An Eulogy

To Long-Distance Relationship


Goodbye and good riddance!

Oops! Are we guilty? I hope not...

I Hate Your Wedding Web Site
What should be purely functional turns into a showcase for narcissism

By Noreen Malone
Posted Friday, March 12, 2010, at 7:17 AM ET

My roommate and I spent a solid hour on the couch one evening discussing a wedding Web site we'd been sent. The people getting married were strangers, but that didn't stop me from forwarding it to a friend or two I thought might get a kick out of it. Pretty soon everyone had seen "Jane" and "Tim's" site, on which they treated their impending nuptials with all the pomp that preceded Princess Diana's wedding. Except Jane and Tim's wedding won't just be broadcast live on their special day, like Diana's paltry event was. In the months preceding their marriage you can watch the Flash slide show that explains how the pair met-cute while rooting for opposing teams during a Yankees-Red Sox game as many times as you want. But that's only if you tire of the video showing Jane and Tim lovingly washing their dog, Mr. Snuffles.

Sadly, Jane and Tim are not alone. Nearly every pair of happy, ordinary American betrotheds creates a personalized wedding Web site. NBC's tapped into this with wry realism recently, ginning up the slightly painful www.halpertbeesly.com for the wedding of characters Jim and Pam. In theory, the practice is as harmless as Jim's clean-cut demeanor. The sites make life easier for guests who can't remember where the couple is registered or lost their save-the-date cards. But instead of being tasteful, utilitarian affairs, these sites inevitably turn into showcases for unbridled narcissism—and open the couple up to a great deal of mockery from friends and strangers alike. Brides have been told that their special day is the most important thing in the universe, thanks to the wedding industrial complex (which has been amply documented), and Generation Y has taken this wedding mania digital. If you're used to extensively celebrating your daily existence on Facebook, Twitter, and perhaps a Tumblr or two, how better to signal that this night is different from all other nights than by giving it its own bespoke URL?

Jane and Tim, for instance, have chosen to color their special story various shades of soft green, with tan accents of faux ribbons, shadowed floral flourishes, and a highly stylized fake script font. The vibe is perhaps meant to be "classy," but it's very hard to achieve an understated aesthetic when the message you most want to telegraph is LOOK AT ME. The main page features a black-and-white shot of Tim adoring Jane while she reciprocates with the upturned chin angle that telegraphs true, moony love, taken during the couple's (extensive) engagement photo shoot. Visitors can choose one of several unrecognizable soft-rock songs while they browse (but no mute button option). There are a grand total of 651 pictures featured—from baby photos to Solo-cup-filled college dorm-room shots to shots of their four—count 'em—engagement parties. Other sites might stop at just a couple of hundred pictures or fail to limn the courtship narrative in quite the same painfully painstaking detail, but the features of Tim and Jane's site are closer to the rule than the exception.

The idea behind a formalized wedding is that the couple stands up in front of their family and friends and declares their love. Historically, this happened in a house of worship or maybe City Hall. But as so much more of life is lived online, it makes sense that people feel the need to share their wedding news with their virtual community. This doesn't excuse, say, the couple who tweeted and changed their Facebook relationship statuses from the altar, but perhaps it explains the compulsion. The instinct to spread those marriage tidings isn't new either—think of newspaper wedding announcements—but now a self-created site democratizes the process, while getting one's union written up in a newspaper often means running a gantlet of elitism.

But the democratization of the Web creates an entirely new problem: It asks the virtual community to engage meaningfully with the idea of blissful foreverness in the same inherently judgmental medium that spawned Perez Hilton. Show me your rock over coffee, and my delighted exclamations over its beauty will be genuine. Post a jpeg of it on your site, and I'll probably do a quick catalog of the many ways it is gauche, along with a back-of-the-envelope calculation on roughly how much it cost per karat. Let the best man tell the story of the proposal in his toast at the wedding, and I'll beam in the reflected glow. Spill a plodding 2,100 words of questionable grammar about how the groom managed to disguise the ring in your tiramisu, and I'll worry whether your future children will be able to develop writing skills at a state-mandated grade level. The inclination to judge is probably doubly true for people who aren't inner-circle enough to be invited to the wedding but close enough to be forwarded a link to the Web site.

Should you actually be attending, the overflow of advance information a wedding Web site provides also brings knotty practical implications. When you want to flirt with a groomsman, all obvious avenues of points of entry will be barricaded off: Try inquiring innocently about what he does for a living, and you might end up inadvertently revealing that you'd Googled him to such an embarrassing depth that you know all about his 3-point shooting percentage during his flourishing Euro-league basketball career. And when someone at your table brings up the story of how the happy couple met, you automatically snort with derision. You can't help yourself after those hilarious 11 minutes you spent with your roommate and a glass of wine doing a close reading of the official online text. You've already deduced that the "friend" who had introduced them was Samuel Adams, and that the time they'd spent "learning about themselves" before deciding to be married involved three or four acrimonious breakups and probably some cheating.

The problems of the wedding Web site are the problems of the social Internet, clad in tulle. And it's a practice that's increasingly impossible to opt out of—if couples don't create a site of their own volition, there are inevitable requests to please, please, just post the driving directions and registry, which are followed by requests from undermining maids-of-honor to pretty it up just a tad, and soon the couple is making Jane and Tim look hermitic. I can come to terms with the fact that these sites aren't going anywhere, if the perpetrators can come to terms with the fact that the more baroque they make their creations, the more they're opening what ought to be private and special to the indiscriminate mockery of the World Wide Web—and their future selves. Twenty years from now, Jane will shudder at the excess of those four engagement parties and Tim will regret those faux ribbons. They should remember that while half of marriages crumble, a Google cache is forever.

(Source)

The most beautiful verse in the Bible

"As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love."

John 15:9

S'Wonderful

T-t-t-ten days till Mr J T-t-ting returns!

Fare Thee Well

I hope you will like your new home(s). :'(

Etiquette Fail

The past few weeks have been trying. Please don't make things worse for everyone. Here are some tips -

1. When you receive a card that says 'RSVP' and states a date, there IS a reason why that specific date was put down.

2. It is rude to question why the date is earlier than, say, 1 week before the event. Remember, you are not the one throwing the party, hence you may not know that there are others aspects involved in the planning to which an early confirmation of attendance is essential.

3. When someone sends you a reminder that the date to respond by is approaching/has lapsed, please have the decency to at least acknowledge that you have received the reminder and if you are still unable to provide an answer, you should formulate a DECENT excuse, rather than completely ignore it. This will not score you any brownie points when the host FINALLY tracks you down. Especially if you, in your reply, say that you actually saw that e-mail.

4. Building on Point 3, you should not be checking your schedule ONLY when the deadline has already arrived/passed. Invitations are sent to you early for a reason, so that you can get all your affairs in order beforehand to respond in a timely fashion.


And in closing, I hope that you get your act together in time after all this babying so that you don't think it is a brilliant idea to call the bride and/or groom on the day of the event to ask for directions/instructions/details. You do know that most likely we will not be picking up the phone so, GOOD LUCK.

Über retro chic

My mom and I have been eyeing these retro tea sets in the tea cosies/wicker baskets for ages - my grandmother has one and my mom always talks about how good one of these is in keeping tea warm (doesn't help of course that it looks pretty!). We saw these in Sia Huat a while ago but have been putting off buying one for me to take to the UK 'until closer to the wedding' so that it doesn't sit around the house and collect dust.

Given how few weekends are actually left till the wedding, we trooped down to Chinatown today and decided to buy TWO sets - one for my mom and one for me. We ended up getting one hexagon basket and one oval basket (because the lock on the clasp of the last hexagon basket they had was broken).

As juvenile as it sounds, it's so fun having 'matching' tea sets! :) And I am looking forward to using this in my new home in the UK.