Ægrus Somnium

It’s wedding season and those of us that have to go or be in one are slitting our throats but there are some of you who are excitedly creating this hell for the rest of us.

So you are getting married, or maybe thinking of getting married…or maybe you are one of those obsessive cat ladies that creep out potential suitors with your compulsive wedding banter because your biological clock is taking over where you psychological balance has ceased to exist.  Whatever the sitch, it’s on your mind and with the economy going to shit faster than the religious credibility of thousands of bankrupt Rapture defeatists, financing your wedding will definitely be your main focus.  It will be, even though your main focus should be the happiness and new life you are creating with your partner…but you can’t bullshit a bullshitter.

In planning my wedding I learned some very helpful and solid ways to cope with wedding budgeting that you may not find on normal blogs, magazines, or from the mouths of all those middle-aged wedding harpies who will badger you with advice and tell you what you SHOULD do and NEED to have at your wedding to make it more like their now defunct marriage celebration 800 years ago so that when you ultimately stray from their advice they can get so pissed off about it they actually contemplate not going to your wedding, declare it a disaster, but do go for the free food and cake.

1. Don’t give a shit. Seriously! Why freak out over every little thing that goes wrong or doesn’t go your way? Yes there are some things that will go wrong and need attention but nothing is worth the Bridezilla melodrama because you know what that proves? You are an intolerable spoiled asshole, everyone feels sorry for your soon-to-be husband or wonders how he can be so stupid, and they all secretly hope something really goes wrong to teach you a lesson or take squares on when your marriage will inevitably fail.  That’s how people roll. Relax and enjoy the planning and let things roll off, always have a plan z because no one feels bad for you.

2. Think outside your wedding box! Having what you want doesn’t have to be black and white and it doesn’t have to cost a lot, especially when it comes to favors. When you are looking for types of boxes, ribbons, etc. think about it not as a bride but as a normal person.  For example, I wanted Chinese take out boxes for my Asian themed wedding.  At wedding and favor stores and sites they wanted 1.50-3.00 per box. Fuck that! I needed 150 boxes!  So I thought about it not as a bride but as if I were in need of supplies for my Chinese food restaurant, where do they get their boxes from? They surely don’t pay that much per box or they wouldn’t make you take the free pint of rice no one ever wants. I ordered them from a site called Paper Mart and paid less than $25 for the entire order! Things that are made explicitly for weddings are marked up dramatically because they are bending over the bride and that’s not fair to the groom. So be creative, because your reception will inevitably take up at least 50% of your total budget so save where you can.

3. Trunk Shows and Mailing Lists Rock! Creepy or cunning, most girls fall in love with their potential wedding dress well before they are even engaged and in many cases the dress is haute couture, unavailable because they haven’t made it since you were 16 years old, or very overpriced and we end up settling for what looks good or what can be affordable. Why not still be in love with a dress?  If you have a favorite dress then stalk it like you did your soon-to-be husband! Sign up for the mailing lists of the designers you love because most of them have trunk shows that travel to authorized dealers seasonally. These trunk shows usually have the entire collection available to try on and if you put a percentage down on your dream dress during the trunk show, you will get a HUGE discount on your dress! I saved over $400 on my dream dress and didn’t have to settle for shit.  Also, don’t be afraid to look for dresses in unconventional places. Many designers make prom and quinceanera collections and sometimes those are more extravagant and fun than boring white wedding dresses.

4. Make your wedding reflect who you are as a couple. Don’t cave in to the harpies! Unless your dream wedding is a perfectly traditional and lame affair then have fun boring the shit out of your guests, they will forget about it eventually. However, if you are looking to be a little more memorable, try adding touches of who you and your partner are. Things from your home like pictures, favorite keepsakes, etc. make perfect editions to weddings and they are free! Even though I had an Asian themed wedding my husband added his flair to our sweetheart table by draping our Jolly Roger Pirate Flag in the front and my happy Buddhas sat on the top of the table. Everyone loved the decor, it was free because we owned them and it added warmth to the reception. So if you are a Redneck, embrace it with beer can pyramids and a few hundred of your closest sister wives! If you are into the Jersey fad well then kudos, you have already done everything as cheaply as possible!

5. Don’t be lazy, if you want it done right do it yourself! Centerpieces, favors, invitations, even the bouquets and other small trinkets can be handmade or produced mostly on your own at very little expense.  Invitations that are professionally printed not only cost A LOT but also waste a LOT of paper, they are very environmentally costly because of all the stupid little envelopes and metallic trim that make them impossible to recycle.  Printing your own is one way to not only save money but you can control the type of card stock used and its environmental impact.  We used recycled card stock with a very pretty cherry blossom print. As luck would have it, the pattern was on clearance so with the ink for our printer and stamps the total cost for our invitations was about $30. Because of the environmental focus, not caring to keep track of more paper, and not wanting to spend more on stamps, we did not do return envelopes for replies.  We saved money by giving our guests two ways to reply:  By phone and via a special email address that we had set up just for RSVPs. People loved the email and preferred this method to calling or sending back reply cards because much of our combined family are anti-social telephobes and confessed their inevitable irresponsibility because they were sure they would have lost the reply cards which would have resulted in last minute RSVPs, wasted money on postage and more dead trees = shitty karma.

6. Put those bitches to work! Nothing says cheap labor like a bridesmaid.  Everything you plan to do yourself can be accomplished with the blood, sweat, and tears of your bridal party, it’s in their job description and they work for food and cheap wine! Bang the drum and make them earn that ugly dress (we all know you did it on purpose you catty bitch)!

7. Call in Favors! Finally, don’t be afraid to call in those favors! If you know a DJ, remind him that he is banging your sister and a great present would be to do your wedding for free. Know someone that works for lawyers? That means that they are chummy with judges and justices too that can marry you on the DL for cheap if you aren’t into the Church thing. Related to someone with gorgeous, spacious property? Hit them up for a ceremony/reception in their yard then splurge on catering and Dior!

The hardest part about all of this is not really about the money but letting go of the fact that you are not sponsored by a broadcast company nor marrying into money so your dream wedding will not materialize into much more than a drool encrusted fantasy.  Keeping elements of that dream and making them the focal point of your wedding will however tie it all together and keep it memorable. No one wants to walk out of a wedding feeling like they wasted 5 hours of their lives, although we all do more than we care to admit. Thank Buddha for open bar!

You want to get the word out about your wedding early, so people can plan accordingly. There are many great companies that offer promotional products that you can give to everyone invited and these wont cost an arm and a leg.

ok, so harold camping is at it once again, instead of admitting he was just a crazy old man he changed the date of rapture to the date the world was supposed to end and says that we’re all being judged from the original date (may 21st, 6pm) until then, I love people like him, they make the world fun. now I have an idea to make the world fun for him, well, even more fun since I’m sure in his head it’s a fucking blast, so here’s the plan, he said the error was in his calculations, yet again, so what I think we should do is all go to our local dollar store and buy a cheapo calculator and mail it to him so he gets bombarded with calculators to help him get the proper date once the rapture doesn’t come in october, or maybe he can calculate it properly before the october date and give us a real date, below is a copy of a letter that can be copied and sent with the calculator along with the address to his radio station:

———————————————————————————————————-

Dear Mr. Camping,

    I am a devout Christian who says my daily prayers and attends church weekly, I also listen to your broadcast via the web as often as possible, I fear for my immortal soul and those of my friends and family as well. I fear that we may not be prepared on the day of judgment and am doing everything possible to insure my family’s salvation such as living as meagerly as possible. All excess money that comes into our household is donated to our local church branches to help those in need and we do not rely heavily on technology since we believe science to be a sin brought about by the devil to lure us away from the one true lord, amen. On two separate occasions now we have sat together as a family praying waiting for the rapture only to feel we have done something mortally wrong, thank the Lord it wasn’t time for the true rapture. My wife, my now grown children, and myself truly believe in your cause and wish to know of the true judgment day and hope this might help, may the Lord bless you and protect you forever in his holy light.

Blessed in God’s Divine Light,

———————————————————————————————————-

Family Stations Inc.
290 Hegenberger Rd.
Oakland, CA 94621
attn. Harold Camping

there, that should be horribly tacky enough, if you want to join the cause to help camping get a correct rapture date and mail off a calculator to the address above, feel free to copy that letter and sign your name or some bogus ass name below the “Blessed in God’s Divine Light,” line, and if you have any friends with enough humor to do so as well send them this page, or email the content or whatever you choose to do, lets see if we can give the poor guy a hand , enjoy

Addendum: there is also now a facebook event for this, join the fun: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=169077369818518

• another fallacy added to the list
• close minded fucks
• bigotry
• emo fags
• sissy pants
• nascar
• human race in general
• war
• poverty
• american gov’t
• gerbils
• religion

I’m just bored I suppose, don’t you love how I put close minded, and bigotry in there and put all the stuff I hate lol, the truth is yeah I do hate and/or dislike many things but I don’t force my opinion down people throats, if your religious and you believe more power to you, I may think your absolutely wrong and say so here but I’m not chasing you down and forcing it upon you, I don’t run out and beat up an emo boy wearing sissy pants(skin tight girl pants), though I must admit, I do laugh at that sight, but those are my opinions and mine alone I suppose, your just wrong and going to hell for not believing them, that’s your choice though and I hate you for not conforming to whatever whim I may have, feel free to comment with things that I left off the list, there are a lot more

New Year’s Day 2011, about 2pm. Phone conversation with my father.

Dad: Just think, everything sucked so bad last year this year can’t possibly get any worse.

Me: No shit, all that can happen now is something could potentially kill me and that would be doing me a favor and we can’t have that that would be too fucking convenient.

Dad: There ya go! See what a little positive thinking will do!

That exchange really happened, my dad is the shit. By the end of 2010 my life could be summed up as a very thin and very ugly looking frail and haggard thread that could snap at any second and send me spiraling into despair so deep that only a Sylvia Plath gas bath could cure. Unlike my terminally depressed life partner, I am not usually a particularly depressed or suicidal person. I am moody, morbid, and pleasantly pessimistic, meaning that I expect everything and anything to go wrong so I am never disappointed and when something goes right for a change I can appreciate it at face value. It was absolutely a shitty year. Fuck 2010. It gave me nothing but defeat, anxiety, depression, puffy eyes, 30lbs, a mean streak, terrible health, and left me with one less Golden Girl. Fuck strokes for taking Rue McClanahan away from me when she had so much more to give us in her twilight years. There were far more celebrities that were less important than she was that could have gone in her place; like anyone that had ever been cast in a Twilight movie, Sarah Palin or Chris Brown, for Christ sake kill that bastard before he breeds little douchebag woman abusing gay bashing pieces of shit. Just leave us Kanye West, he’s good to keep around for comic relief and I like his music. If you aren’t over him interrupting Taylor Swift you can take Rue McClanahan’s place too if you like and take Taylor and her 20 songs about the same fucking thing with you that bitch is annoying. Anyway back to me. In everything terrible that has happened to me personally and to the world globally with earthquakes, economic suicide and BP’s explosive diarrhea all over the gulf coast; I wish I could say I learned something meaningful but really all that was accomplished were affirmations. Indulge me won’t you?

1. This country really is only beneficial to you if you are an illegal alien, a minority, or dead weight. If you have an education, paid into the social security system and paid taxes and suddenly lose your job, you have to fight harder than anyone to survive. Fuck that. I have been trying to find any job now for over a year and have been told that I am “overqualified” more times than I care to hear. Translation, “we don’t want to pay you because we know that you know better so we will hire this uneducated asshole that we know will work twice as much as you for peanuts. Fuck off.”

2. People really do equal shit. This cannot be stressed enough. Seldom does one give a fuck about anyone. People do NOT want to help you as a rule. As much as they try to convince you and even themselves that they do, there is usually some underlying self-serving rationale to either gain something or boost their shitty karma. Family is the worst of the culprits. They will promise you sunshine and rainbows and no sooner shit down your throat and piss in your cornflakes. Family as an institution is no longer sacred but now an excuse to have cause to hurt people without just cause. Existential punching bags that are doomed to indentured servitude and emotional tithing for life merely because of whose vag was the slip n’ slide. As a result we have written off a fair amount of familial bullshit baggage in 2010.

3. No one ever does get out alive. We worked and worried ourselves sick wondering how we would get by, how we would pay this or pay that and how I would finish school and get us out of this hell we are living. We still can’t figure any of it out as we sink deeper into financial and emotional torment. In a week I may find out that I can’t finish school even though I only have one fucking semester left because I can’t find one bank that will lend me the last little bit of financial aid I need. But even if I do and we get out of this, what the fuck is it all for? By the time we finally can breath again we are still working to get by and everyday ticks by closing in on imminent death. When you look at it in the grand scheme of things, we are wasting our lives and it is our own fault. We created the people who oppress us, who keep us from being like them and being happy and we created our misery and for now there isn’t a god damned thing to be done about it.

So what can we do about 2011? First, I will take the “we” out because really, I don’t care what you do with it since I will probably hear or read about it on Facebook anyway. However, since I am too poor to have a vice drugs and alcohol are not viable options. If I am able to finish school I won’t have time for simple pleasures like meditation or video games but will get to those if I am forced to be a loser and quit school. I plan on keeping my pleasantly pessimistic outlook but trying to leave the rest behind, it hasn’t really suited me. I am not making any resolutions because that is too much pressure and my memory sucks anyway. All there is left for me to do is be more fierce and competitive than ever. I want it all and more than anyone because I have to. I am Veruca Fucking Salt now. However, if 2011 even thinks about claiming Betty White I cannot guarantee rational behavior on my part. I leave you now with the iconic words of Ke$ha. Yes I did say Ke$ha and she wrote them all by herself and everything:

Every single night we fight,
To get a little high on life.
To get a little something right, something real.
At least we try. Time after time.
Try dodging all the douche bags guys.
Try trading all the wasted times.
For something real, in this crazy life.