The weekend my friends planned for me included a purple and green-themed bridal shower, some nice dinners and a brunch out, hiking at Point Lobos State Reserve and picnicking, spa time and gel manicures at the Marilyn Monroe Spa in the Hyatt Regency, and a number of bachelorette games both slightly naughty and nice. It’s clear a lot of thought went into the planning of this. I’m very touched by all the work my friends did to pull this together.

My friend was so exhausted planning this that after the bridal shower was over and we finished cleaning up, she had to “decompress” for a bit before getting in the car to drive down to Monterey. I guess we’re not all natural planners and handle stress differently. I remember when I planned her bridal weekend three years ago, and my “tense” period was in the two days leading up to the event. There’s always this feeling that as the planner, you have to make sure everything has to go perfectly and as you envisioned it. But I guess I was more militant than she was in terms of setting timelines for things, which tends to help when you have a group larger than two people.

I always look back and wished I had done a few extra things for that weekend to make it the “ideal” weekend, especially when I would hear about ideas that other colleagues had carried out for their friends and family. I actually enjoy event planning and the details of it. Maybe one day in the future I’ll have the opportunity to do it for someone else. And if I don’t, I hope I get to enjoy someone else’s labor that went into an event like this.

I’m really happy that I had all of my friends and family together in a room yesterday, and also grateful that I was able to successfully get five of my friends to spend a weekend with me. Three of them have never traveled with me before, and all five of them have very different personalities and preferences. I don’t really like a certain “type” of friend, which is a good and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it means I have a variety of friends with different interests and perspectives, but it’s bad because once they are all in a room together, for some reason even though they might like me, in most cases they don’t really like my other friends. The last time I organized a birthday event for myself, I was painfully aware of how awkward it was and decided to never have a big event ever again… well, except for this weekend and our wedding.

All the usual things played out as I thought they would: one friends’ desire to make sure everyone was happy became exhausting when it came time to actually making decisions because it meant everyone had to agree; exhaustion tends to happen when we don’t have someone who is assertive enough to put her foot down. Another friend decided to sit in the front seat of one of the cars and instead of navigating, lazed around, so that resulted in slight delays arriving at final destinations, almost getting lost, and frustrations for the driver and myself. One friend didn’t have much interaction with the rest and seemed to only interject occasionally to say the not-PC comments that the rest of us would have thought about minutes later; we’re clearly not as quick-thinking as she is. The fourth friend amused with her sarcasm and occasional confusion when she didn’t understand a joke was a joke. My last friend was probably the smoothest sailor and took everything as it came. She was also the lightest packer ever.

It still ended up fun, mostly as a learning experience for my friends who don’t know all the crazy things that have happened in my life and in my family’s. It was like a constant unraveling of exactly how dysfunctional my family is. One of my friends was so exhausted by the stories that she just left the room. Maybe not everyone wants to hear how crazy my family is, but I think it’s good to know about people’s backgrounds because it helps us understand them better as individuals. You can’t really understand anyone unless you know what they have gone through.