Wedding Wars

As you may have heard, I recently got engaged to my long time live-in boyfriend, Matthew Garel.

I was so delighted to finally be able to throw the off-beat, backyard wedding of my dreams. I pictured a handful of close friends and family, decked out in the season’s most fashionable denim, sipping on some frozen margaritas and chomping on some freshly grilled burgers and fries, as I mosey on up a make-shift aisle in my Grandmother’s garden dawning some cute, baby-doll looking off-white dress and some cute, trendy flats, on a bright sunny day in 2013.

I’m a simple girl, as you know, so I was thrilled to skip all that fancy foolery that usually accompanies a wedding, like formal invitations and black tie attire. It’s not like my goal in this whole thing is to have a wedding–it’s to have a marriage! Hopefully, a happy one according to my standards and not the standards of current society. Then isn’t it only right that we have a ‘wedding’ that defies the expectations of current society too?

Not according to my family. They are huge funs of traditional weddings! The more fuss, stress, tulle and torture, the better.

I made a lovely list of 120 guests that would complete my ideal backyard wedding fantasy. They countered with a list of 400. Many of my conversations regarding the list went like this:

Me: I just want close family and friends.
Family: What about your fourth cousin that you’ve never met who lives in Canada? We could never not invite them! They’d feel so offended! God, we’d just die of shame to not invite them! And you know we’d never hear the end of it from the other cousins in California who we never ever see!
Me: But I’ve never met them. Why would they care?
Family: Believe me, they’ll care!
Me: But again….I’ve never met them…so why should I care that they care.
Family: Oh my God, what a failure we’ve been at raising you! Don’t you know anything about weddings!

All this chorused by my father’s often heard chimes of “If you don’t like it, elope!”

You’d think that in a global recession, people would forgive such shallow expectations of being invited to weddings of distant relatives, but recession be damned. We are Lebanese! We never forgive anyone anything. Look at how far we’ve gotten with Israel, Palestine and the rest of those camel jockies. Clearly forgiveness is not out strong suit!

So I’m left now with two options: Have a big, fat Lebanese-Circus wedding or run off to Vegas (my grandfather has been kind enough to offer to pay the plane fare), the tacky, grown-up version of Disney World, with my frozen margarita between my legs.

Why can’t I just have my backyard bbq and not tell anyone? Isn’t this supposed to be my wedding?

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Crystal Renn–Where Art Thou?

Famous, iconic plus-sized model, Crystal Renn–the historic first plus sized model to appear on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar–appears in the up-coming Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue looking like this.

I don’t know about you, but I am not a fan of this new, ordinary, anorexic-looking Renn. As a model who rose to notoriety by penning a book about her struggles with eating disorders, and damning the conventionally accepted view of beauty in the modeling industry, I’m confused by her shockingly extreme weight loss.

According to Wikipedia, Renn is now a healthy size 8. Take another look at the link above. Does that look like a size 8 to you? I’m a size 6 and Crystal Renn, in this photo, seems half or even a quater, of my size.

Also, her face looks emaciated. If I saw this photo, I would’ve never guessed it was Crystal Renn.

Why?

Because THIS is what Crystal Renn, iconic plus-sized model and challenger of conventional beauty expectations looks like!

Not some anorexic twit off the street, flouncing about in a string bikini, looking like she’s jonesing for a sandwich.

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Need A Pick-Me-Up?

Sometimes what you need, is a perfect puppy pick-me-up, like this photo below.

There! Now don’t you feel better about your car that’s falling to sh*t more and more as the days go by, or the time you went on a full-out diet and gained five pounds that have since turned into ten, or the fact that no matter how many times you tell people that you’re NOT a stripper, they still insist on pushing money in your face?

Yeah, me too.

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Clearly, I’m Knocked-Up

You will recall my post about Sex Ed for Adults, where I sought to teach like-minded females who are in and around their thirties, the concept of the birds and the bees.

Well I am finally realizing why nobody believes me.

Exhibit A: Hollwood.

If you’re one to troll the online gossip mags (like myself), you’ll notice that pregnancy is not determined by missed periods, lack of birth control or ovulation cycles, as I had alleged in my previous post. Pregnancy, in Hollywood, is determined by loose blouses and upcoming movies that need promoting. This is how a baby is made. Why have I been so blind? Of course you can ignore conventional birth control methods. Unless you’re about to launch a new perfume line or shell a new clothing line, why on Earth would your body ever feel ready to carry a child. You’re body is smarter than you! It’s not gonna create a perfect PR storm when there’s no monetary gain in sight!

Look at Jen Aniston. I’ve been hearing she’s pregnant for twelve months, and since there’s nothing for her to promote right now, the baby is refusing to manifest! Her body is simply smarter than that! It’s gonna wait til summer when her new stationary line is announced to even hint at a popped-out belly button.

Exhibit B: Look at me.

I have convinced myself that I am pregnant. Yes, I’m on the pill. Yes, my cycles are totally normal. No, I have not missed one single dot. However, didn’t I just release four novels on Amazon Kindle? Aren’t they Best Sellers? Don’t I look a little paunchy from this angle? Or this angle? or THIS ANGLE?

Clearly, I’m knocked-up!

Babies aside, I have every reason in the book to be preggo! My body must realize that it’s time for it to shine.

In preparation for my upcoming bundle of poop/pee/puke, I have been eating like a wilderbeest, hoping to turn my unborn fetus into an oreo cookie with eyes. (As God and Hollywood intended).

Does this make sense to anyone other than me, because my boyfriend, (sigh), he doesn’t get it.

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Bed Wetting & Ballerinas

Many children wet the bed. It’s a part of potty training that sometimes extends into elementary school. My brother was a huge bed wetter. He wet the bed so often that his entire room began to smell like pee. As I got older I realized this might have had something to do with my brother’s inability to aim correctly into the toilet, as well, but thankfully, (and with the help of much teasing from me), he devised a plan to not wet the bed by the totally respectable age of six.

I didn’t realize this was such an accomplishment until I encountered bed wetters in college, but that’s a whole other post.

Anyhow, the point I’m getting at is this: I was a superior child. I never wet the bed. Once I knew where the toilet was, I made the conscious choice to pee in it. Except for one tragic night when I was ten.

Now if you wet the bed anytime before third grade, I consider it normal. If you wet the bed after third grade, you clearly have a medical condition. Well, one night, me–the superior child–went to bed and had a very vivid dream about swimming in the ocean. I could feel the salt on my skin and the sun on my neck. It was so real. Suddenly, the urge struck me to pee–and I did–right in the ocean of my sixth grade bed.

When I awoke a few moments later, I was horrified–or to use a more appropriate adjective for the times–mortified! I was a ten year old, who had wet my bed, in the full view of the Jonathan Taylor Thomas posters on the back of my bedroom door. Me! The only non-bed wetter amongst my siblings. Now, a normal child wouldn’t give this too much thought. They’d rationalize that it was an extremely vivid dream, change the sheets and resume their sleep. Not me–the child version of Woody Allen. I sat up for hours trying to figure out “what this means”. Do I have cancer of the bladder? Has a toxic cyst ruptured and I only THINK it’s pee? Does this mean I’m regressing into babyhood? Oh dear God, what does it mean?

I walked around for weeks, worrying about “what if it happens again?” Imagine the implications: no more sleepovers. I’d have to wear adult diapers to high school. Nobody would want to be my friend! I’d be that bed wetting freak for the rest of my life, until whatever terminal, mysterious disease finally up and killed me!!!!

This couldn’t be my life, so I took the most logical approach. I stopped drinking water, juice, soda, or anything. If there was no fluid in me, then there’d be no fluid coming out of me.

Obviously, you can see where this is going…

Which leads me to what I’m really thinking about: Ballerinas. They live on less than five hundred calories a day sometimes and condition their bodies to do some incredibly non-human things. How do they live that way? If a couple days with no fluids can make me faint, feel weak, sick and all over yucky, how do they go with so little and at the same time, put their bodies through so much?

They must be, in fact, non-human! Let me present, exhibit A: A video of a ballerina in Russia. Tell me she doesn’t remind you of every creepy un-dead character from a horror movie.

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