An Open Letter to My Wedding Photographer

I prided myself on not being a Bridezilla this time around. Not that I was an all-out disaster the first time I got married. But at 24, I was younger, and inexperienced, and -- more to the point -- not paying for the event myself. For my second wedding -- to the Mister this past April -- I wanted to focus more on the marriage and less on the big day. Round tables...square tables...didn't matter. White versus ivory linen tablecloths? Nope; didn't care. We kept the invite list well under 100, and focused on crafting a ceremony that meant something to us, rather than one that met or surpassed others' expectations.

We had a great time.

The one detail we really splurged on was you. We decided that, since the day was going to be such a special one to the two of us, we'd shell out for a photojournalistic-style photographer who had the time and temperament to document it.

Up to and including the wedding ceremony, you didn't disappoint. That you made the trip from Oklahoma, where you live and work, to New York City, where we do, to stage the engagement photo shoot blew us away. Your top-notch snapshots from that shoot even more so.

On our wedding day, from the early morning prep until the last guest left, you were present but unobtrusive. Your team and you were consummate professionals.

So would it have been so hard at least to have a sample album for us to look at five and a half months later?

You got us proofs just a few weeks after the ceremony was over. We have long since posted them online, selected our favorites, printed them out, and given you a list of must-includes and must-excludes from which to choose.

In May, a month and a half after the wedding, you advised us that you were "eager to begin [our] album." In July, two months after that, you told us that you had "just checked and [ours was] the next one in the cue."

I sent you two follow-up e-mails in August inquiring about the status of the sample album. I sent a third in September. We haven't heard a thing from you.

When we were in the planning stage for this event, I decided not to get all hardass-New York City-litigator on you. I figured: we were hosting the ceremony in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Where people are nice. Where people honor their contractual obligations.

So we paid you in three installments prior to the wedding. And that leaves us no recourse at this late date. What can I do except stomp my feet and wave my fists in the air to get you to send us our album?

The proofs are lovely. But we paid for your services. You haven't provided them in full. You owe us. It's that simple.

The least you could do is send us a "sorry, but I've fallen behind, and I promise to get working on the album" letter. I'd be understanding. I would. Even though I am a hardass New York City litigator.


*sighs in frustration*

Stagnation So Soon?

It's funny. Amongst my friends, I'm not known for my brevity. As one friend once said, "You and I, we never say in five words what we can say in fifty." I adore prepositional phrases, and have a tendency to write in run-on sentences. Hellsy, more often than not, I think in paragraphs, not sentences.

My preferred method of communication with my nearest and dearest these days is e-mail. I write epic e-mails. I wax hyperbolic about everything and nothing. And yet, when it comes time to blog -- to discuss the same sorts of miscellaneous life experiences I e-mail friends about daily -- I have writer's block.

Maybe it's the knowledge that this blog could gain a life of its own and, as I think I've written before, who knows who could wind up reading it. After all, with a little creative Googling, it's not too hard to track down former high school nemeses, friends with whom we've lost touch, old colleagues, our exes, our significant others' exes, our exes' significant others, and so on. We like to think that our e-mails never reach any destinations other than the eyes of the readers for whom we intend our messages. More often than not, they probably don't. But blogging? Blogging is putting something out there for everything to see.

After all, as recently as this past week, I read the story of a favorite blogging family of mine: a photograph they'd taken of their daughter had been used by an online parenting website in conjunction with an article about the dangers of lead paint. Used with neither their knowledge nor consent. That's unacceptable. That sort of thing gives me pause; it make me think twice before continuing with this blogging effort.

If all I want to do is keep a journal, I don't need a blog on which to do it. If I blog, as much as I may try to keep a low profile (avoiding last names, adopting pseudonyms, trying not to call too much attention to myself by jumping onto the commenting-so-that-people-visit-your-website-and-check-out-what-you-have-to-say bandwagon), the word will get out. I'll get sloppy. It's bound to happen.

But I've never been a keeper of diaries. I'm not in this simply to catalog my daily goings-on. The public nature of blogging intrigues me. When the time is right, I'll be eager to engage the world, or at least that portion of it that is interested in hearing what I have to say, in a dialogue. I want to do this for all the reasons so eloquently articulated by Misguided Mommy. Even if it means opening myself up to unsolicited assvice.

I can't recall where I first heard this explanation, but someone once said that if you dislike someone, the way he holds his fork can drive you insane, whereas if you love him, he can upend his plate of pasta and dump it in your lap, and it won't matter at all. I guess blogging is like that. Some people pour their hearts and souls into their blogs and the dividends they get on their investments are nonexistent; they get shot down and ridiculed by the blogosphere. Other people can write two-sentence quips about what they had for dinner, or about how they didn't get out of their PJ's all weekend and refused to wash their hair, and their literary stylings are such that they can quit their day jobs and pay the mortgage with the ad revenue realized from their blogging efforts.

I want to be in the latter category. Not necessarily for the potential untapped financial gain to be had. I just want to write something that means something to someone. Something that I can be proud of. And something that helps other people, or motivates them, or moves them, or induces empathy, or makes them think, or makes me friends.

After all, I met the Mister online. And he's my best friend in the world. If the Internet led me to him, then I have to figure that there are experiences I won't have, other wonderful people I won't meet, and things I won't learn unless I put myself out there. Even if not everything I have to say is genius. Even if some of it is downright dull.

NaBloPoMo -- National Blog Posting Month 2007 -- will take place in November. I think I'll give it a try. In fact, I'm going to treat next month as a dry run. I'm not sure that volume = quality content, but I am sure that not posting means I'll never give myself a chance to find out if I have something worth saying.

It's the same way I taught myself how to take pictures. I never took a photography class. I just went out and took a bunch of pictures. And then I took some more. I saw what came out, and what looked like crap, and learned from my mistakes. I may not be great now, but a higher percentage of my photos are keepers than used to be the case. If blogging proceeds at the same pace, then it's better to indulge the urge to post whenever it may strike, rather than be stymied by self-censorship. It'll be an interesting experiment.

More soon....

Color Quiz

On a whim, I took a "Color Quiz." Not sure there's any wisdom to it, or that I agree with the results, but it was as good and unproductive a way to kill five minutes as any I could think of. Results below:

Vals took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Desires a tranquil, peaceful state of harmony offe..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

Radio Nowhere

The mister and I snagged two tickets to see Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band perform at Madison Square Garden next month. For my money, there's no better live performance out there, even though the vagaries of Ticketmaster are such that we're spending good cash to watch the back of the Boss' head for three plus hours. This will be the fifth time I've seen Bruce perform live -- the third at MSG.

Born in the U.S.A. was the first album I ever bought. Not in CD format; not even in tape. Vinyl, baby. In 1984, courtesy of my soon-to-be-stepmom (who, at 28, was old enough to fund my nascent record habit but young enough to turn me on to music way cooler in my eyes than anything either of my parents would recommend), I was the proud new owner of a record whose jacket boast the bluejeans-clad arse of an all-American man:

I listened to it until it scratched and warped. I accompanied him, singing off-key until I'm sure my parents were sick of it. (Although, in retrospect, this probably paled in comparison to the nausea-inducing weeks during which they endured marathon sing-along sessions involving my younger sister and me alternatively butchering Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All" and belting out the entire soundtrack of Les Misérables.)

Becoming a Bruce fan at the ripe old age of eight may not have been particularly subversive when you consider that most of my classmates at the time were bopping out to Madonna's Like A Virgin:

But -- subversive or no -- I loved it. And the passion for the Boss and his music has stuck. I'm a fan to this day. It's one thing to continue to hold dear a book or a painting that touched you when you were young. But the Bruce Springsteen catalog -- both with and without the E Street Band -- keeps growing and delighting me. So next month's concert should be a real treat.

Allowing myself this sort of thing to look forward to is what makes slogging through the everyday bearable.

On Insecurity and Paralyzing Self-Doubt (or Sorry to Get All Meta on You So Early in the Game)

Like way too many twenty-somethings in the Summer of 2003, I indulged in the weekly guilty pleasure that was The O.C. (Only Season 1…and – fine – part of the way into Season 2, lest you think too poorly of me.) For a brief while, the Seth Cohen character became something of a patron saint for me – giving me hope that being a cool nerd or nerdily cool was something to which I could hope to aspire. He identified his life as one of insecurity and paralyzing self-doubt, and I’m focused on just that issue today.

I’m not the mission statement type. If I had sat around trying to decide why to blog or what I’d hoped to get out of blogging before I actually set up a blog, I’d probably never have gotten around to it. If, as countless high school teachers (and my legal writing prof) insisted, a thesis sentence was a prerequisite to every paragraph, I’d never succeed in putting pen to paper.

That said, I’m also not wholly a fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants type of girl. I have whys and wherefores. I just don’t always have them fully fleshed out before I begin to speak or write.

Truth be told, and I suppose blogs are, or this blog is, supposed to be about telling the truth (for all the world, or at least those who happen onto your URL), I’m more someone who, after muddling at length over whether to or whether not to do something, say something, etc., takes a deep breath and plunges in. For better or for worse. I jump off the diving board, and hope there’s water in the pool.

It usually works out okay.

Given what I’ve seen of blogs, at least in the three some odd years I’ve been reading them, often there’s room for them to evolve. A blog may start out as being about one thing, and then evolve, and then evolve again. So if I don’t set out too many rules for myself just yet – if I just consider this a work in progress – then I’ll probably be okay.

It’s hard to be sure. I’m writing this now without a clue as to what my readership will be. Will I have a constituency – a readership? Will people discover this site weeks or months or years down the road and read my archives so they get to hear the story from the beginning? Will friends and siblings and parents – and former classmates and colleagues and bosses and ex-boyfriends – read this and nod appreciatively to yourselves, or snicker, or be outright horrified?

It’s not as if this blog is, or will become, the sum total of everything I feel or think. But there’s no doubt that it is, and will remain, what I put out there of myself for public consumption. I’ve yet to decide if I want to give myself permission to air my dirty laundry, or my petty thoughts for anyone with an Internet connection, a keyboard, and fingers to see.

And yet….

And yet I have the advantage of hindsight. I’ve gone back to the incipient posts of some of the blogs I read regularly. To be sure, there is plenty of rambling about nothing to be found there. Some of it makes for surprisingly interesting reading.

So maybe I have to give myself permission to write, unfettered, about whatever comes to mind. Maybe the voyeur in you will want to read about my laundry lists and hangnails and nonsensical dreams and what I ate for dinner last night. Or maybe you won’t want to read those postings, but you’ll like enough other stuff that you’ll put up with them. Or maybe you won’t frequent my blog. Or maybe you’ll write me hatemail.

Maybe I’m not writing for you at all anyway.

I just don’t know yet. But I guess that’s what this is all about. Here I am, shouting into the void, waiting to see what sticks, and what comes back. Here I am – trying my damnedest not to be so paralyzed that I tremble to push the “Publish Post” button. Here I am, blogging.

It’s as good a place to start as any.

Here goes nothing (or, perhaps, everything)...

So, after countless months of discussing the pros and cons of online navel-gazing, the Mister finally started a blog of his own tonight. Never one to be bested, I figured I'd best do likewise. So here I am -- one more former English Lit. concentrator (the catchall major for the undecided) spewing inevitably self-indulgent content into the aether.


As I have never been one to keep a journal or a diary, and, consequently, am not yet sure to what end I want or plan to maintain this site, if, indeed, I want to maintain one at all, I don't know how long it'll be before I post again.


Even so, here I am, jumping onto the proverbial bandwagon, starting a blog. I'm as curious as you are to see what happens next.