Thursday, November 12, 2009

What Did You Say Your Budget Was?: finagling something nice out of nothing

Fancypants wedding, found via Google images. Oh boy!
It is lucky for Josh The Fiance and I that we're not big on the idea of having a fancypants wedding, because if we did the wedding industry would be HAHA SUCKERSing all the way to the bank. And back. And to the bank again. And Josh The Fiance and I... well, we just don't have very much money to put in the Wedding Industry's bank account. (And if we did I'd like to think we'd put it into the Graduate School bank account. Or maybe the House Ownership bank account. Or *hinthint* the Getting Grace A Puppy bank account.)

But again... not that much cash that we'd like to blow. (Do you know the kinds of germs that are on money these days? It's just DIS- what, you didn't mean that kind of blow? Er, carry on.) But the V Word started to rear its ugly head.

A venue wouldn't be that big of a deal if we wanted, say, a small ceremony and afternoon reception with 50, maybe 70 people. You can fit that sort of crowd cozily into a handy backyard, or under a small shelter in a nice garden-type park. But just my close extended family is about that, and Josh The Fiance is in a similar situation. If we cut out all but the most beloved of friends our guestlist is bumping up merrily against the side of the Good Ship 150. Small garden ceremony? Ha! Ha!

So we had to find a place that a) was not ludicrously priced; b) could accommodate our exorbitant families; d) fit our short laundrylist of aesthetic requirements. (And preferably not presided over by a crazy person.)

First we discovered that "not ludicrously priced" in Wedding Speak is $2k. Second we realized that if it was "reasonably priced", could fit our families, and was outside and pretty, it was not only often presided over by crazy people but usually we would have to pay to get it catered unless we wanted our guests to eat grass in the manner of cows. And reasonably priced catering typically starts at $10 a head for a light appetizer buffet. Which, with a guestlist of 150 people (each with their own personal head) is about $1500. That, on top of our reasonably priced venue, came to around $3,500. Which is not really a reasonable price when you realize we have already gone over our budget by 16.6% and we have not even purchased the dress yet.

I am beginning to see the appeal of eloping.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Figuring Out What We Want: a journey of self-discovery, whining, and bees

When it comes to planning a wedding, I'm beginning to discover that while most people do it in a year or less, there are things that can (and will) occupy your time no matter how long your engagement. Especially if you, like me, never spent any time as a younger person thinking about what sort of spectacle you want your wedding to become. So when Josh and I gleefully, nervously, blindly stepped into the world of Almost Grown Up People we had rather a large job set up for us already, despite our carefully planned (massive) engagement period.

Before you can plan all of the little wiggly bits of a wedding (centerpieces, pennies in your shoe, cufflinks, etc) you need to have some kind of idea of what on earth you'd like to do. And this is where the venue comes in.

Before wedding planning I rarely, if ever, thought about the word "venue." My mother used to be employed at a rather large tourist attraction with a splendidly overpriced event space, and our discussions about her job in that very specific category was perhaps the only time in living memory I have ever uttered the word. Until now. The venue is so important, so central, so all-encompassing in the course of wedding planning that you apparently cannot make one single bloody decision until you figure out where to throw the damn thing. Will it be outside? If it's inside, can we have candles? If it's outside, will we have to rent porta-potties? Will we need to rent a tent? Where will the chairs be coming from? Do they allow outside caterers? Wait, did we even budget for catering?

Et freaking cetera.

One thing we did know is that we wouldn't be having our wedding in a church. Neither Josh The Fiance nor I have a home church, for one. Additionally, the ceremony will be (if it includes faith at all) alarmingly inter-faith. I came from a hippie presbyterian background and am now, with the help of college courses in Comparative Religion and an unfortunate bout of religious relativism, mired in floundering agnosticism. Josh The Fiance was raised Jewish/Native American Pagan, and now generally enjoys the idea of God but mostly thinks about cooking and computers. Our best church option would probably to be married in some kind of Unitarian commune, the kind where everybody wears hemp and brings a set of miniature set of bongos for the round singalong.

Another obstacle in our wedding planning is our debilitating lack of cash. Do you have any bloody idea how bloody expensive every bloody venue is out there in the world? Apparently the average cost for American weddings these days is something like $27,000. HOLY MACKEREL. ON A STICK. AND OTHER VARIOUS EXCLAMATIONS. That is more money than my dream car costs. Our budget cuts out most private estates, most hotel ballrooms, pretty much anywhere that requires that you hire their in-house catering service, and... that's pretty much that.

But we needed to figure out what sort of setting we wanted for our wedding, and we wanted it to be outside, in a pretty place, preferably somewhere that was close to most of our relatives, especially the ones who found travelling long distances difficult. That meant somewhere in Oregon or close to the Washington-Oregon border. (Josh and I live in the Seattle area, for those of you following along at home.)

And so the adventure began. Working from our computers, poking around in areas we were at best unfamiliar with, we started the Great Venue Search.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

A Very Good Place to Start

So what do you do when two crazypants kids think it might be a good idea to get married?

I suppose I'm using the term "kids" loosely here - Josh The Fiance and I were both born more than two decades ago, for example. We're both old enough to have graduated from high school. Heck, as of this writing I am but five bitter months away from receiving my BA in Linguistics. (Yeah, I know how to pick degrees worth money.) Of course, I am a cradlerobber, and harvested Josh when he was still but a wee babe in swaddling clothes, cackling all the while. He and I are the same age for exactly ten days every year. SHOCKING.

But we are young, and we know it. Which is why this is going to be A Very Long Engagement Audrey Tautou not included. Partially because I'd like to be a little older when we tie the knot. Partially because we just don't have the cash to throw around at the moment, and need time to save up. Partially because I want to milk Dad's insurance policy for as long as possible we want to really have the time to enjoy our engagement and not spend the whole darn thing panicking about !!!the wedding!!!! I like to take things slow. I'm just that kind of girl.

But part of the reason I'm glad we're not getting married for a while (as in summer 2011, haha) is that it gives us a long ol' time to just enjoy looking at a bunch of wedding crap and taking our sweet time deciding what we want. Which we are taking full, FULL advantage of. Y'see, I have this problem... it's called Not Giving A Crap About Stuff Brides Are Supposed To Give A Crap About. Flowers? I like dandelions. Food? WE CAN FEED EVERYONE PIZZA JOSH, WOULDN'T THAT BE AWESOME. Processional music? I announced recently that I intended to walk down the aisle to Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen.

I'm sure by now every semi-traditional female in my life is busying her time with hand-wringing and flinching whenever she thinks of the horrible catastrophe that my wedding is sure to become. I'm really sorry, guys. There's a lot of reasons this won't be the fancypants traditional white wedding that you see in Martha Stewart Wedding. Someday I will write those down, and you will know them.

But the gist of it is: Josh and I love each other. A lot. I'm not going to smash your faces into how great this person is, but he is really amazing. I've decided that if he's not an avatar of Vishnu than he's doing a great job of faking it. We want to get married, and we want to share that with our families and friends and all of the people who are most important to us. We don't care about cake. (This is a lie: we care a lot about cake.) We don't care about flowers. We care mostly about having a big family reunion where everyone we love gets together and talks and hangs out and has a good time and we get to eat as much cake as we want.

Also I look forward to the presents.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Proposing To My Boyfriend: why I did it and why you could too (if you want)

If you were to look up "macho" in the dictionary, you would not find my fiance's photo. You may find it under, perhaps, "serene." Possibly it would be lurking (in a friendly sort of way) next to the word "calm." Most likely of the bunch, it may be next to the rather unexpected entry "Jiminy Cricket," as one of his most commonly-uttered phrases just so happens to be: "Grace, please do not put that on the internet. If you do, you will be sorry."

Like Jiminy Cricket, his good advice is typically, and unfortunately, ignored, which explains why I am constantly getting into rather a large amount of trouble on facebook. But that's really a story for another day, or no day at all, because Josh says I probably shouldn't put that on the internet.

My picture, on the other hand, would likely be found next to "brash," or "spontaneous," or possibly (okay, probably) "kind of dumb sometimes." Because I am kind of dumb sometimes. Oddly this is sort of considered to be a masculine trait, in so much as frat boys are wont to do silly things like engaging in parkour without any physical training, attempt to drink 12-packs of beer in one sitting, and, er, propose to their girlfriends. Generally dangerous activities, really. And don't worry Grandma, I don't do either of the first two.

Some women have lovely stories about candlelit dinners and rose petals in the jacuzzi and secluded picnics at the beach at sunset, stories that usually end with long-ass descriptions of expensive shiny crap and a general sense of dreamy wonderment. My story is from the other side of the ring.

When I told my mother I was planning to propose to Josh (all the while swooning at the romance of it all), her first question was: "do you think he isn't going to?"

Now, this bit takes some explaining. I am very, very bad at gender roles. I don't rebel against heteronormativity on purpose, I'm just... a really, really unskilled wife-to-be. Or husband-to-be, for that matter. Gender roles don't really occur to me when I am planning my life. So no, the reason I planned to propose was not because I thought he wasn't - it was entirely because I wanted to.

Which, when you really think about it, is one of the best reasons to do something.

I don't deny that it could have blown up in my face. (Well, actually it wouldn't have because if you know Josh, you know that the most it could do was fizzle. He is one mellow dude.) If I was dating someone who had a lot invested in being the one behind the ring, I don't think I would have proposed. If he had been insecure in his ~manhood~ I wouldn't have proposed. If he was set on going about things in the traditional way, I wouldn't have proposed. If he was fearful of commitment, I wouldn't have proposed. But Josh isn't any of those things, and it went absolutely perfectly.

(He says I shouldn't put the sound he made when he saw the ring on the internet.)

So now it's your turn to talk to me about proposals. Were you the proposer? Do you want to be, someday? Did the engagement come about by mutual agreement?

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Post The First: A short introduction

Welcome to An Immodest Proposal. It is small, and it is new, but since it is mine I like it a lot and I think you should too.

This blog will be about wedding planning. "Oh, GOD," I can hear you saying out there in the twisted ether of the cybernetic web, "aren't there rather a lot of those already?!" Well, yes. And most of them are probably a lot better than this one. But - and here's the kicker, ladies and gentlemen - this one is mine, which means it is special. And here is why.

Reason Number One: Hi! I'm Grace. I think I'm cool, and you probably should too, especially if you're going to continue reading this blog without wanting to set yourself on fire. I inherited a sense of baseless arrogance from my father, which you will start figuring out soon if you haven't already. (He says it's not baseless, which leads me to believe I inherited my mother's honesty as well.) Also a focus on this blog will be Josh, my ~*~fiancé~*~, who shall henceforth be known as Josh, my fiance, because I am too lazy to type that twiddly bit over the e over and over again. I apologize for this, but I am not so sorry that I will change my behavior.

Reason Number Dos: This will not be a blog about my thermographic printed invitation suite, or my couture gown from Vera Bradley (although wouldn't that be hilarious), or how it is Very Important that All Of The Bridesmaids wear Matching Scarves Knitted From Angora Wool And Dyed By Artisans In The Artist's Colony Of Ubud On The Island Of Bali. I have very little cash and even less patience, especially for wiggly little details. I'm not going to attempt to feed you any nonsense about how "because what's REALLY important is that at the end of the day I'll be married to my best friend!!!" because really I'm just a lazy jerk who never spent any time planning imaginary weddings when I was a kid.

Reason Number I Am Bad At Math: if you are here you probably either a) care about weddings, b) care about my wedding (hi Grandma!), or c) tumbled across it on accident while looking for Roasted Baby recipes. If you are here because you care about weddings - you're planning your own wedding maybe, or you're looking for somebody through whom to live vicariously, or you just think weddings are goshdarned exciting and you want to read people write at length about them as though they were important - you are in the right place, because I am going to write at length at what I'm doing and how and why and how I'm paying for it and why I think that's just bloody exorbitant. (Have you seen wedding dress prices lately? JIMINY MACKEREL.) If you care about MY wedding (hi Grandma!), then you are also in the right place, because this is where I'll be talking about it. If you're looking for recipes? Um... sorry. I'm no Jonathan Swift.

Those are some good reasons why you should love me this blog. Please do so. If you do not I will cry, and then everything will get wet and you will be sorry.