Monthly Archives: March 2016

Wedding luck

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Today, we boarded a plane heading to LAX for our wedding week. Yet as wedding “luck” would have it, the day did not start so smoothly. We checked a bag full of wedding materials to discover that Chris had somehow lost his New York State ID, and it was nowhere to be found in any of his bags or his wallet. It was so unlike him because he’s usually very organized and efficient, so he was forced to go through the regular security line instead of the TSA pre-check line, and go through extra scrutinized security screenings. It was so frustrating just watching it happen; the TSA guard practically felt up his genitals. Yes, that’s what they do to you when you forget or lose your ID. Now you’ve been warned.

Then when gathering all our belongings to get off the flight when we landed, Chris managed to get my veil caught in the garment bag zipper, and in a poor attempt to undo it, I ripped the tulle at the bottom of the veil, resulting in a 2-inch long tear. Good thing that I looked up what to do in case the veil tears; you can always trust clear nail polish for these quick fixes.

Then the carry on roller handle decided to get stuck, and now, it cannot be retracted. It’s been so reliable for the last year or so since we got it.

Finally, my very trusted and many-times-used black travel bag decided that it was time for its strap to retire, and it broke while running errands today. Today was certainly one of those “this only happens during your wedding week” type of bad luck days.

Dying ducks

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Last night, I dreamt that I was walking through a huge green park, and everywhere I walked, I could see dead white ducks with bright yellow beaks lying around me. I peered closely at a few of them, and as I examined the ground, I realized that they were all attempting and failing to eat the pins that you poke into Pilates balls to get them to seal the air in. The white pins were lying all over the grass, and some ducks had tried to cough them up before they had died. I felt distraught as I continued walking, trying not to step on any of the dead duck corpses.

Chris came out of nowhere, and I grabbed his arm and told him that all these ducks were lying around and had died because of eating all the white pins that some evil person had left lying around for them. Chris shrugged, acted as though this was all normal, and insisted it wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t sure what to think.

Printing

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We had a printing snafu today. Chris’s mother originally got us this really nice gold paper in India to create our wedding programs and menus, but unfortunately, the paper was not letter-size and instead was A4. And the paper is thicker than regular printer paper, so when we tried to feed it into Chris’s laser printer at his office, the printer jammed the paper, insisting that the paper was too thick even after adjusting the thickness setting. We ended up printing everything at my office at 10:30 in the evening, which resulted in the alarm going off. We later asked the doorman if we set off the alarm, and he said it was just a regular building alarm. The printer still isn’t familiar or used to printing on A4 size paper, so some of the lines came out a bit crooked and not straight. Great — the travails of working on finishing touches for a wedding.

7 more days

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The menus, ceremony programs, ceremony script, and name cards are still not done. Everyone who told me that the week before the wedding would be chaotic and stressful — they were right. I’m trying to stay calm right now, but until these things are done, I won’t feel ready to leave for LA this Monday.

And to add to that, I heard on the news today that a Nor’Easter storm may be hitting the New England and New York area this Sunday and Monday, which could potentially result in a cancellation of our Monday morning flight to LA. Granted, our wedding isn’t until Friday, but we have so many errands to run that if we lose Monday, it could make everything we needed to do a rush job. I want to relax the two days before our wedding. That is the goal.

“Every time you go away”

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Somehow, every time I get ready to leave for a trip that requires me to take paid time off, everything at work starts to get very hectic and go to hell. Right now, we’re currently working on amendments to contracts and statements of work, potential upsell opportunities that are time sensitive, interviewing potential new team members, and it’s been completely chaotic. Every time I go away, it gets like this. It’s like my clients and internal teams know I am going away and need to speed things up. And when you add planning a three-day-wedding extravaganza, it all results in a lot of exhaustion at the end of the day.

When I am at work, I am really busy, and when I go home, I start my second job — wedding planning. Our wedding only has 75 people. I have no idea how I’d cope if it were double or triple. I guess there was a reason I am not ethnically Indian living in India. Then, I’d really have to hire a full-service wedding planner.

Bachelorette fried chicken dinner

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Seven colleagues treated me to an evening of fried chicken and waffles, endless cocktails, and a light-flashing penis veil tonight in the Lower East side after work. It was low-key, full of laughs and stares from people who were caught off guard by a white veil with flashing penises all over it, and it was so much fun.

I guess in the last year, I haven’t spent much time thinking about any of my female colleagues and how much they actually are a part of my life. I try my best to have a very strict line between work people and friend/family people because I don’t like the idea of favoritism or being too casual in front of my colleagues for professional purposes. But I realized tonight that it isn’t so bad to let my hair down once in a while and just be a woman with a bunch of woman colleagues outside of the office. Even though I may not think they are that close to me, they do know and respect a side of me that perhaps my own friends and family will never get to see, and that in itself is worth something.

10 more days

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I am spending the next few days doing calligraphy for our wedding reception cards. We were able to save money on these little name cards through my generous cousin’s Wedding Paper Divas vouchers since he works for Shutterfly, which owns Wedding Paper Divas, but unfortunately, they do not print names or table names onto the cards. So after having saved about $90 through the voucher, I ended up having to buy my own fancy purple calligraphy pen (I love Michael’s!) and hand writing out each one. The thickness of the pen was not correct, so I probably spent about three to six minutes writing each name card. I will be very sad if people end up either not taking them or throwing them away. Actually, I know people will end up throwing them away, so I asked my wedding coordinator that if anyone left them on the table to please give them back to me. I can then use them for my future wedding scrapbook so that they don’t *all* go to waste.

Falling out of the window

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I had a dream that it was my friend’s daughter’s third birthday. They are hosting a birthday party for her at some rented space on the top of a 50-story building. I’m chatting with one of the party goers, who is a friend of my friend. And we were talking about how people are dying younger and younger for some reason. Maybe it’s the chemicals in our food, the stress in our lives, but every single one of us is doomed to have a shorter life.

And there comes the birthday girl out of nowhere, who starts balancing herself on the sofa. Behind the sofa is a window that is half open… big enough for a baby to fall out of. The girl tries to use the window to lean against to balance herself on the top of the sofa, but because it is open and she cannot see that, she falls right out in front of our eyes. The friend’s friend and I both witness this at the very same time, and we both yell out. The girl just fell out of the window of a 50-story building, and she’s going to die.

Pigeon feeding

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While walking during my lunch break the other day, I noticed a homeless man sitting at the side of a church, scattering seeds and feeding about seven or eight pigeons. Some of them were nibbling and biting around him, others were perched on his arms, shoulders, and knees, but all were attentively eating and worshiping his very presence. The homeless man seemed really happy and peaceful.

When I was younger, I used to look at homeless people doing this and think it was the filthiest and most disgusting situation. Why would any human being want to actually attract these disease-infested, rodent-like birds? They’re not even remotely attractive and everyone else who is sane wants to stay far away from pigeons. But now, I actually understand why a homeless person might want to do this; everyone wants to avoid homeless people like the plague. People blame homeless people for being homeless and assume all of them are just druggies and just wasted away all their money. No one wants to give them the light of day, so how do they get out of their suffering and misery? With the pigeons, they don’t care. They just want food, and if a homeless person can give it to them, that’s a win-win situation for both: the pigeons, who are avoided by everyone, get food and nourishment, while the homeless person, also avoided by everyone, gets some attention and tenderness… even just a simple touch from the birds. And that reminds them of their humanity when everyone else wants to deny it of them. Can you blame a human being for wanting some love and attention? We all want it, yet we don’t often get enough of it.

Fancy Manhattan spas

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Last September, my boss got me a very generous gift certificate to Great Jones Spa as a bridal shower gift. I decided to save it for a couple weeks out from my wedding to get a deep cleansing facial, so I went to the spa today. I enjoyed my facial quite a bit, including the foot treatment that was very unexpected, but did I think it was worth $160? Probably not, but at least treatments over $100 include use of their water lounge.

I love water lounges. I generally spend most of my time in the hot bubbling water and a grand total of three seconds in the cold plunge. It’s a great way to relax and ease my muscles, especially after five days of intense workouts. What is not great to relax is when the water lounge is full of loud white uppity women who decide to talk and laugh loudly in a place that is meant to be tranquil.

As I am sitting on my long beach chair perusing a skincare magazine mindlessly while drinking herbal tea and snacking on rice crackers, I watched as one of the patrons (everyone here was white except me) stopped one of the Hispanic workers (all the workers doing the cleanup are Hispanic) and said to her slowly as though she could not understand English, “You work so hard. So hard!!” The worker smiled weakly and didn’t say anything other than a quick thanks.

I wasn’t sure that was really necessary. Did that white woman think she was doing a good thing by acknowledging the hard work of that Hispanic worker, who is one of many on the staff that works hard to ensure patrons like her a great spa experience? Does it make her feel better to know that we live in a painfully color-aware, class-ist society?

Every time I go to one of these places, even though I enjoy the experience, I always feel like I don’t really fit in. Seeing that exchange made me realize why. I don’t really fit with that uppity white woman, but I also don’t fit in with the Hispanic service worker. Great.