Thursday, June 22, 2006

Type A personality

Every once in a while, i do enjoy the fact that the world is not as anal as I am.

Monday saw me storming off to the rental place, to rent the chairs for our ceremony (we thought about just making it a drum circle - but Matt's side of the family has no rhythm!). I was getting all ornary, as this task had been on Matt's To Do list for two months. So, off I go. All worried that everything will be booked, or that there won't be enough chairs left over for us, and we'll all have to sit on each others laps. And the girl says to me "I love it when someone comes in early to rent equipment". I'm thinking - "early?!" No sooner had i stepped aside from the counter, than does a lady come in wanting to rent a punch bowl for her party on that very day! And, I think to myself, did she just decide to have a large party today? No, I think she just decided that the perfect way to spend the day of her big party was to drive around Guelph, looking for a punch bowl.

"Chacun a son gout" as they say in the French readers.

How does the world function when there is no advanced planning? How do we get by when we don't know what we need for our daily activities? It seems to me that she would be the type of person to get into the shower, before realizing that she never brought her towel. And then go streaking up the stairs, dripping all the way, to get something to dry off with. She would have to run to the store three times, while making brownies, because she was out of ingredients.

Wow, the world should be more like me.

In any event. We had a dressmaking marathon last week. Jane and Ann came up, with sewing machines in tow, to work on my Gown. We drove to Hamilton to buy fabric, and drank coffee at the world's First Tim Horton's. Rather underwhelming. It was sew sew sew, cut cut cut, and fit fit fit. It is really incredible to watch Jane look at the dress, on me, and intuitively know what she needs to do to fix the part I am displeased with. She has even managed to keep snide remarks to herself when, after her labouring to make the dress hang a certain way, I change my mind. She is great. It is always great to watch genius at work. The dress is coming along well. I have thought of another reason that I am glad Jane is doing this for me - I would never have otherwise seen any of this process. I would never have been able to justify the un-godly price of most gowns (see? no capital letter for mortal gowns... just for my Gown). I now have no doubt that gowns are worth the price we pay for them. Given the number of hours it takes - I am sure that dressmakers clear about $2.30 an hour. If that. It has to be done for the love of the end product.

How sad it is that we never wear these concoctions again. All the work that goes into them, and we never allow ourselves the joy of wearing them (or, often, of ever seeing them) again. To my married readers: do you remember the feeling of putting your wedding dress on, the day of the wedding? When your hair was all arranged, and your make-up was beautiful. Do you remember that feeling? Why do we put it into a hermetically sealed box and deny ourselves that joy? Ladies, if diamond companies can tell us that the was the right to buy ourselves "right hand rings", we can damned well pull our gowns out of the closet to wear while sipping champagne on a rainy Tuesday afternoon when we call in "sick".

1 Comments:

At 1:37 PM, Blogger Cathy said...

I totally agree about the planning issue. I'm always beating Alex over the head with it - because it does seem so logical, doesn't it?

However, he has a good point too. Sometimes, planning a LOT has a way of making one stressed out because they are stressed about the things that have not yet been planned or about what will go wrong that they need to plan for ahead of time.

Most of the time, as long as you're not totally anal, when things go wrong, you can fix it up with no big issue.

That's not to say that you shouldn't pay your bills on time or that you shouldn't put aside money for the downpayment on your home. But that is to say that sometimes when you plan you can lose the joy of it all and that not organizing everything way ahead of time can turn out alright too.

It's a lesson that I need to learn a little bit about: relaxed organization.

Everyone plans/organizes differently.

To-do lists are more or less urgent depending on the person's perspective.

I have to learn how to be more flexible about other people's schedules - not everyone runs on mine, sadly.

Anyway, I'm sure if that woman hadn't found a punchbowl there, she would have figured something out. Maybe that rental was her back-up plan when the crystal bowl she got for her wedding shattered on the day of its inaugural appearance.

And you? If the PERFECT chairs had been rented, then you would have taken the cheaper, second-best ones and no one would have noticed.

Because they'd be too busy being dazzled by your beautiful dress!

 

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