So we’ve finally decided on the city for our wedding, and it certainly wasn’t an easy one to make. I’ve spent the last five weeks researching venues across Melbourne and Southern California, thinking most of that time that we’d be having our wedding in Melbourne since that’s where most of Chris’s family is, and where it would be easiest for both of his grandmothers to get to given their elderly ages. I also thought it would make the most sense since things are just generally cheaper there with weddings, and the exchange rate has only made the U.S. dollar even stronger there.

Then this past weekend’s trip to Los Angeles kind of destroyed the idea of our Melbourne wedding. And two venues in Southern California topped the list. I’m sure one venue in particular in Melbourne, who I’ve probably exchanged at least 50 e-mails with and have called at least four times, is completely exasperated and pissed that they don’t get my business and money after the time they’ve invested in me. I’ll be honest; I felt really frustrated after spending all that time researching everything from venues to external caterers to rental companies in Melbourne. I feel like it’s a sunk cost. I devoted so much time into that city, and now our wedding is no longer going to be there. I spent a lot of time on Southern California, too, but nowhere as much time was devoted to that.

I actually really wanted us to get married in Melbourne, not just because of Chris’s family and his two grandmas, but also because I know that this would be the one opportunity to force my parents to travel to Australia. I think it would be nice if they could come see what Chris’s family’s country is like, how he grew up, and what the culture is like there versus here. I guess now that we’ve made our decision, they will never come. And both of Chris’s grandmothers won’t be able to come to California. But it will always be impossible to please everyone.

When people say that wedding planning and research can be all consuming, they aren’t joking. I never thought I’d be that obsessed about it (though my friends would say otherwise given my anal, attention-to-detail tendencies), but this has become something that I’ve either had to work on or think about at all times of the day. I’ve thought about the pressure I’ve gotten from both my side and Chris’s side of the family regarding setting a date and a location, I’ve been insulted by ignorant colleagues regarding having a “cheap” wedding in Australia (due to the exchange rate) and “forcing” people to travel so far “just” to see me get married, and I’ve also encountered people who have just said, “well, you could always just go to City Hall and get married, then have a small dinner after if all this becomes too stressful. That’s what I did!” I’ve gotten a lot of productive and non-productive feedback regarding wedding planning. And of course, I’ve also gotten many pro-Melbourne and pro-Southern California comments. The pro-Melbourne comments tend to come from friends who want an excuse to visit Australia, or from those who are in Melbourne who probably don’t want to go anywhere else. The pro-Southern California comments tend to come from my lazy family who doesn’t want to travel anywhere, or my broke friends who can’t imagine paying for a plane ticket halfway across the world. It’s all understandable.

Then there’s the aspect of the “wedding” I haven’t put that much thought into, and that’s the bridal shower/bachelorette party, really the part that my bridal party is supposed to be in charge of. The pressure came for that out of a dream I had last night. Apparently, I told my friend that I wanted an “exercise retreat” for my bachelorette party. As a result of this, she and I went to scout out dance and workout studios to rent out for a full day. To “test” the floors to see how sturdy they were, we jumped up and down all over every floor and practiced air kicks to see if the floors would fall apart.

The dream seems pretty ludicrous, but I guess it adds some humor into what tends to be a somewhat stressful planning experience. I want all of this to be fun and enjoyable, even when it is stressful.

I’ve had a greasy head my whole life. If I don’t wash my hair for a day, the next day, anyone could tell that my hair was not clean because of that gross “wet” look it gets. I used to get away with it sometimes just by tying up my hair, but now that I work and oftentimes have to meet clients and other external contacts, that “look” isn’t really what I want to go for. And now, it doesn’t help that I go to the gym four days in a row each week. I can’t go to work with sweaty and greasy hair.

In an effort to be better to my hair and grow it out, I stopped blow drying it after every wash about six months ago. Now, I barely blow dry at all, even in the winter cold. I just let it air dry. It’s actually been a huge difference for me in texture as well as no split ends in sight. But then I thought about the hair washing, and I wondered how I could wash it less. My friend suggested that I just rinse my hair out at the gym after workouts and condition the ends. She insisted I try it just once to see if it worked. And I did. And it worked. I went two days in a row with no wash, and I wasn’t a grease ball at the end of it. I washed my hair on Saturday, then no wash on Sunday and Monday, and washed it today. It’s amazing how I was so resistant to trying this before, and I know I know it works.

I don’t have a large friend group. In fact, since the age of 15, I haven’t had a large friend group. Sometimes, this has bothered me, and I have moments or even days when I wish I had more friends with more varied interests, or a reliable local group of girlfriends who I could just hang out with from time to time who I could trust. Last year, I went to a number of Meetup groups to try to meet new friends, but there wasn’t much of any “click” that happened. The one girl I met who seemed fun ended up being really flaky, and that seems to be the common theme among people in New York. Everyone has a lot of options and doesn’t always want to choose you. In fact, they may never choose you.

When I was out in my group of six tonight, though, with Chris, I felt really happy. In these moments, when we are all sitting around a table, drinking good whiskey instead of taking stupid shots, and talking about the most random things, and friends from different areas of my life are all laughing about the same thing, I think, well, I have a lot to be happy about. My friends all fit my life in different ways, as they should, and they love me and want to spend time with me on my birthday, even when I don’t always want to celebrate it. It doesn’t matter that they may be five versus fifty. I have what I need right here.

I was thinking about Ed yesterday during all this wedding venue research, wondering how we are going to incorporate him into our day. And then last night, as though he’s been hiding from all the wedding research nonsense, he came back again in my dreams.

I enter a bright room, seemingly the room that I’d be in to get ready for my wedding day. There were large windows that allowed a lot of bright light to stream through. As I enter the room, I notice it’s a large round room with lots of people sitting and standing along the circumference, talking, getting ready, and adjusting their necklaces and ties. Ed is sitting by the doorway on a chair, and he’s adjusting the collar of his white button-down shirt. He has a tie hanging from his neck, and it looks like he’s about to put it on. He notices I am standing there looking at him, and he looks up and smiles at me.

“Hi,” he says to me.

“Hi,” I respond, not knowing what to say. I am confused because he is sitting there, alive and bright and smiling, and I was not expecting him. “You’re here…” I bend down and pull him into my chest. He doesn’t say anything and just hugs me back.

After five months of waiting, my mentoring program finally started today. It’s a small program with no more than 15 mentors and 15 mentees, and so far, it looks like it will be a good setup. All the mentees are in fourth or fifth grade, so they are a relatively young bunch. I haven’t been matched with anyone yet since for the first 2-3 sessions, the program leader wants all mentors to get to know all mentees, particularly in the instance that a mentor or mentee can’t make a session. In that event, the absent mentor/mentee could be replaced with someone that s/he was familiar with.

The exercise we did today involved a method like speed dating, where all the mentors sat in one row and all the mentees sat in a row sitting across and facing them. We had five minutes with each mentee before the time was up, and they had to move to the seat to their right.

Like I imagined, there was a large range of personalities and social skills in the group of mentees. I had one mentee who was really mature for her age, and she’s already traveled quite a bit around the U.S. and in the Caribbean and was telling me about her travel experiences. Another mentee was so hard to crack that it ended up feeling more like a Q&A talking to him, but the answers part was just one or two word answers from him. Some had one sibling and others had seven siblings. Some knew where San Francisco is and some had never even heard of it. But they all had eager, happy faces.

That’s what I want. I want to be around kids and people who are hopeful, even if they are painfully shy or awkward or even annoying at times.

In a rush to get to the gym on time this morning, I left my phone sitting on the counter much to my irritation. On the train ride to the gym, I wanted to do everything from read e-mails I’d downloaded, listen to Edge of Eternity via Audible, and even check my work schedule to see what was on my agenda today, but I couldn’t do any of it because it was all on my phone. Then, I thought about my personal to-do list I made for this week. I couldn’t access that, either, because that was in the Notes app on my phone. I felt so useless without my phone and as though I was just standing mindlessly on the train, waiting to reach my destination without anything to accomplish. I hate feeling inefficient. That’s one of the worst feelings to me — feeling like I am useless and getting absolutely nothing done.

This is the trouble about living in a modern society with the privilege of having a mobile phone. We become phone dependent; everything is on this freaking device. I used to write tons of post-it notes for everything as reminders when I was on the go; in an effort to save trees and contribute less waste to a city like New York that doesn’t recycle, I stopped doing this and now write everything in my Notes app. Even little things like phone numbers, which in the past we used to memorize for our family and closest friends, we don’t do anymore. Chris and I have been together almost three years now; I don’t think I actually remembered his phone number fully by heart until after a year and a half. I still don’t think he even remembers mine.

At work today, I actually felt a bit liberated without my phone. I didn’t have anything to check or buzz at my desk, and it felt kind of nice after a while to think that I didn’t have to think about my phone or its existence until I got home. I didn’t expect that to happen, but it did. Granted, I was in front of my laptop about 90 percent of today, but having a mobile phone is so much different. It’s like you are married to the damn thing even when you don’t want to be.

Maybe I should use today’s experience as a lesson to be less attached to my phone this year and not to check it several hundred times a day the way the average person does now.

When discussing wedding venue research today, my friend told me about how his friend’s cousin is trying to plan a wedding in Kazakhstan this year, and it may even overlap with his trip there, which means he’d be able to attend. The problem with planning, though, is that her family needs to be mindful of the planting season. If the planting season is not done, the wedding cannot be held because the groom’s side has a lot of farmers, and so they would not be able to attend.

“Whenever you get frustrated about wedding planning, you can remember this and remind yourself how lucky you are that you don’t have to deal with problems like these,” he said.

Well, that’s certainly true. 🙂

We slept for 12 hours last night and woke up at around 11am this morning. This never happens to us.

Both of us are usually quite good about not getting jet lag and timing our naps and awake times on planes. I’ve been doing this since I did my first international trip to China in 2006. One strategy I’ve used to force myself back onto local time is to never take any additional days off to “recover,” and instead to go right back to work the next day. It forces me to be alert and get back into my usual routine.

That strategy doesn’t really work when the next day, you actually have the day off because it’s New Year’s Eve.

In the blur of our jet lag, I’ve started our wedding venue research and contacted at least 13 other venues today. The new year will have a lot to accomplish for our wedding, careers, and personal lives.

We are two days away from the new year. 2015 seemed like it would be ages away for a long time, and now it’s just two days away. As difficult as the last year has been for me to accept many circumstances in my life, particularly losing Ed, the last year has been one of the most fulfilling years of my life.

I did quite a bit of travel, both for work and for pleasure: we visited a number of states on our quest to hit every state in the U.S., including Arizona, West Virginia, Vermont, Upstate New York, Michigan, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. We took my parents on a first vacation that I paid for to the Grand Canyon, Phoenix, and Scottsdale.

I learned how lonely and isolating work travel could be. I also realized how deep the word “unethical” can go. I stopped spending time with some friends who I felt just didn’t understand anything past the surface and wanted me to assimilate rather than just be myself. I realized through this process that some people never really get past the maturity and depth level of high school. I also stopped putting as much effort into other friendships because I didn’t feel like always being the one doing more.

Chris proposed on a secluded beach in Rio, and we became “engaged.” We went to Brazil for the World Cup and saw some of the most stunning and beautiful sights on earth. We also visited Montreal, Quebec City, Vienna, and Budapest as some additional international trips, and finished the year in Australia, visiting his hometown, of course, but also Cairns and Brisbane, and the biggest highlight, snorkeling underwater in the Great Barrier Reef. I finally got to hold a koala (yes, I am very ambitious like this).

I started my first fundraiser in honor of my brother to raise money for suicide prevention in the United States, and was ranked 10th out of hundreds of fundraisers in all of Manhattan. I met other suicide survivors and realized I wasn’t alone at all. I started mentoring with two youth organizations and started realizing things about how much my life has changed since I was my mentees’ ages. There’s so much more to be done to help others with hardships; I haven’t even done a fraction of what I’d like just yet.

My dad found blockages in his arteries that resulted in his having double bypass heart surgery, and I flew home to be by his side. After losing my brother, this was probably one of the scariest periods I’ve had to endure. Logic may prevail with those who are more distant, but when this is affecting someone this close, emotions aren’t always so logical.

I’ve continued documenting my life through 1 Second Every Day and through this blog. It’s kind of funny when I think about this because it’s like I am prepping for the one day that will come when I am gone and can for whatever reason no longer be coherent, and perhaps my children will read through all of this and see all the ponderings of their mother. They will look back and read this blog and think, damn, our mother was ambitious as hell. She loved and cared that much despite all the dysfunction and selfishness surrounding her. And boy, did she love travel with Dad.

Now, what’s in store for the new year?