Wedding Bell Blues

This is a wedding rant, so if you are uninterested in my wedding, you may make your exit now.

Gentle reader, if there is anything that I have learned in the last year that I feel is necessary to pass on to you, it is this one piece of advice: Just elope. ¹

Things have been relatively calm up until this point. There have been a few hiccups along the way, of course, but in the span of about five days, everything got stupid. For example:

• Wedding rings: Did you know that the price of gold is at an all-time high? It is. Which means that my plain, simple band cost almost $250 more than the price we were originally quoted.² It actually would've been cheaper to buy the pre-fab band encrusted with diamonds that we initially vetoed as being too expensive.
• The back up venue for the ceremony, which my father-in-law had assured us that we would be able to get (for free) is in fact booked. Most of the other possible venues? Also booked. Most of them in the last two or three days. Except for the one restaurant, which told my father-in-law that he normally charges about $200 to rent the space, but since it was a wedding he'd have to charge $500.
• Two of the three people that we'd intended to ask to do readings at the wedding are...not coming.
• The RSVP deadline was on Sunday and only 55% of the invitees have responded so far.
• My aunts on Facebook are talking about the black bra of doom.³
• None of the fascinator or jewelry supplies that I've ordered online have arrived yet.

The end result of all this is that I have taken to obsessing about things I cannot change. For example, I have just noticed that one of our floors is a bit slopy. The house is eighty years old, and I've lived here for just over two. I am sure that the floor has been a bit slopy the entire time, and that I've just never noticed before now. But now I cannot not see it or feel it every time I walk on it. There is not a damned thing I can do about it either.⁴

So in the meantime, I am going to breathe deeply, exhale slowly, and tell myself to accept that things are what they are, and that I need to conserve my energy. And then I'm going to go home and have a really kick ass weekend there.

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¹ My wedding has, in fact, driven me crazy. Mad. Loopy. Barking. 'Round the twist. I am losing it. I can't believe that there are still five weeks to go because I can't imagine living like this for five weeks without resorting to the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol.
² Not really the jeweler's fault--we got a quotation for price back in February, and gold has done nothing but go up since then.
³ It is an absolutely enormous bra that women in our family get to wear at their bridal showers. You are supposed to stuff pieces of wrapping paper from your gifts into it. The last person to wear it was my tiny, tiny cousin. I, unfortunately, pretty much fill out the bra to begin with.
⁴ Which is to say, not a damned thing that doesn't involved ripping up the floors and replacing them, which is not really a feasible solution at this juncture.