J is for Jumping Ahead

My engagement to Jeffrey is a long one. We knew that from the start. Our tentative-wedding-date keeps getting pushed back further and further. We simply cannot afford a wedding right now.

But lately, with my stress levels off the charts, I've been really needing to focus on the happiest things in my life. One of the thing in my life that is absolutely fantastic is my relationship with Jeffrey. Since we're both busy, we aren't spending as much time together as we want to. Since I can't focus on actually BEING with him, I've, instead, been focusing on our wedding.

Some of it I find boring (seriously, who gets chair-covers?) some of it I can't even justify vaguely fantasizing about without talking to him (location, food, music?) but some of it, I can totally justify looking at.

Stop. Pause, Step back. I've been planning my wedding since I was 12, or maybe earlier. Why is it that now that I'm engaged, I feel the need to justify looking at wedding things? Whatever.

Back to the topic at hand.

Why the HELL are weddings so expensive? Who can justify spending several thousand dollars on a DRESS? I fell in love, the other day, with a dress. I will not be getting this glorious dress because it costs $1000. I can't do it. Even if I had the money, I wouldn't do it. Surely it doesn't cost that much to make the dress. The materials aren't that pricey, and how much time really goes into making the dress?

I've discovered something though. Prom dresses are a lot cheaper than wedding dresses. EVEN when they are the same style, by the same designer, with the same fabrics. I don't have the links anymore but I did find a case where that happened. They even used the exact same picture on the website. The prom dress was somewhere in the $200-300 range, and the wedding dress was about $1000. It was hilarious (but also saddening) So now I'm looking for white prom dresses. Besides, I don't want a train on my dress, and that's easier to find in prom dresses than bridal gowns.

Weirdness about me? I won't wear a second-hand wedding-dress unless I know who else has worn it. I would wear a dress if it was passed down from someone in my family, if one were to exist (I don't think anyone has their dress anymore but whatever). But wedding dresses are..... memories. Keep sakes. I guess I'm a little superstitious. I don't want to wear someone else's memories. It seems in poor taste.

I also fell in love with flowers, but those aren't as dramatically expensive.

Leap of Faith?

It's a long story, but if you don't want to read it, there's a tl;dr version on the bottom. Just scroll.

I started cheerleading when I was 8, for a local rec-football team. I loved it, but it was only a few months a year. Outside of cheer season, I'd constantly be talking about it, practicing old cheers, and trying to talk the neighbor kids into practicing stunting with me (which looking back on, I'm glad they refused, since they had no idea what they were doing and we were all kids with no supervision)

When I was 11, an All-Star team (competitive team, for those who don't know anthing about cheerleading) opened up nearby, and I joined it. It was 3 practices a week, year round. It became my everything (second only to my love of writing) We were good. Not great, but good. We had two teams, a junior and a senior team. I was on the Junior team. Our seniors won first place at their first competition. The first competition any of our teams had. They continued doing just as well at all the regional competitions, but always came in last at Nationals. That was okay, we figured. That's still better than a lot of other teams in the country. Our junior team wasn't as great, but we did well enough. We made it to Nationals, finally, in our third year, and everything fell apart. One girl called us just before our flight and said she changed her mind about coming. Another girl, our best tumbler, broke her wrist in the pool at the hotel. A third girl (and her mother) got food poisoning and couldn't compete because she couldn't stop puking. We had to re-arrange our routine, we all messed up at least once, and we came in last. That's fine. Our performance was really terrible.

None of us knew, at the time, that it would be our last competition. A month or so later, our coach sat us all down at the end of practice. She had lost the lease on our gym. She was having a hard time finding us a new practice space, because we needed it three times a week. She asked what we wanted to do. We wanted to stay together, even if that meant only one practice a week. We'd just practice more at home.

We tried. Our coach couldn't handle it.  Our team dissolved. There were no other All-Star teams in the area. I was starting high school, but my school didn't have a team. I had no other options. Cheerleading was over for me.

It's 6 years later, and I still miss the sport more than anything. I'm in college now, but there's no way I can cheer. For one, my school doesn't have cheerleaders, and more importantly, I'm out of practice, and out of shape. I doubt I can even do a decent cartwheel right now.

But since I'm in college, I just moved. And the town I'm in has an All-Star gym. I'm tempted to send them an email, saying..... I don't even know what. I can't cheer, I'm not certified to coach, I've never choreographed anything half-way decent, and I can't even answer phones for them, because talking on the phone sends me into a crazy anxiety attack in which I'm likely to throw up or pass out. And their team is internationally ranked. Mine was only barely nationally anything, and I was one of the least-skillful girls on the team. But I want, maybe need, to get back into my sport. I'd happily vacuum their spring floors (THEY HAVE 2! TWO COMPETITION SIZED SPRING FLOORS! HOW FREAKING AWESOME IS THAT!? ) for free. But how do I say that without seeming like a desperate wanna-be, or a total creeper?

But on the other hand, it would break my heart if they turned me away. I hurt enough for Cheerleading. I don't want to hurt more.

Irrelevant, but  we've set the date for our wedding. May 31, 2012.

Time to Vent a Little

I'm getting really REALLY tired of strangers telling me I'm too young to get married. You’re strangers. If you were a friend, I would think you were genuinely concerned. But you aren’t a friend. I don’t even know your name. You have no reason to care about whether my marriage is a success or a failure, and so your comments about how my marriage is doomed? They almost feel like something that you’re saying just to upset me.

And it’s working. It's not making me second guess myself. It's not making me scared. It's just making me angry. You don't know who I am, you don't know who he is, and your reasons for why its a bad idea, half the time, aren't even true.

Friends, if you think I'm making a mistake, I will listen to you. I will know that you're trying to help, and I won't get angry. I will appreciate your honesty, even if our opinions are not the same.

Strangers I will NOT listen to you. Not unless you take the time to actually talk to me, whcih would make you not strangers anymore.

What prompted this? I found a message on facebook from someone who I don't know. It's a friend-of-a-facebook-friend, but I hardly even know our one mutual connection. When I first read the message, I was so offended that I deleted it instantly, but it said something along the lines of "Congratulations on ruining your life. It's impossible to make a marriage last when you're young, and no one who gets married in college ever graduates. Have fun being in debt and homeless in ten years."

It was longer than that, but I can't remember what else it said. It was rude, and I'm quite angry. Unfortunately, I encounter this attitude pretty often. It's always "You're too young and you're ruining your life." Occasionally it's "Oh you're getting married? I didn't know you were pregnant." That's just annoying. I'm not pregnant, and even if I was, I would not get married just because of that.

Oh, and I'm not ruining my life. Just throwing that out there.