The Making of a Bridezilla.

Bridezillas are scary, there is no doubt about that, but I can also kind of understand where they’re coming from. As much as I’d like to think that I would be above being a bridezilla at my own wedding, I can totally see it happening: I’m a person who likes to be in control, and when something out of my control goes wrong, I generally have a mini-meltdown over it. I think that there are so many factors, though, that can work together in just the right way to create a bridezilla. One of them being a natural disposition toward wanting to be in control, obviously. Another one is money; if you’re shelling out the big bucks for quality, it’s valid to expect to get it, right? Especially for big events like a wedding, it’s easy to consider something you pay for a waste of money when you aren’t happy with it. And no one likes to waste money. Another one is the performance: because really, at least of half of a wedding ceremony is for the benefit of other people. It’s like you’re an actor performing a role that so many others have perfected (like Hamlet), and you’re expected to follow a script that never changes whilst maintaining your distinct personhood and entertaining your audience, which consists of family and close friends, ie. people you don’t want to disappoint. It’s enough stress to alter a person’s demeanor; I’m almost having a panic attack just thinking about it.

Another thing that I think is a really big factor is the idea that, especially for girls, your wedding day is supposed to be perfect. I guess I can only speak for myself when I say that, for me, weddings have always had kind of magical connotations, like this one day of your life you get to experience romantic transcendence and perfection because you’re committing yourself to love in an elaborate ceremony, but I suspect that most girls have at least experienced the residue of this image of weddings. But this masterplot of ‘the wedding as a perfect and defining moment of your life’ is totally flawed for several reasons. One, it’s just another day in your life, only with more tradition and smiling and dressing up; it is a ceremony that symbolizes love, not the manifestation of love itself. And like all other days, it ends. Two, I think it’s kind of reductive to suggest that being a bride is definitive of a woman’s personhood. Maybe it’s just the feminist in me, but I would hope that there would be a lot more things I could do in life to give me a sense of personal pride and accomplishment than get married, since any girl over the age of eighteen (and even younger if their parents give them the okay) can do that. Which gives me an excellent segue way into Three: more than half of marriages end in divorce anyway! Weddings are great and everything, but I’m likely to be a lot more impressed by a couple that has endured hardships and stayed married even when it would have been easy to throw in the towel, than a couple who has a flawless wedding where everything is perfect and appears to go as planned that ends up getting divorced a couple years later. No wonder women turn into bridezillas when they expect something perfect and transcendent from their wedding, and only get stressful and normal instead.

Anyway, feminist tangent aside, I can see both sides of the bridezilla coin. I only hope that when I get married I can do so with grace and humility and joy, instead of turning so scary that everyone cowers in my presence from fear. I may need the aid of sedatives to help accomplish this, just sayin’.

Does anyone have any good bridezilla / wedding disaster stories?

Kendall The Sad Sack: The Life of an Unemployed College Graduate.

The lack of posts in the last week and a half can be explained in one small but earth-shattering phrase: graduation weekend.

My parents and youngest brother have been here for the past week and have been shacking up with me, which is both fun and slightly overwhelming. My parents met my boyfriend’s parents for the first time over dinner last Saturday. I donned a cap and gown on the hottest day Seattle has seen in recent months and sat through a three-hour long ceremony that pronounced me a college graduate and saw people that were once my friends, but who I will probably never speak to again, and felt immense peace about it. All of this is supposed to be like the transition period between being a college student and being a working adult and contributing member of society. This is not my life.

My life is disappointment. I’ve been applying to jobs for the past two and half months, jobs that I am insanely overqualified for, and cannot find employment anywhere. I heard on NPR today that having a college degree is not the impressive asset that it used to be, and I think my present condition is the manifestation of that sentiment. My degree does not mean shit to anyone that I’ve interviewed with, because I’m having to compete with people who aren’t college-educated but have way more experience than I do. People keep asking me how it feels to be a college graduate, and keep telling me what a huge accomplishment it is to get my degree, but truthfully, it doesn’t feel like anything to me because having a degree has not done anything good for me thus far.

NPR also said that it is becoming more common for people to get jobs based on networking and connections, rather than through education or experience. Which is just adding insult to injury for me because I don’t have very many connections, and the ones that I do have that I’ve tried to use to my advantage haven’t even been able to be translated into a job.

I just feel hopeless so much of the time. Like, what is the point of emailing my resume in response to a Craigslist ad when I know that 90% of the companies I email will never respond and that 30% of the ads I respond to are scams anyway? I had one position that I interviewed for and made it down to the top two candidates, but what’s the point of interviewing for any position when I know that if it’s between me and one other person, the other person probably has more experience and will be chosen over me? It’s so hard to keep sending resumes and filling out applications and calling to check up on my application status because there has been nothing encouraging that has resulted from it. I just keep getting doors shut in my face and promised phone calls that never come. Sometimes I think I should just go live with my parents in Georgia, for free, for a year and then go to graduate school directly after. At this point, it seems like there’s nothing I can do with what I presently have. I either need more education, or more experience, to get anywhere.

It’s a depressing and frustrating life I’ve become accustomed to. I think this photo accurately sums up my current attitude:

‘Album of the Year’ = Album of My Life.

There is so much music in the world. But there is so little music that feels like capital-T Truth.

Do you ever put on an album that you listened to in high school, and either think to yourself “Hello nostalgia, I feel like I’m being physically transported back in time to my adolescence,” or “Wow, I can’t believe I listened to this once and loved it, and now listening to it doesn’t make me feel anything”? I started listening to The Good Life’s Album of the Year when I was a junior in high school, and totally identified with it because I was angsty and emotional. But I listened to it recently after a long hiatus, and had a really atypical response: it felt more important and like Truth listening to it now than it did when I was in high school.

A little background information on Album of the Year: The Good Life is the side project of Cursive frontman Tim Kasher, and Album of the Year is a concept album comprised of twelve songs, each representing a month in a year-long relationship. As a concept, the album is golden: each song musically takes on the subject matter it’s dealing with in the lyrics: when the relationship is good, the songs are lilting and calm; when the relationship hits on sour times, the music is frantic and dissonant, or just painfully sad-sounding, like hearts are being ripped out of chests.

But I think what hit me hard this time around was the potency of the lyrics. I loved it in high school because I was dramatic, because I thought I knew a lot about relationships and the pain they cause and the trouble they can be. But looking back, I really didn’t know shit. Now that I’m an adult and have actually had real, serious relationships, the words feel more true than they ever could have when I was seventeen. I understand now how people can trick themselves into a love that isn’t real (“You never fell for me / you fell for how it felt / you fell for being held”), how wanting to fix or save someone isn’t love, how jealousy can be an untameable weed, how there is an irrevocable finality in ending a relationship (“the only thing everlasting / is this vow of silence / well, I guess that’s the vow that we took”). I feel like this is a heartbreak/break-up album that can resonate with everyone who has ever experienced it, regardless of how the details may vary. Or at least that’s how it feels to me. When I listen to Album of the Year, I feel like it was written specifically for me, and that’s something rare and amazing.

This album has just been speaking to my soul as of late, so I thought I should share it’s amazingness instead of keeping it to myself. Listen to some tracks below. Or, if you’re into buying music legally, you can purchase it here on Amazon. You won’t regret it.

The Good Life – Album Of The Year
The Good Life – Under A Honeymoon
The Good Life – Inmates

I Am Bad With Knives, But I Still Have My Thumb.

My brother Judson and I were making homemade pizza for dinner tonight; he was putting sauce on the dough and I was chopping an orange bell pepper. I accidentally cut my left thumb and immediately ran to the sink, thinking that it was a small cut when in actuality it was deep and half the circumference of my thumb and gushing blood all over the dirty dishes. Judson put some ice in a washcloth so that I could numb it and put pressure on it at the same time, and he drove me to the urgent care in Battle Ground, which is about twenty minutes away from the house. I was trying to stay in good spirits and tell jokes to make Judson laugh and be grateful that I didn’t cut my thumb completely off or even part-way off. It reminded me of a time when I was in high school when my mom cut her thumb with a pair of garden shears that cut all the way through her thumbnail, and when I came home from school, she was just lying at the top of the stairs with her feet up against the wall and a towel pressed against her hand. She had been that way for at least an hour, and had just been waiting patiently for me to get home so that I could drive her to the hospital. It made me think how glad and lucky I was that Judson was at the house with me, and not out with one of his friends or something. I told Judson this, to which he replied “Yay favorable circumstances!”

We got to the urgent care and it was a pretty quick fix. The doctor told me they could either glue it or stitch it up, because apparently the army invented a type of glue to seal people’s wounds that didn’t irritate the skin or cause any kind of bodily harm, so that they could get right back out on the battlefield. It was a horrifying thing to listen to, but I had no battlefield to go back to and no desire to have needles stuck in me if I could avoid it, so I opted for the glue. What a crazy concept! They patched up the wound and put a splint over it and wrapped it thick with green tape. I now look like a gardening enthusiast with my green thumb.

And this whole episode happened after showing up to a job interview to find that it was actually a group interview, which I despise and probably wouldn’t have gone to if I had known in advance; finding out that I didn’t get the job at Language Fusion because the other candidate they had narrowed it down to had more experience than me; and the son of the people whose house I’m staying at showing up unexpectedly to get something out of the garage and raid the refrigerator for Coca-Cola, and mistaking Judson for my boyfriend. And yet, despite all of this, I somehow feel like life is still okay and that good things will find me sooner or later. I have to laugh sometimes to keep from crying, and laughing really does help me keep my chin up instead of just seeing my circumstances as a massive failure that can’t be remedied. That said, I’m going to make a hilarious tale out of this knife mishap that will make people laugh heartily at my jackassery every time I tell it. Which will make the whole thing, this whole day, not seem so terrible.

Digitalization Nation and the Rise of Technology.

This past weekend I took the train up to Seattle to retrieve the rest of my things and transport them via U-Haul to my new home (or, rather, storage unit). While I was waiting for my boyfriend to pick me up from the train station, a man sat down next to me and started reading. On his Kindle. It was a bizarre thing to witness since, heretofore, I have only seen pictures of Kindles on Amazon and have never witnessed one in the context of someone actually using it. Another man came up to Kindle man and started asking him questions about it, and Kindle man said that now that he has a Kindle, he reads more than he ever has before. Because I’m a snoop, I slyly looked over his shoulder to get a peek at what he was reading, only to find that he was reading the same book that I had been reading on the train, the physical manifestation of which was in my purse at that very moment.

I’m sure that I’ve railed on e-books and the like before, but I think that my disdain is actually directed more toward the technological revolution as a whole rather than the e-book as a singular entity. Obviously there are certain aspects of technology that have really become inescapable (ie. email, texting, etc.), but there are some aspects that I just can’t (and my never be able to) bring myself to subscribe to, namely e-books and digital cameras.

Two weekends ago when I was at the Olympic Sculpture Park, I had my old Canon film camera with me and an older gentleman came up to me and asked if I was an art student. When I told him I wasn’t, he said he had assumed that I was because he never saw anyone with a film camera anymore. We talked for a little while about the pros and cons of both digital and film cameras, and he said that one of the best things about digital cameras is that you get instant feedback on your photos instead of having to wait for them to be processed at the grocery store or what-have-you. I found this comment really interesting, and it got me thinking about technology in the context of our perception of time.

The U.S. tops the list of countries that are wholly preoccupied with time: we want things fast and efficient, which is why we have thirty-minute lunch breaks at work and eat alone in the car while we’re driving, as opposed to Brazilians, who get two hours for lunch during their workday so that they can go home to eat with their families. Americans have a hard time valuing time, unless we’re saving it. I feel like it’s especially prevalent in my generation, which I like to refer to as the “instant gratification” generation: we want what we want and we want it now. And I suspect that technological advances are born out of our desire to save time and to get what we want instantly without waiting. Your email will reach its recipient within seconds whereas your letter may take days to arrive. You can instantly play a DVD from the beginning or skip quickly to a particular scene instead of having to fast-forward or rewind on your VCR. You can see what your digital photos looks like immediately after you capture them instead of having to wait for a slow elderly photo attendant to process your images.

But I think that in an effort to make time bend to our wills through technology, we’re losing (or maybe giving up) so much aesthetic tangibility.
I read a review of Rihanna’s newest album on Pitchfork, and the critic wrote that the break-up ballad “Photographs” was anachronistic because actual physical photographs are passe for Rihanna’s generation; instead of looking at photographs, we click from digital image to digital image in our iPhoto library. This critic is correct, but it still makes me sad, because there is such a lack of romanticism in digital technology, and such an abundance of sterility and distance. I love getting snail mail because, unlike an email that takes a person a millisecond to type and send, it shows that the person took care with their words and that they value me enough to spend the time it takes to handwrite a letter and mail it. I get excited about shooting photos in my film camera because it’s so unpredictable and I never know what I’m going to get for results, and the time between dropping off my film to be processed and picking it up and being able to see my photos is always rife with giddy anticipation. I think I will always favor holding a book in my hands, and being able to feel the texture of the paper and the creases in the binding and the gentle flexibility of its shape instead of the cold hard plastic and digital screen of an e-book.

I’ve read numerous headlines that allude to declining interpersonal communication skills among youth because kids are so used to communicating silently via text that their verbal skills are waning. I worry that this is what my kids will inherit: this digitally over-stimulated way of life that simplifies what doesn’t necessarily need simplifying. I worry that my kids won’t be able to spell because they’ll use SpellCheck to proofread their papers; I worry that my kids will want cell phones when they’re eight years old so that they can text their friends in class; I worry that my kids schools will require e-books instead of textbooks, and that my kids may never know what real books are, or even that they may regard them with incredulous and mocking curiosity. I worry that if technology continues to advance at the rate it has been, that we’ll all end up like the morbidly obese humans in Wall-E, eyes glued to a television screen and riding around on hovercrafts until their muscles atrophy and they lose the ability to walk. The future looks like a scary place.

I appreciate what technology can do for people and I definitely reap the benefits of it in my everyday life. I just question technology especially in the context of entertainment and correspondence, and at what cost we are embracing it. (Blogs the girl on her laptop.)

The Accumulation of Stuff. Or, I Am A Pack Rat.

To the four or so people that read my blog: I am moving. Away from Seattle to lovely tiny Woodland, Washington. On Sunday.

It’s been less than a week since this plan become something feasible and definite instead of just wishful thinking. And somehow, amazingly, everything has just fallen into place. I started packing up some of my things, and realized that the only time I am aware of how much stuff I have is when I’m moving.

The apartment that I’m currently living in is super super tiny, and yet somehow I have managed to accumulate a horde of material things. I don’t even have large furniture except a mattress and some book shelves: the bulk of my possessions are books, and clothing, and knick-knacks that I’ve saved since I’ve been in college.

I had coffee with a friend today (who also happens to be a pack rat like myself) and we talked a lot about why we save things. I think the reason I can’t let go of anything is because I can’t detach the meaning attached to certain objects from the objects themselves. I guess I just save books because I like them and because I like having a collection (and can’t resist adding to it), but with letters and mix cds and things, and even with clothing, I like to hold onto them because of what they remind me of. I struggled to get rid of this one shirt for like three years because, even though it didn’t fit me anymore and I knew I wasn’t going to wear it again, my best friend from high school bought it for me for my seventeenth birthday, and just seeing it in my dresser reminded me of her and all of the fun we had when we were together. I also save old letters and mix cds and packages and gifts from old boyfriends. Not because I still love them or anything, but because looking at them takes me back to another place in time. I feel like I have an abnormally bad memory when it comes to things like that, but having physical evidence of things that happened or sentiments that were expressed help me to remember the good things and that that person loved me once. I feel like if I don’t keep the artifacts of my life that I will forget, or that throwing them away would be like a disacknowledgment of things that have happened in the past. While I don’t advocate living in the past, I do think it’s of paramount importance to be mindful of it, and to never forget what led you to where you are now, whether great or small. Everything is significant.

And maybe this will sound terrible, but it gives me comfort to be surrounded by these things. Or, if not surrounded, then at least to have them close at hand. People let me down, but my favorite book will never let me down, and neither will the dress that makes me look and feel like a million bucks, and neither will the inscription that an ex-boyfriend wrote in an antique book he gave me for our two-month anniversary. There’s comfort in the dependability of things. The Marxist section of my brain says that’s just the commodification of sellable products, but my sentimental heart says otherwise. Maybe that’s just nostalgia talking.

God Went To Beauty School.

It rained today, so I wasn’t able to go to the sculpture park. Sad.

My life (without going into too much detail) is pretty chaotic right now, but in the past few days things have started coming together in an all-too-perfect way. Like things have turned out better than I could have ever hoped, and it seems almost too good to be true. I was telling one of my friends about it today, and he asked “Has it made you start believing in God?”

And in some way, it sort of has. But how belittling is it to God that I can only manage to believe in God’s existence when things are going right for me? I think that happens to me a lot, and I’m not sure why. I feel like I should be able to see God in everything, in the good and the bad and the ordinary, and appreciate God’s role in all things. I’m not in that place yet. But I read a poem the other day that made me want to be. It’s by Cynthia Rylant, and I think it’s beautiful.

God Went To Beauty School
He went there to learn how
to give a good perm
and ended up just crazy
about nails
so He opened up His own shop.
“Nails by Jim” He called it.
He was afraid to call it
Nails by God.
He was sure people would
think He was being
disrespectful and using
His own name in vain
and nobody would tip.
He got into nails, of course,
because He’d always loved
hands—
hands were some of the best things
He’d ever done
and this way He could just
hold one in His
and admire those delicate
bones just above the knuckles,
delicate as birds’ wings,
and after He’d done that
awhile,
He could paint all the nails
any color He wanted,
then say,
“Beautiful,”
and mean it.

Thoughts Accumulated from Three Days in Vancouver “The Couve” Washington

1. Few things in this life are more depressing than looking for a job, especially right now. I spent most of today collecting applications from marginally good restaurants, and what is most depressing about this is that these are the same restaurants I applied to when I was in high school, ie BEFORE I HAD A COLLEGE DEGREE. I feel like one of the main benefits of a degree is license to be particular about what jobs you will or will not take. And yet, I’m experiencing a lot of personal rage because in my job search, I’m having to be as indiscriminate about where I apply as when I was a teenager and didn’t have a stitch of work experience. I’m having to take whatever I can get, even if it’s minimum wage and has nothing to do with the degree that I spent four arduous years earning. But alas, we all know life isn’t fair. Happy graduation to me.

2. American culture’s fear of fatness is disturbing. I watched a show on E! or some comparable entertainment channel that was a countdown of the forty celebrities who have lost the most weight, while a program was playing simultaneously on another channel about celebrities and plastic surgery. Celebrities like Karl Lagerfeld and Rush Limbaugh who lost weight in unorthodox and unhealthy ways are valorized because they escaped being fat and it’s all played out like a rags to riches success story: they once were fat, and now they’re fabulous, which can only mean thin. Tara Reid had a botched liposuction procedure because she was too thin to need lipo to begin with. The focus is never on being healthy, but rather the transformation from fat to slim is sensationalized because in a metaphysical sense, it’s a transformation from unattractive to desirable, from weak to powerful, from a tragic figure to a “new” and “improved” self.

3. I love having the kind of friendships that, no matter how much time has elapsed since I’ve last seen them, are easy to just pick up right where they left off. I saw three old friends from high school while I was here, all of whom I haven’t seen or really kept in close contact with for at least a year, and with all three of them it was like no time had passed at all. It wasn’t awkward, we didn’t run out of things to talk about, and we didn’t have to get reacquainted with each other; being with them was the same as it’s always been, and that’s such a calming and light feeling to be able to experience that, and to be able to look forward to it. I want to be surrounded by people like them.

4. I thought of a new name for my blog. I’m still mulling it over, but if I decide I like it I’ll be revealing it soon. Let’s just say there’s some Latin in it. Oooo, foreign and mysterious.

Facebook as a Time- and Life-Sucker

I gave up Facebook for Lent. It has been forty plus days since I’ve been on it, until today when I reactivated my account. It felt instantaneously like a mistake.

The reason that I gave up Facebook to begin with is because it was a time-suck. I suppose it was no one’s fault but my own that I spent fifteen minutes on Facebook here, twenty minutes on Facebook there, until it all accumulated to about two hours of Facebook time per day. I felt disgusting about it. Not because it was Facebook, but because I was sucked into this repetitive motion of checking my profile and looking at other people’s profiles and pictures and then checking my profile again until I wasn’t even conscious of my actions anymore. It felt like I was on auto-pilot, or like a puppet-master was pulling the strings. Bad feeling.

A couple years ago, when I asked one of my friends why she didn’t have a Facebook, she explained to me that Facebook was social masturbation. I didn’t get it at the time, but it makes complete sense now. Certainly, Facebook is a valuable and easy way to keep in touch with people, if in fact that’s what it’s used for; but I think the more common use for Facebook is personal gratification. Doesn’t it feel wonderful when you have lots of friends on Facebook, and when those friends leave you nice comments on your Wall, or when they comment on your new profile picture, or invite you to events? All of this makes a person feel loved and cared for, and maybe that’s valid to a certain degree, but how much is Facebook a reflection of real life, really? I know that the majority of the people who are my “friends” on Facebook I would not consider friends in real life, and the people that are my friends are people that I don’t need a social networking site to interact with on a regular basis. But it feels nice, regardless, to have people acknowledge you. To paraphrase my friend, when it comes to Facebook, we’re all just jerking each other off. (It is probably worth mentioning that this friend has made her way back to Facebook, bless her heart.)

And I guess that’s my real beef with Facebook: it’s a synthetic substitute for real life (at least for me, anyway). It’s intangible and impersonal. No matter how many people comment on my Wall, that doesn’t mean they’re really my friend. No matter how frequently or how easily my “friends” can see pictures from my life, that doesn’t make them any more a part of it. Nothing from Facebook carries over into real life, which, now that I think of it, may actually be a good thing. I guess it’s really a matter of how it’s used, but it’s so damn easy to use it for evil.

Since I’ve been off Facebook, life has been better, more full-bodied and rich. I’ve been infinitely more productive since I’ve retrieved those two extra hours each day, and I like not feeling like there’s some sort of gravitational pull that lures me into a dazed stupor. I’m resolved to spend only a small allotted amount of time on Facebook per day, but I fear that I’ll get sucked back into that scary artificial Facebook world and that I’ll continue to waste time on something that is neither interesting nor beneficial. I guess I’ll see how it goes, but I may decide that it’s just better not to have the temptation at all.

My Hair as a Marker of Milestones.

Change, in my life, has not come easily or lightly. I’m one of those people who doesn’t like change and who have a dramatic reaction when change inevitably comes. I remember when I was in high school, my parents got a new refrigerator that opened from the opposite side than the previous one had, and it took my months to get over it. As I get older, I have an easier time dealing with change: no fits, less crying, just some inner turmoil that can be disguised. But in the changes that I’ve experienced in the past four years of college, I’ve realized that there’s one thing that I can easily and unemotionally change: my hair.

I’ve changed my hair a lot in the past couple of years, and it has always been at a time of transformation or transition. I guess I like the symbolism of meeting a metaphysical or emotional change with a physically-manifested change. It makes me feel less afraid of what may come.

In the beginning, I had very long hair.

May 2008
This is what my hair looked like two years ago. It had survived multiple bleachings and an ill-fated attempt at dreadlocks, and though it was damaged like hell, I loved it because it was long. I was very attached, and I never wanted to cut it.

June 2008
I cut my hair at the end of my sophomore year. It marked the halfway point of my college career, my first real break-up, and my first time leaving my family and the continent on my trip to South Africa. On a practical level, I wanted a lower-maintenance haircut for when I went abroad; but this haircut encompasses my taking the plunge, letting go of the familiar and the comfortable in favor of something new and strange. After I cut my hair, my life followed suit.

December 2008
I cut my hair again on my 21st birthday. It marked my coming-of-age as an adult, getting over my break-up, overcoming an existential crisis and letting go of my fear of change. I had always wanted short short hair, but was too afraid that it wouldn’t look good or that it would never grow out. I made a conscious decision to cut my hair because I didn’t want to regret not doing it later, or wonder about what could have been for the rest of my life. So I did it, and it was the first haircut I got that didn’t make me cry; I even liked it.

March, 2010
I’ve let my hair grow out, but I changed my hair color to mark my college graduation. I loved my platinum hair, but it was time to move on; I have to enter the working world now, and I want to be taken seriously, which I don’t think my platinum hair would allow. It was really hard to let go of my super-blonde hair because it’s been that way for so long that it feels inextricably linked to my identity. But at the same time, I don’t feel like I need to have an extreme hair color anymore to make me unique. There’s more to me than my hair, and those are the things that make me stand out.