Suggest-a-Blog Thursday!

Okay, I made that up*, but I do have a blog I'd like to suggest you peruse:

MWF Seeking BFF

That stands for "Married White Female Seeking Best Friend Forever," and it's by a lovely young woman named Rachel, who moved to Chicago with her husband, leaving best girlfriends behind:

"I have two lifelong BFFs, Sara and Callie, who I met when I was 10 and 14, at camp and high school respectively. I have seven super-close friends from college. I have dear pals from high school whose weddings I’d never miss and babies I’m dying to meet. There is no shortage of shoulders to cry on. Here’s the catch: I live in Chicago. Sara and Callie live in New York City. My Northwestern roommates live in Boston, San Francisco, New York, and St. Louis. The high schoolers are in D.C. and Manhattan. My closest friends are everywhere but here. "

Her blog is about the active effort to find "Miss Right" -- a real, true girlfriend. Not a coworker with whom you might do Happy Hour every once and a while, not the perfectly nice wife of your husband's friend, but a real girlfriend. Someone you could call up on Saturday morning and say, "Let's get a pedi!" Rachel not only shares research on friendship, but also her adventures in finding potential friends - through readings at book stores, casual conversations in line at the bank, and other funny (and sometimes awkward) experiences.

After dating Kyle "long distance" for three years, spending every spare social moment here in Gainesville, and then finally moving here two years ago, I finally feel like I have my own friends. Yes, I met them as girlfriends of Kyle's friends OR via a girlfriend of one of Kyle's friends, but I finally feel like I can meet up with them without Kyle or their boyfriend/husbands; I even (sometimes) have plans of my own that have nothing to do with Kyle.

Not that I don't love spending time with my husband, or spending time with him and "our" friends, but I think it's important, nay, crucial to a marriage that a sense of individuality be maintained. I don't think it's fair to expect Kyle to be everything to me: husband, lover, friend, sole freaking source of entertainment. I think that's quite a burden. And if you lose your individual personality, you lose some of that person that your spouse fell in love with in the first place.

So I know how Rachel feels, moving away from your girlfriends and feeling that void. And she's a hell of a lot more proactive about finding friends than I was; I'm enjoying her adventures and her writing. Even if you feel like you've got all the friends you'll ever need, I think you might enjoy her blog as well -- it's really about that very important thing: adult female friendships.

(*If I thought I could do anything on a weekly basis, I would suggest a blog on Thursday, though...)

Photo time! Our first gerbera daisies of the year:

The More, The Merrier

Kyle and I attended a wedding this weekend in Clearwater Beach. We only met Kelly and Dieter a few months ago, but we've really become good friends. They came to our wedding, and I recently flew to Chicago (for the first time!) for Kelly's bachelorette party.

They were married on the beach. Kelly looked beautiful (loved her dress!) and the weather was nice. Warm, but nothing Floridians, hardy midwesterners, and even-hardier Germans couldn't handle.

It would have been 100% wonderful, except for this large group of people that camped out near the ceremony spot. Of course, Sand Key Park is a public beach, and I'm sure Kelly and Dieter were made aware of what that could entail, but you would think that people would at least try to be quieter during a wedding ceremony. I couldn't help but think that this group was actually being loud on purpose. We really couldn't hear anything they were saying, but Kelly's smiles and Dieter's very serious face spoke volumes. I might have even caught a little tear on his cheek!

Kelly's friend Julie from Chicago (who is one cool chick), Kelly and me at the cocktail reception after the ceremony:

Yes, I have a little bit of sunburn (put your sunscreen on before you get to the pool, not when you get there!).

Our friend Jay, who officiated mine and Kyle's wedding, sang at Kelly and Dieter's, along with our friend Cassie, who just so happens to be recently engaged. They did a duet of "Leather and Lace," originally sung by Don Henley and Stevie Nicks. Kelly just loves Cassie's voice, and she and Jay sing together very easily. Of course, we practice every year at Ginnie Springs!

Kelly and Dieter were so pleased afterwards!

Sigh, don't you just love weddings? So romantic...

My wedding photographer

My wonderful friend and former colleague Mark Basse has agreed to photograph our wedding in May. Mark works at Florida Community College, but his real career is photography. He's amazing.

I started working with Mark while interviewing students to feature on the FCCJ web site. After doing an e-mail interview, Mark and I would meet them on campus to ask follow-up questions and take their picture. I would "assist," mainly by holding that reflective unbrella-looking thingy that does something with the light.

Mark's such a great photographer because he puts you at ease, and he takes a great photo of anybody, even students who were visibly concerned about their appearance.

Just fooling around one day, he called out to me: "Hey Jen!" I look up and poof! Photographed.
Can I tell you, it came out so good that I had it framed and gave it to my parents?

I received an e-mail from Mark today - apparently he was going through files and found two photos of me - both silly, off-the-cuff things.

You might recognize this one as my profile photo. It's the one I had framed for my parents:


This is even sillier:


He took both of these with the camera in just one hand, quickly - you should see his stuff when he's actually doing "photography." Looking at them, I get excited about him taking photos for our wedding. I think they're going to be great - what a great friend!

I also think I might want to grow my hair back out . . . .

This is not a Darryl Worley song.

I miss my friends.

This is not a new topic for my blog, so feel free to move on if you've heard it all before.

I'm feeling a little left out of the big deal of She's Getting Married. I have come to the realization that there are some things that I'll miss out on by going the solitary, online route, like trying on dresses with my friends.

I was watching the TLC show about a New York bridal salon, "Say Yes to the Dress" (we can go into the shame of that later), and maybe it was because I'd had a couple glasses of wine and it was, oh, 1 a.m. on a weeknight, but a particular scene got me a little blurry-eyed.

A bride pulls this (admittedly gorgeous, albeit stupidly overpriced) wedding dress over her head and stands on the little platform to see herself in the mirror, and suddenly the camera cuts to her mom, and then to her bridesmaids. The look on their faces said it all. "Wow. This is the dress." And everybody started laughing and smiling and hugging. Very touching.

I didn't get to have that!

And while, yes, I realize that in the long run, it's much better to have ordered my dress online, paying a pittance, a fraction of the cost of your run-of-the-mill David's Bridal thing than to blow a wad of cash on something I'll wear once so that I could experience that "moment," right now I don't care. I want that experience! I want someone besides me to get excited about this wedding.

Don't get me wrong. Kyle wants to get married. He wants a wedding. He's had opinions on things, like food and music and hiring a friend to DJ and whatnot. But it doesn't feel like anyone else is really into it.

But should they be?

Am I letting the artifice of the media version of weddings cloud my emotions? After all, it's me that's getting married, not my friends. Of course they're not being kept awake at night, thinking, "My God, what will Jen and Kyle do for a first dance?!" That would be silly.

Yes, I know why it has come to this. I have no bridal party. Showers and bridesmaid dress fittings are the stuff of which wedding buzz is made. How can they be interested in that which they are not involved? And Kyle and I made that choice ourselves; it's not as if people were begging me to not drag them into something that required random dress purchases.

If I had bridesmaids, by definition they'd have to be interested - people would be deciding who's throwing the shower, everyone would worry about their dresses (Will it suck? Will it be obscenely expensive? Will it make my butt look gargantuan?) and thus, they'd HAVE to talk to me, keep up with what's going on.

But I didn't want to burden anyone. My friends live in other towns and are very busy people (hell, most of them have children, do you know the time good parenting entails? I can only imagine). These people don't have time for standing around looking at each other in pastel-colored nightmares, deciding which one is boring enough to not make any particular person look horrible.

Not being a bridesmaid isn't the only reason why I don't see my friends as much as I'd like to, of course. We're all busy women, with jobs and/or kids and new homes or new relationships. And when you're on different tracks, it's hard to run into each other. Many of my friends have been married for several years, and now they're parents - that's a completely different social life than someone who's just starting a relationship, or someone like me, still trying to figure out just what my routine is, as a wife-to-be, new homeowner and employee. Some of us are going to Disney World, or are camping with our kids. Some of us are still going out on dates, or have the free time to fritter away on Christmas tree placement (against the wall? which one?). We're not exactly going to run into each other like that.

Where am I going with this? Nowhere, really. There is nowhere to go.

I think, perhaps some of this is really about growing up. This is not the wedding of someone right out of college. I'm trying to plan a big-ass party of a lifetime, and I'm squeezing it in between buying new tires and finally getting around to registering for homestead exemption - and my friends are too. So I guess it comes down to this: I just can't have that TV show wedding experience; I don't live a TV show life.

Floor samples AWOL, missing out and time's running out

I got a call from FedEx this morning - they needed to verify my address for a delivery. So that's where my flooring samples from Lumber Liquidators are . . . I had to leave a message with someone and I put new numbers on our mail box for good measure. It was missing three of the four numbers in our street address, so maybe that's why they couldn't find us?

Everybody has fun stuff going on in the month of July. Fun stuff they want to share with us. Fun stuff we've had to say "no" to because we're running out of time to work on the house before we have to move in completely.

1. Dear friends who live in New York are down for the weekend. "Come spend the weekend with us at our Orlando condo," they say. "Sorry, we can't . . ."

2. A close girlfriend has her family's beach house for the week. "Stop by next weekend - the weather should be great!" Again, "sorry . . ."

3. Coworkers finally have a get-together that involves cocktails and a (bad) movie. Me? I'm painting trimwork!

4. The band of a friend of our had their last concert last night - they're all moving to Austin. You already know what I was doing. Kyle? Mowing, edging, weeding in the front yard. For at least two hours.