Pretending to Care About Flowers

I promised you all this day would come and it finally has. I'm going to take you all back about two months to the day I wore a white dress with beaded detail and took on a last name that I laughed at upon first hearing.

August 19, 2011 - Our Wedding Day

Actually, I'm going to take you back just a step further than that to the planning of this sacred day. The most intense stages of planning came while I was working at Camp Lone Star, an occupation known for making people so tired that they start to do things like this:

and also this:

not to mention this:

I must really not care what people think of me.

In the midst of all of that, I was also checking TheKnot.com every day, making random trips to Austin for fittings, working on my guest list, finishing up the final stages of decorating, having meetings with the coordinator at the site, planning my day-of schedule, pretending like I cared about flowers, prepping the DJ, selecting my accessories, finding gifts for the wedding party, and tons of other things that made a shiv in my cornea seem like a day at the spa.

All of that to say that planning the wedding was tough. It was especially tough in this wedding-obsessed culture we live in. Every time I got on TheKnot.com or stylemepretty.com to get some inspiration, I would see unrealistically cute things like this (note: the following pictures are not from our wedding):

 

and this:

  

and frickin this:

Confession: we did not do any of these over-the-top cute things. I couldn't hack it. Take away my girl license, but I just couldn't with all I had going on (spoiler alert: I was so happy, I didn't notice any of these details at my own wedding).

We weren't entirely lacking though because we did manage to have an actual theme (it was FIESTA, by the way) and we had amazing friends setting up sweet details all throughout the space (Emily, Lya, Dani, Reagan...start some event-planning company...STAT). But for the things we could skimp on, we did. Here's some pictures of our decor and details. You be the judge.

I don't know. I'm proud of it. It helps that we had the beautiful photography of Lauren Guy (www.laurenguyphotography.com) to make everything look like a fiesta in heaven.

Getting all of that fiesta kitsch was fun. It was me, Daniel and my mom at Market Square in San Antonio for hours and hours. Panchos and clay pigs were everywhere.

Anyway, so I planned things all the way up until the day before my wedding (that's when I found those cutie cacti). Is that typical? I'm not sure. The thing about planning for a wedding, at least for me, is that all of a sudden I had to care about a million things that I didn't care about previously. What kind of flowers? Don't care. What kind of food? Edible, but don't really care. Hairstyle? Half-up-half-down/don't care. Escort cards? Wait...what's that?

I was genuinely only focused on getting to finally be Daniel's wife and on having a big party where everyone gave us toasters and told us they loved us. Fortunately, that is pretty much what ended up happening.

Regardless of how tedious planning was, I'm glad I did it. I'm glad there was some level of detail going on and I loved the time Daniel and I got to spend putting it all together. The truth is, as beautiful as our piñatitas and papel picado were, nothing in my life has ever been more beautiful than what happened to us on that day. Kim Kardashian herself could have come in and dropped $10 million on the O'Shoney wedding and it still would not have come close to matching the beauty radiating from our family and friends that day. I've never experienced anything like it.

By the way, yes, we got married the same weekend as Kim Kardashian. No, our budget was a little less than $10 million, but we're actually still married, so I'd say we are the winners in that comparison. Burn.

I'm going to stop right there. It turns out, I have a lot to say about this whole wedding thing, and I think it would be best split it up into two entries.

Tune in next time for:

THE BIG DAY

which started like this:

My bridesmaid Lara promptly tweeted: The sacrifices we make for a bride :) @christianalizla #covershog

Truly, best sleep of my life.

Laments of a Former Film Student

As I've noted in previous entries, this period right after college that I am experiencing is full of confusion and collegiate-withdrawals. Again, I'm not the authority on this realization. Films like The Graduate indicate that certainly post-students have been feeling this ickiness for a while now (watch The Graduate. No, seriously. Watch it).

For me, college was so full of daily enlightenment, friends, Dr. Pepper floats, free t-shirts. I didn't realize it, but I was waking up to some of the most affirming days of my life. I was so in-control of my destiny as a student. If I truly desired, I could go to class, listen to a lecture, take notes, study, and get an A. There was no inevitable sense of rejection around every corner. No sir. Just good old-fashioned hard work that paid off in the end.

This is a real thing that happens at Baylor. An hour of free Dr. Pepper floats.

College trained me to think that if I applied myself, things would surely go my way...that if I could dream it, by God, I could do it.

But here's the thing though. All of that was a bunch of hooey. Yeah, I said it. Hooey.

Because outside of the glorious Truman Show that is Baylor University, rejection follows you like some back-alley cat (No offense, cats. You're still the greatest). Even the weird jobs can escape you. I'm serious about this. I applied to be a bilingual puppeteer and was turned down. Pretty grim, right?

This is a strange time, and I am beyond positive that a lot of us are feeling it. That is actually one of my greatest comforts right now -- I'm not alone in this.

Let me go back to The Graduate for just another second. Actually, let me go back even farther than that for yet another second.

In my undergrad, I was a Film and Digital Media major. Sometimes when I tell people that, they give me a face like I'm either supposed to be super interesting or a total nerd. Both might be true. The department was full of both (and some in-betweens). Now that I am out of college and free from my obligations to the FDM department, I am pleased to admit that I regularly was annoyed with several of my peers.

Here's why:

I could take the tech nerds. I could take the blood-shot eyed guy who did his editing project all night. I could even tolerate the 80% of men in the department who did not regularly shower. But what I could not stand was the pretentious attitudes surrounding film. You were nobody if you hadn't seen The Boondock Saints (seen it. Hate it) or Bladerunner (great movie, but don't wet yourself about it). You might as well be dead if you didn't put Stanley Kubrick on a level with some kind of demigod (2001: A Space Odyssey? More like 2001: A Really Crappy Movie That I Hate). And don't you DARE think about not listing Citizen Kane as one of your all-time favorite films (it actually is for me, but that's not the point).

The Graduate is one of those films that film students love to go nanners over. They claim it as their own and use it to distinguish themselves as Film Elite.

I don't think that's why I like The Graduate (though I'm not beyond being pretentious). I like it because it really meets me where I am right now. It's accessible. For your reference, it's basically about a guy who graduates college and doesn't really know what to do with his life, so he kind of floats around (metaphorically and at one point he does so literally in a pool). He makes some weird, unsatisfying decisions. And that's mostly it. Sound familiar?

Obviously, that description is missing several nuances of the film (as well as the entire Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack that runs throughout it). But I just appreciate that The Graduate seems to know this part of me. I appreciate that about art in general. Art is good when it consoles that gnawing fear that we might actually be alone. There is nothing particularly redeeming about the story-line of the film in particular, but at the very least, it reminds me that someone else has done this. That's what's important. Art is important.

I would love to say that this mere realization solves all of my problems, but we all know that would be a lie. I've talked to many people who have been through this life-stage and it seems like one that tends to stand out in the grand narrative of life. That's exciting in a way. It makes me wonder what the next step is going to be and what movie I'll relate to at that point.

Dustin Hoffman...floating

ON THE NEXT EPISODE...

I will discuss the day this absolutely disgusting picture was taken! It's finally here. O'Shoney Wedding entry! Tell your friends. 

A Defense for Cowboys & Aliens

A few weeks ago, I saw the film Cowboys & Aliens. If you have not seen it, I suppose you should not read any further as I am bound to give away critical information regarding the plot, however, I'm pretty sure you don't want to see it. You've heard it's crap. You were jazzed by the trailer, hellbent on picking a side before it came out (cowboys?aliens? some hybrid of the two?), but your best friend saw it, hated it, and now you're dead inside.

Sound about right?

Well, I have news. Great news. Cowboys & Aliens was good. So good, in fact, that I'm still talking about it a month later.

For your reference.

There is this part in the film where Daniel Craig wakes up in a desert with no memory of where he is, how he got there, and worst of all, he's got this fierce bracelet on and he can't remember who gave it to him. Oh, and also, he doesn't know who he is.

He meets an array of colorful characters including Han Solo and 13 from House. Some of these people even seem to recognize him, but Daniel Craig, with his unchanging facial expression, can only access the faintest memory which is of some lady in a field. Not very helpful.

This concept legitimately scares me. A similar thing happens in Muppets Take Manhattan when Kermit is hit by a bus or something and all of a sudden he thinks he's some flashy executive. It also happens in the series finale of the hit television show Full House when Michelle falls off a horse and then wakes up with no memory of her three dads or her rigid Tanner duties. Also, Men in Black. Memory-erasing happens all over the place in Men in Black.

For Daniel Craig, Kermit, and whichever Olsen twin happened to be sober that day, memory loss brings about a slew of emotions. There is fear of being in an unfamiliar place, sadness for a loss of self, and frustration with an inability to emotionally connect to integral aspects of life.

This is a clip from the Full House episode "Michelle Rides Again". Note her anguish and despair.

This same emotional recipe has existed in my life. I have not suffered memory loss (at least not to my knowledge), but one day I experienced the same confusion that Michelle seems to feel in the above clip. I woke up and I was a college graduate living in Austin, Texas with a man next to me calling himself my husband. In what seemed like an instant, I went from a sweaty college freshman on my first day of Welcome Week to a Sadie Sadie Married Lady with a legitimate Bachelor's degree.

Everyone knows this is an interesting transition. I'm not the first to write about it and I won't be the last. Many of the people I know are in this exact same boat, and let me tell you, it is weird. This is the first time where we truly could sink or swim. We could choose to pursue this new life with a boldness and determination that we always dreamed we would or we could sit, lie, wait, and let our muscles atrophy until we don't even resemble human.

For me, I choose the former. That's just me though. And this blog is to hold me accountable to that. I will write about my life, my marriage, my faith, and my pursuit of joy. Maybe in doing so, I will identify myself as the woman I see every day in the mirror with a ring on her finger and a super hot husband. I still just can't believe it.