my own.

I say "making" for obvious reasons... it took about 5 minutes to type stuff on a template and send it to a copy shop in my hometown for my mom to pick up (bless her). There are a certain things that are priceless when it comes to planning a wedding from overseas and one of those things is a Paypal account. I found MMScrapShop  (run by a very nice lady) on Etsy, bought the library card template ($2.99) and it was sent to my email immediately. I actually did this back in February and it just sat around in my email for a while. I finally opened that bad boy in Pages (like, last week) and downloaded a couple fonts for the typewriter and stamp font.  I emailed it to a local Ohio copy shop and asked it be printed on white cardstock. They called my mom the same day for her to pick them up. The huge bonus is that this template comes with five cards on one page, and I estimated 75 invitations to send (lots of families and couples), so I only needed 15 pages printed! The cost was $17.85. I got 100 envelopes for $17.98 plus $3.99 shipping so the grand total for our invitations was

sorry for all the wedding talk

My mom: I don't know what I'm going to wear to your wedding.
Me: You can wear pants if you want to.
My mom: I just might.

Nobody has a cooler mom than I do.

retrospect

When things are really bad I think about how I'm going to write a book about all our troubles. Then I realize that I'm trying to forget them as much as possible. The one simple fact we always have is that we're facing everything together. It's more important to fall asleep together than to dwell on petty arguments. It also helps that by the time we go to sleep, we're so exhausted that we collapse in fits of giggles.

On a completely unrelated note, I don't care how much it costs; I'm getting the tailor to sew pockets into my wedding dress.

expectation

I told B I wanted another tattoo. He sighed. He probably never thought he'd marry someone with a tattoo. I never thought I'd marry an engineer. Life balances out like that.

dwellings

story of my life

I forgot what I was going to say.

April 2009

I always thought I'd meet the man of my dreams on, say, a Tuesday and we'd be in a laundromat and I'd be reading a book while waiting for my clothes to dry. And then he would stride purposefully in, setting down his basket of clothes and maybe dropping a t-shirt on the way. I'd watch him search all his pockets for some quarters and then he'd finally cash in some singles, uncrumpling them and feeding them into a machine. Then he'd start the machine, sitting down in a chair, jiggling a knee, standing up again to read the bulletin board hanging above his head. He'd read everything twice through, even the dog-walking service flyer, even though he doesn't have a dog, and sit back down. Some sort of stars-aligned situation would cause him to talk to me and immediately see my shyness as endearing (an introvert's dream) and we'd spend the rest of the wash cycles talking and talking and talking until we finally left together to get a milkshake.

While I did actually meet him on a Tuesday, several things would prove to be impossible. Waiting for my clothes to dry in a machine, for example. The lack of quarters in the euro currency. My sudden lactose intolerance preventing that milkshake. Other details were wholly replaced by others and I had to be the one to talk to him (being the teacher and all). And in all actuality, I'm the knee-jiggler.

It was nothing like I'd imagined and nothing I could ever expect. Unfortunately the same can be said for some everyday struggles that exist nowadays, the fog traipsing through my clear thoughts and leaving them lost. It's always a losing battle. For every one time you are successful at keeping the fog at bay, there are five other times you fail. Nothing is real. And you look back to when you were happier and how much easier things were then. Innocence was lost and the full extent of your wreckage lies before you. I am a good person, you insist.

His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
From A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway, on F. Scott Fitzgerald

lately