I didn’t mean to turn into this woman
But I just looked at the clock, and in fact I HAVE spent the last forty minutes trying to determine what flowers are acceptable at Chinese weddings, because large arrangements of white flowers, lillies, chrysanthemums and other Western standards are FUNERAL FODDER for the Chinese, and I can’t have my grandmother shaking her head, because she thinks my boyfriend is hao-hao (all that).
I have turned into the kind of woman who has an entire notebook to plan for a single day. I have turned into the kind of woman who buys the phone-book-thick bridal magazine that’s staring her down at the checkout. The other day I spent a good hour learning about custom-engraved chopsticks. I had almost decided to learn decorative Chinese knotting so I could make favours myself.
Apparently this kind of woman had been lurking inside me for the last twenty-two years. Certainly there’s been events I’ve stressed over before, and certainly I have a reputation for being anal and detail-oriented when I feel like it–but I’m doubtful whether I’ve ever felt such compulsion to Get It Right combined with such a heterogeneous judging comittee and associated ambiguity of standards. There’s no Instructions to Wedding Authors, goddamnit.
Some of this non-acute wedding-induced insanity can be attributed to me being on vacation. I realise that it’s not really that important what wedding guests take home from the reception, other than a pleasant experience, but the fact that it’s not that important makes me feel like I need to figure it out RIGHT NOW because come fall I WON’T HAVE TIME to think about this crap and It’s so trivial ANYWAY that it should be a freaking piece of OVERSWEETENED AIR-PUFFED CAKE.
So I hope red carnations are OK. It’s our day, yeah, but I am the kind of person who wants no cause for Chinese-grandparent head-wagging on our freaking special day.
I didn’t mean to turn into the kind of woman who cared so much about the colour and style of custom-engraved chopsticks (red, and Chinese-style, goddamnit, because I cannot hand out Japanese-style chopsticks or my inner Chinese grandparent will shake her head). But I didn’t mean to be going grey at my age, either, and until about a year and a half ago I didn’t mean to be a pharmacist, and I didn’t mean to get fat, and I didn’t mean to scorch my first and only batch of sweet-potato/cilantro soup. But hey, here I am–big butt, scorched soup, caring way too much about chopsticks.
I could try to stop caring so freaking much, or I could let it run its course. There’s a hard deadline of about a year, within which the wedding-planning insanity is guaranteed to end–and as stupid as this is, I’m loath to trade it in for other neuroses.