Does anyone have a really fabulous recipe for lemonade?

You see, life has just thrown an extra-large quantity of lemons at me, and I need to find some way to make something out of them to keep my sanity.

As I sit typing this post, it is roughly 2 months and 2 weeks until Alex and I tie the knot.  Everything is all set up: all our vendors are confirmed, my dress is ready, the invitations have gone out.  We’re good to go.

… Or so I thought.  Apparently all the planning and organizing and thinking things through in the world – because if I’m being honest, I have planned and organized and thought through this wedding more than I have ever planned or organized or thought through anything in my life – will not prevent everything from unraveling around me, making my cozy cocoon of completed checklists shred to pieces before my eyes.

Don’t worry, nothing has happened to stop the wedding from happening.  Everything with Alex and I is great.  But I would say that arguably the worst thing OTHER than the wedding not happening has occurred.  We found out last night that we have to move… TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE WEDDING.

Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal.  But for us, it is.  We aren’t just moving a few streets over, or one town over.  We have to move to a whole other county.  That whole other county is 50 miles north of where we live now.  It’s also 50 miles north of where the wedding is.  Our current lease, in a bizarre twist of fate, ends 5 days before the wedding.  We’ve known for some time that we weren’t going to renew the lease for another full year because we’re buying a house.  The hope had been that our landlords would let us stay here month-to-month until the end of the summer, but now we’ve been informed that they aren’t interested in letting us do that.  So we have to get out by the time the original lease ends.

Life’s a bi%ch, isn’t it?

This new development throws all kinds of big hairy monkey wrenches into the month before the wedding.  For example:

• All our gift registry delivery details will now have to be changed, since we won’t be here anymore if packages get mailed to our home address.
• We have to add at least 1 extra night on to our hotel stay the weekend of the wedding, since we have many people coming in from out of town, and it seems pretty darn crappy for us to not be around to see them before the wedding.
• Alex will have to drive MUCH farther and longer to pick up E for all the wedding events, something that gives both of us agita.

Worst of all, we will be coming home from our honeymoon and living with one of my parents until we have the home-buying stuff settled and closed.  We always knew we’d be living with one of them for a few months while we waited – we just didn’t know we’d start our lives as newlyweds there.  It’s more than a little bit depressing (although we do know that this means we will save more money than we expected, which is not a horrible thing).

Bottom line: I currently feel like the rug has been yanked out from under me and I can’t find the ground to steady myself.  Maybe I should be asking for a recipe for hard lemonade…

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Not too long ago, someone made the following comment within earshot of me:

“If the engagement ring is any less than a carat, it means he doesn’t really love you.”

All I could think was, what is wrong with this person?  I initially shrugged off what I heard as someone being entirely too materialistic and unaware that other people could hear them, but the more I have thought about the remark, the more it has bothered me.

Who, exactly, is it that gets to decide the rules of what is and what is not a respectable symbol of a man and woman’s intention to spend the rest of their lives together?  I looked into it a bit, and the general consensus seems to be that DeBeers decided to run an advertising campaign promoting diamond engagement rings around the end of the 1930′s, and that combined with Marilyn Monroe’s famous “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” raised diamonds to the status symbols they are today.

So, whatever, now a man is supposed to buy a diamond ring for a woman when he asks her to marry him.  I’d be lying if I sat here and wrote that I did NOT expect Alex to go buy me a diamond ring when he decided to propose to me.  But I also don’t think that is the only way to go.  I think it’s equally nice to give a girl a sapphire ring, or something else that is equally meaningful to the couple, as a symbolic, outward sign to the world that you are betrothed.

It’s not really that it’s supposed to be a DIAMOND that bothers me.  It’s the attitude so many people have about the expected SIZE and EXPENSE of the diamond that bothers me.  For example, many people seem to think it’s necessary for a man to spend at least 2-3 months’ salary on an engagement ring.  Other people, like the person I overheard talking, think the engagement ring ought to be as big as possible, and that certain smaller-sized rings are utterly sub-par.  I don’t know where this “wisdom” came from, but it seems horribly flawed.

Don’t people care about their MARRIAGE and their future AFTER the wedding?  Because if you’re asking a man to invest that much money in a ring, he probably isn’t going to be able to invest much money in anything else for a while after the proposal.  It seems perfectly ridiculous to put that kind of financial pressure on a guy, who is probably already completely nervous about pulling off the proposal right, and about getting married and being a good husband.  Not to mention, the engagement ring is supposed to symbolize love and commitment simply because he went and bought the ring and gave it to the girl!  Who cares if all he can afford is a quarter of a carat because he’s a waiter working his way towards a PhD, or a struggling actor, or a retail store employee?  Isn’t it the thought that counts, and not the net worth of the ring in this situation?

I guess my point is that the people who have these crazy guidelines in their heads really seem to be missing the point of the ring in the first place.  I’m not advocating that a man should go grab the first cubic zirconia ring he sees – by all means, save up what you can and put thought into the process!  But going into major debt, with no hope of being able to pull yourself out, just to buy an engagement ring is ridiculous.  It’s also ridiculous to go into debt to put a child into pre-school, or summer camp, or to go on a dream vacation, but that’s really another blog.

My point?  It would be nice to see more people focus on the endgame when it comes to engagements and weddings, rather than on the materialistic crap (for lack of a better word) that so many people parrot to each other.

{For the record, my own engagement ring is not too big and not too small, and my fiancee was intelligent and bought it in such a way that he does not owe anyone money for it, and hasn’t for many months.}

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

My new year has not gotten off on the greatest foot.  I was all ready for this to be the best year ever, so I’m pretty bummed things haven’t been going my way so far.

Let me explain further.

Because of where we live, we have Cablevision in our house for TV, internet, and phone services.  There isn’t another option, at least there wasn’t when we moved here.  Perhaps there is now, I’m looking into that this week.  Anyhoo, unknown to me (or anyone else I’ve talked to for that matter), Cablevision, for whatever reason – and to be honest I don’t give a crap about the reason – ended its deal with the Scripps Networks as of January 1, 2010.  Scripps Networks, for those of you who don’t know is the company that brings us the Food Network and HGTV.

That’s right.  As of the New Year, there is no more Food Network in my house.  AND IT’S ALSO THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.

The Food Network has been my background noise, my relaxing-in-front-of-the-TV channel, and my muse for my entire adult life.  The loss of it, in a word, sucks.  Cablevision has their version of what happened running on the channel formerly known as the Food Network.  You can check it out here.  Similarly, Scripps Networks has their own campaign going to explain what happened, which you can check out here.

What it comes down to is a contract dispute.  All I can think of is 1994, when the MLB Player’s Association went on strike and the season ended before it’s true end, robbing fans of the World Series for that year.  The fans didn’t care what the problem was, or who was right and who was wrong, they just cared about losing out on watching their favorite teams play baseball.  It’s the same thing here.  No one cares whose fault the whole thing is.  We just care that we’re getting screwed out of our shows (while still paying the same price and having to hear from people on other cable networks about all the great stuff we can’t see).

As if losing my favorite TV channel wasn’t enough, we also discovered last Saturday (1/2/10) that our dryer is broken.  We rent, so we have to wait for our landlord to fix that problem.  Until then, we either can’t do laundry, or we have to wash it and then line dry EVERYTHING.  Or we have to impose on someone we know to use their machines.  I won’t go to a laundromat, for reasons that are outside the scope of this post.

*sigh*  I still have high hopes for this year!  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that both issues are taken care of soon.

© 2010, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I recently had a conversation about the merits of the statement: “You shouldn’t feel that way.”

I am of the opinion that this statement is a bit offensive.
Perhaps this is something you hear in everyday conversation and ought not to be viewed as offensive. Perhaps. Or maybe how a person feels is a completely subjective experience and ought not ever be invalidated by a statement like “you shouldn’t feel that way.”
By way of definition…

• Feelings are a conscious subjective experience of emotion. As such, feelings almost never give the feeler a perception of the physical world that would be considered a universal perception or reaction.
• Perception: the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. Perception is viewed as a result of the interplay between past experience, your culture, and your own interpretation of what you perceive.

Even the definitions of these words are open to interpretation, and will be judged based on each reader’s own prejudices, pre-conceived notions, needs, and past experiences. And just because the person who wrote the definitions of these concepts may have intended one thing of them, it’s very possible someone reading them will take them in a way not originally intended. I suspect this is the case with a lot of Shakespeare’s works, by the way.
Examples: No one is quite sure if we all experience the color red in the same way. It’s rare to find two people who experience classical music pieces in the same way. Culinary creations suffer from the same problem. You could make an argument that everything in life is subjective, there is no right and wrong, or black and white – only the explanation by each individual for how they perceive the world around them.
Which is the whole point. How can anyone attempt to understand the true nature of the world we live in or the universe as a whole if statements like “you shouldn’t feel that way” are deemed acceptable? That different people feel different ways and interpret things differently is what makes life interesting and difficult to unravel. If someone feels a certain way, that’s how they feel. One individual’s disagreement with that feeling is valid, but should not invalidate the original feeling. Everyone is entitled to feel what they feel and to not be told something is wrong with them for feeling it.
This quote probably says it better than me:
“People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole-shaped.” ~ Unknown

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

It is now time for my annual rant about jerks who don’t clean the snow off their cars before driving on the highway.
In all seriousness, what is wrong with these people? I can appreciate that sometimes snow becomes icy on the car and it sticks and it’s hard to chip it off and you don’t want to scratch your car – these are not the heinous offensive turds I am referring to. I’m talking about the people who don’t even TRY to clean off their cars, who leave mounds of soft snow all over – on the roof, on the trunk, basically anywhere it wasn’t absolutely necessary and/or convenient to brush it off in order to get in the car and drive. More often than not these are people with SUVs, although I won’t make that a stereotype because I have seen small-car drivers be guilty of this same offense. I can’t stand these people – just tooling along the highway, letting the high speeds and wind do the work for them, giving no thought or consideration to the other drivers on the road who did take the time to properly clean off their cars, or to the DOT workers who have to go around re-salting and re-sanding and re-plowing because these inconsiderate jerks have seen fit to mess up and ice up the roads with their laziness. And they look at you like, “What?,” all wide-eyed and innocent when you pass them after having survived the snow shower they rained on you while you were behind them. CLEAN OFF YOUR DAMN CAR!! No one enjoys standing out in the cold and brushing snow off their car, but it’s necessary – in fact, I think you can get a ticket if a cop catches you driving around like that, which is the only comfort I take in this particular issue.

These are probably the same people who cut into lines of traffic at the last second and forget that their vehicles are equipped with a nifty little device called a blinker.

*end rant*

© 2008 – 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Update:
I was able to purchase tickets this morning for the show I mentioned in my last blog, but I had to do it over the phone. They have no idea why the website isn’t working. :-p

© 2008 – 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I just wasted an hour of my life trying to figure out why I can’t buy tickets to a lecture Alex and I want to go to on Tuesday at AMNH.

The show is on 12/2, and no matter how hard I try I can’t get the damn website to let me buy tickets. On closer examination, though, I realized that NO SHOW has tickets available.

That’s right. Between now and February 24th, according to the AMNH website, all the Rose Center shows are unavailable for ticket purchase. I found it hard to believe that every dorky lecture for the next 2 months is sold out. But I still panicked, because it would suck more goat balls than I care to imagine if the lecture is indeed sold out. So I tried to call the ticketing phone number, thinking that if anything is sold out there would be a recording about it. Too bad the ticketing number is not useful at all. In desperation, I went to my sister to see what she could figure out.

We go to the website. I show her that out of about 7 lectures in the next 2 months, only 1 has a “buy tickets” icon next to it. So she tells me to try clicking on it and seen what happens. I scoff at her, but do it anyway. Guess what? The website must be down, because even the lecture that had a “buy tickets” icon displayed the ‘Page Cannot Be Found’ screen of doom when I clicked on it. My sister informs me it’s likely you just can’t buy tickets when the actual ticket office is closed.

I’m going to be honest… I was paranoid and not sure I should believe her. I was still worried that all the lectures Alex and I want to go to between now and February are already sold out.

Then my sister pointed out that there aren’t too many dorks like us in the world, and it’s unlikely that any of them are completely sold out this far in advance, so it therefore has to be a website problem. Thanks, sis. :-p

© 2008 – 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.