The theory: New year, new outlook, new blog.

The reality: Most of the leadup to New Year’s as crook as a dog, leading to me going to bed well before midnight. I won’t mention the visit to the ER but I will mention I’M NOT PREGNANT (because that’s what people assume).

Today, I’ve made a decision.

I’m gonna be awesome.

Hello, world. it’s been a while. Although not due to a lack of thought.

Here’s the problem as I see it:

1. I would like to write in this blog more often. I have a lot of things to say, to write about, to observe. Whether people read this is secondary.
2. I am an intensely private person and am aware that somehow people may start reading this. For this reasons, I have not wanted to write about the following things lest my online and offline worlds collide: my work life (hello potential work stalkers), my environment (hello potential stalker stalkers), my married life (awesome, yet none of your goddamn business) and my social life (out of respect to those people who I care about and don’t want to be mentioned online). This does not leave much.
3. There is an aspect of my family life that takes over much of my thoughts, not in a good way. It has caused a toxic cancer that has festered for about fifteen years, and has got to the point where I need to let go and move on, lest it take over all of my feelings and turn me into a bitter shell. I would not mention it but I don’t want to be that angry person either offline or online. Cynical and sarcastic are a way of life for me, but combine it with rage and it’s not a pretty thing at all. These feelings have kept me away from writing things down.

So, what to do?

I’ve decided that I need to throw caution to the wind and be a little bit more open, talk about things that I enjoy doing, things that I have seen. Many, many more photos, although because I mainly use film cameras there is usually a lag between when I take a picture and when I put it online. I guess that means that in a lot of ways this will turn into a more ‘traditional’ blog but that ain’t such a horrible thing. It does mean that I need to make a concerted effort to post more to get a rhythm to work out what this blog is all about.

In conclusion, I’m back, for now. Let’s see where this leads us.

Yeah, been waiting over an hour now. Random thought time.

Anklets might make you feel ‘alternative’, but when they’re under a pair of cheap stockings and you’re wearing a business suit, you just look like you’ve sold out to The Man.
The only women that call themselves ‘barren’ are spammers justifying why you are entitled to that inheritance.
If you’re going to chat up schoolgirls, don’t do it wearing a suit.
The first rule of Amber’s uterus is: don’t talk about Amber’s uterus. I won’t tell you the second rule.
I believe that songs are like parasites: if one gets stuck in your head it won’t disappear until you find it a new host.

I feel sorry for men sometimes. Because they have to deal with women.

It is true- women are manipulative at times. The ‘is my butt big in this’ question- it’s a loaded question. There is no right answer to it. In fact, all of the answers are wrong. On top of this, women don’t try and hide their feelings, but they expect loved ones to be able to read how they feel. Again, there is no right answer. PMS. Damned if you do call it by name, damned if you don’t.

But, in the defense of females, it’s so bloody easy to become one of those people that makes their partner second guess the real meaning behind things, and as men in most cases just want to make things better, it can just lead to pussywhipification. Woman happy. Man tamed. Who wouldn’t want that?

However, there are some times that may seem like a trap, but it isn’t. It’s an actual test of the type of person that you are, the type of partner. You know when people go through something, and they say what they find out who their real friends are? In reality, some people are less of a friend than you thought they were, while other people are incapable of being that ‘friend’ in the first place. Hell, sometimes you don’t want to be a person’s friend but you’re still there and then suddenly you’re a true friend to them but they’re your pity friend. I think I’ve gone off the track a bit.

I know someone who is failing that test right now. Not with me, but with someone else. And you want to smack them over the head, but they’ll be hit in the face with the consequences.

After the wedding I closed the page off. It was done, finished with. But again I need to recognise its existence. So, here it is- the first and last time I will talk about my wedding.

The first thing you need to understand about me is that I have never imagined my own wedding. Okay, I take that back- I dreamt of my wedding once, but upon looking down and seeing me in a wedding dress, I pissed myself laughing so much that I woke up.

I also hate the expectations that planning a wedding puts on people, especially women. Why should the fact that you’re planning a wedding be an excuse for going into debt, or taking time and concentration away from your work, or suddenly treating friends as slaves with the excuse that they are the ‘bridal party’? So, no, I didn’t suddenly disappear in a fog of inspiration boards and colour swatches and wanting to be a ‘princess’. Not me.

The other thing you need to understand about this is that the idea of holding a party, being the centre of attention and wearing a dress is pretty close to my idea of hell. However, I do feel the need that a wedding  is a thing worth celebrating, so if I’m going to have to do it, I might as well go the full hog.

And by full hog, I mean a wedding mass on a Holy Day of Obligation. Which meant white everything and little choice in the readings. The one reading we did get to put in took out one about a dragon with seven heads, which was admittedly metal, but inappropriate. But I digress.

Anyway, I do have a sense of detachment about the whole thing. For a lot of the wedding planning, I felt like someone playing a role in someone else’s idea of a wedding- hell, I was even given lines at the ceremony- and I was fine with that because I didn’t feel this is something that I was ever going to do, that I wouldn’t do it it wasn’t my wedding, and had no idea or desire to do things differently.

I know that sounds as though I was either a) coerced into having a certain type of wedding or b) not ‘ready’ for a wedding. It might even sound bitter. And I swear it’s none of these things. I just concentrated on the marriage rather than the wedding, on the commitment rather than the window dressing, but you’ve got to understand that it took a year to get there. A person puts me in a dress and cakes me with makeup and I’m never going to feel like myself. But I wasn’t comfortable with the alternatives either.

In conclusion: My ‘perfect wedding’ has never existed because it wouldn’t involve me. I just had to cope.

So, things that I learned doing the whole shebang:

1. There will be a lot of people whose happiness hinges on the wedding besides you and your betrothed. If you are people pleasers like we are, this presents an issue, because it turns into ‘not your wedding’. There are things that we would have done differently and if we would have frankly the result would have been the same. So you can’t call it a regret, can you.
   To put it another way that is a little less caustic: you will find that a lot of people care about your wedding, both in the planning and the execution. I think the issue on my end is that they cared about the minute details a hell of a lot more than I did.
2. On that, unimportant things become big and important things become small. I was at a dinner and in a deep conversation about layouts of the wedding booklets with my (then) fiance, whan suddenly I see a flicker in the corner of my eye and people start singing. It was my birthday dinner and I forgot and had ignored everybody else because of those bloody booklets. True story. Not the best birthday.
3. Weddings should be done Properly. You’d think that Properly implies a traditionalism, but not really, because wedding planning is also littered with the zombified corpses of people common in their desire to be individual (and truthfully, looking the same in the process). Unfortunately there is no clear definition on what Properly is. But you’re both supposed to be able to answer the question “But you want it done Properly, don’t you?” in the affirmative and know what it means.
4. Remember school? Engagements are like a big assignment that you feel guilty about when you’re not doing it, and when you are doing it, you want to be anywhere else. Getting back to playing videogames and watching movies and doing normal things like writing in this blog without feeling guilt has been awesome.
5. Announcing your engagement is like a coming out party for strangers to talk about your uterus and its activities. There are two types of people who ask me about my plans for children: people who have no right to ask and people who should better than to ask.
6. Don’t move house in the week before the wedding. Just don’t.

What- you were here to actually find out about the wedding? Fair enough. Rant part over. The post is starting to get a bit long, but you know, first and last time, so I have to push on. There’s a lot that happened during the day, but some thoughts are clearer than others:

• I wasn’t nervous. At all. Not even flatulence nervous. I guess that meant that I was ready, although equally I could have been in denial about the whole thing. Got towards the church half an hour early (as it was a open Mass I couldn’t be late). So we went to a local heritage-y place for a coffee to waste time. And then got to the church precisely on time.
• You know when you watch TV and there’s a mystery person in the studio audience who laughs just a bit too loud? I had a mystery hymn singer that I could hear over everyone else. I know who it is.
• I had a veil and desperately wanted to uncover my face, but didn’t get a chance until the kiss, and I think my mum yelled out ‘so that’s who it is!”. She certainly thought it. One of the downsides to no rehearsal, although the priest talked us through as we went along. On that, my parents-in-law were scared that we’d do a fist pump instead of a kiss, but pumping fists is only one of several alternatives to making out in front of your parents so they should have been grateful all of these years.
• I don’t think I made a fool of myself not knowing when to stand and sit and kneel.
• My first name on the marriage certificate is the typo on the birth certificate. Changing my name is going to be doubly the bitch.
• We had the (now) novelty of having a church that allowed confetti- outside at least. I took advantage of this by buying ten boxes to add some colour to the white- wedding- ness. I paid the price when my godmother poured half a box down my cleavage, where it stayed all night in the confines of my ‘supportive garment’. It still covers the floor of the unit now.
• I have a lot of photos of us looking at other cameras. Hopefully the photos where people leeched off the professional photographer won’t end up on the mantlepieces of relatives. History says that they will. But at the moment that’s all I have to show (that’s why there’s no photos in this post for the moment. I’ll add them later).
• After the wedding, we went to visit my new great- aunt- in- law who is 100 and lives in a nursing home. She was flirting with the best man, but I think it was only because he’s bloody tall and she honed in on the biggest blur.
• The reception was full of not speaking enough to people and funky music and food. People seemed to get along, which is all we wanted. There was a mafia wedding at the other room in the venue that night, judging by the security,and it sounded as if they were suffering under the weight of expectation.
• Everyone wanted to know about the honeymoon. We hadn’t booked it- yet.

The next morning, we woke up and asked “What do we have to do today?” It took a while to realise the answer was Nothing. Thank goodness that it’s all behind us, but it’s all ahead of us too.

001:20:10 Collins (onboard): …I’ve lost a Hasselblad. Has anybody seen a Hasselblad floating by? It couldn’t have gone very far, big son of a gun like that.

About 40 years ago, three guys took a giant leap. And in a month, I will be taking my own.

When I got engaged, I did not have a list of things to do before I got married but a list of things to buy before I had to stop being selfish with my money. At the top of that list was completing a quest called Operation Frankenblad, which boiled down to this: about 4 years ago, I bought a Hasselblad body on eBay, then when I got it I realized that one part alone does not a Hasselblad make (don’t worry, I wasn’t ripped off, and it led to a self imposed exile from Internet auctions for a while). So piece by piece, I have bought a photographic icon.

I think about taking ol’ Frankie out for a spin all the time, none more than the week commemorating the camera’s finest moment. But the chances keep floating away, under the pressure of making sure that everything’s done for the wedding (not the marriage, which I am ready for), but it’s time will come. And so will mine.