Bridal wear lust

I'm seriously in lust with both this dress and headpiece:



















Now if I were only actually young, thin, and ethereal enough to pull it off.

Show me your STD's

I see variations on this request all the time on wedding-related boards.

Every time, I have this evil urge to google a pic of some ugly lesions on someone's naughty bits from some medical website, and post a link.

So far, I have resisted the temptation.

Unless my body is overtaken by the bridezilla virus or someone manages to convince me that there is a really good reason to waste paper, postage and money on mailing out formal or witty/cutesy "save the date" notices, the best folks are going to get is an email or phone call.

What do textbooks have to do with this wedding?

It's textbook season right now, with a veritable explosion of textbooks because of all the recent changes in Microsoft software.

(this is wedding related, I promise!)

Textbook publishers are evil. They charge the students outrageous amounts for a textbook, then deliberately make tiny superficial changes to the book every year or to so that the used volumes will be worthless and more students will be required to buy something new. They bombard faculty with textbooks that often have nothing remotely to do with what we teach, or even worse they completely ignore the list of criteria that you provide for what you'd like to review (Anything Linux after 2005, advanced Access and Vista classes only - no basic, and don't send me anything on other Office products was my request this year.) You should have seen the crap they sent me, not one book meeting those criteria.

If it's a book I can use, I will keep it, as an addition to my Linux reference library, or a book that we actually use to give a student who I know is working hard but barely able to survive financially. But the rest? Amazon.com, baby. I sell them as new (which they are), I don't sell books marked "Instructor version" as so many others do, I try to be thorough in my descriptions of dents and marks. And in a good season, as this one is looking to be, I'll easily make $500 or more.

I have received over a dozen in the past week, and have so far sold and shipped three, for a total profit of $135.

Now you'll see how this is wedding related.

That money is going into my personal saving account, to sit until the start of our holiday break, at which time I hope to go in for my first laser treatment for these damned capillaries all over my face. I think I'll have them zap this mustache while they're at it. The dr. said it would take several visits and I presume that there is some burning look to the face after a treatments, so I don't want to do it while I'd be in class. So I'll spread them out - one this winter break, one summer, then one again the next winter break. And the greedy overpaid textbook manufacturers will pay for it, though through them I'm earning my profit on the backs of the students' that they're ripping off. I think I'll just have to find a way for my conscience to deal with it.

The Mail Room Guy keeps saying that he'll start bringing me books from a stack delivered to faculty who are no longer there, for me to sell. What a haul that would be! I'll pull out any we use on campus to give to students who need them, and sell the rest. Hell, if the stack's big enough we could fund half the wedding.

Wasteful corporate bullshit funded vanity.

About dancing

Writing that last post about dance music caused me to reflect on the prominent place that dancing holds in my life and in V's and my relationship.

First, dancing saved my life. Seriously. I was one of those depressed queer kids who wasn't as much suicidal as I just simply calmly accepted that I wasn't going to be around for very long because I was too different, too broken, and I could never just be myself. Then a beautiful man named Isaac, a GI stationed on our base, decided to start a dance troupe for anyone who was interested. We did interpretive dances to songs from J.C. Superstar, African-inspired dances, Broadway-style bouncy numbers. But the important thing was that Isaac had a way of pushing us, of not accepting any less than our best and yet accepting that "our best" was different for each of us. He radiated self-love and self-confidence, and he didn't give a rats ass about being so different from everyone else - he was small, Black, didn't hesitate to wear caftans all around the base for a month when he had some surgery which made wearing pants difficult, he coached the cheerleaders, he was passionate about dance and music. He didn't "fit in" with the rest of the GI's, that's for sure, but he didn't care. He was who he was, and he taught me to love dance and most importantly, he did something for me that gradually allowed me to love myself.

Fast forward then through years of sweating it out on the dance floor, of being told countless times, "you don't dance like a white girl," of cranking up the music to dance around my house, of two-stepping becoming almost an addiction after finally escaping an abusive relationship. Music was the ultimate healing drug to me.

When I chose to convert to Judaism, I was allowed to choose my own Hebrew name, and I chose Chaya Mechola. Chaya means life, and Mechola means dance, and I can't imagine one without the other.

Then when I was considering the possibility of putting myself out there again, of looking for love (though I honestly thought I was looking simply for some comfortable companionship, having mostly given up on the idea of real love), there were many things that were non-negotiable in who I'd consider, including no substance-abusers, must love kids, and MUST love to dance. And not just your standard sway and bounce dancing, either, or "sure I like to dance, so let's go to a club". I wanted someone who could and would do couples-type dancing with me, who would grab me away from cooking or reading to slow dance or salsa, someone who would lead to my natural-affinity for following, someone who didn't just dance in my general vicinity but who truly danced with me.

And, lucky me, I found that in V.

"Let the music play..."

"He started dancing and love took us into a groove, as soon as he started to move..."

That's always been one of my all-time favorite dance songs (Shannon, 1983), and you can bet I'll be out on the dance floor shaking my booty to it at our reception.

Yesterday was mega-cleaning day, which actually gave us a unique opportunity for an important wedding-planning task: Start listing music that we'd like to play during the reception. I want to plan on having two cd's/40 songs of "background music" for while we're eating, and three cd's/60 songs (maybe even 4/80) of dance music. I figure even if we end up hiring a DJ instead of just doing our own CDs, we're going to want to make sure that she has everything WE want to hear. We alternated between "Party Favorites" and "Classic Disco" on our digital cable music stations, and just kept writing down songs we liked as they came up.

Of course, we also kept stopping to dance but that's a good thing.

I'm hoping that other folks will ultimately help us out, so if you read this blog, please please PLEASE add a comment with some song suggestions. We know mostly stuff like disco, oldies, Motown, classic R&B -- you know, old fart's stuff. I'd love to have more of a variety, so if you have some favorite "shake your booty" (or "sway with someone you love") music that has
lyrics that are consistent with this being a wedding (no breaking up, or "I hate you" songs... duh!), I'd love to have your suggestions!

Here's the link to my music list, and where I'd like you to add your suggestions. You don't have to register to comment, but please let me know who you are!

Is it time for a change?

I'm seriously considering changing my name. I've been mulling over the idea for quite a while, and I've not at all decided yet but at the moment it's leaning that direction.

Even though some folks warn me that it's a pain in the ass, I'd hyphenate. I haven't lived with this name for 50 years to just completely walk away from it. And there's a nice rhythm to our two names together: Chaya Victor-Ramirez (not our real names, but you get the idea). And the cool coincidence is that our actual two last names made up the name of the doctor who delivered me and signed my birth certificate, like "Dr. Victor Ramirez."

As much as all my 1970's feminist indoctrination screams at me to not take his name, there's a lot that feels really good about it. I'm not even totally sure why - I mean, I NEVER remotely considered taking my legal husband's name when I got married for the first time, so why now, at this age, do I want to go through the hassle of it? Well, honestly, the hassle of it is one of the big factors that sways me towards not changing it. Social security cards, drivers license, deeds, bank accounts... OY! It gives me a headache just to think about it. Not to mention the fact that if we could actually be LEGALLY married, the name change process would be a quick rubber-stamp process, but nooooo, I have to go to court, petition the judge, give a reason that the judge has to agree to, swear that I'm not trying to break the law or hide from creditors, and spend $$$ to publish a notice for a full two weeks in the local paper so that anyone who thinks it's a bad idea for me to change my name has a chance to challenge it. Straight girls don't have to go through that shit.

(Of course, it's also a bit weird and amusing and frightening that I'd have to do the name change through V's court, and they could potentially even need to pull in a judge from another county to make the decision if the judges here think there's too much conflict of interest involved, and that judge might end up being some conservative assclown who is pissed at having to drive an hour just to hear some queer girl talk about wanting to change her name to match that of the cute butch in uniform standing nearby...)

But I'm really liking the whole level of commitment that goes with changing my name. Which is a bit weird because V really doesn't want to consider changing HIS name, but I'm feeling totally ok with that (for now anyway - another factor towards not changing it is "will I resent later that I did it and he didn't?").

What feels totally anti-feminist and yet totally right to me is that one of the big things in the "for" column is how much it would mean to V. I waited until after I was at least leaning clearly on the "change it" side to tell him that I was considering it, even though he'd told me long ago that he didn't want to consider changing HIS name. I asked him, "on a 1-5 scale, how much would you like it if I changed my name to Victor-Ramirez?" and after hemming and hawing through some guilt about how that wouldn't be fair to ask that if he's not too keen on changing his own name but maybe he could consider it and would be ok with it, I finally got him to answer the damn question about his feelings and he said, with great enthusiasm and a HUGE smile, "a TEN!!!"

I'm guessing/projecting, but I think that he went through so much rejection and loss in his early life, followed by so much presumption of the immanence of rejection and loss in his later adult life, that it's a Seriously Really Big Deal to him that I'd publicly display THAT level of commitment to him. And I'm leaning towards thinking that maybe that's a very special wedding gift that I'd like to give to him.

Plus at least with a Latin part to my last name, it would make at least a little bit more sense to folks in this very brown heavily south-American town as to why my granddaughters call me "Abuela."

This one takes the cake...

In my quest to look at ways to display several standard round double-layer cakes and decorate them with flowers, I've come across a concept that just really "takes the cake": Faux Wedding Cakes. Apparently there are folks who choose to have a fake cake made, which costs several hundred dollars or more, which is there just to put on display at the reception. The real cake that's served is a bunch of sheet cake from the kitchen.

Put this seriously in the "WTF?!?" category for me.