Planning a wedding for all it’s worth
Sometimes the smallest things in life are the ones worth remembering. At your graduation, it’s not necessarily walking across the stage to get your diploma that you want to remember: it’s the jokes you told with your friends backstage moments before, as you all breathlessly tried to freeze in memory the last four…or five…or six…years. [...]
Sometimes I miss my car.
There are two seasons in Chicago: Bike season and bus season. (Unless you are like my insane coworkers David and Chris, who bike throughout the year. They assure me it’s all about having the right winter gear.) Bike season has been promising to come for several weeks, doing a titillating sort of dance where it [...]
Finding “The Dress”
Friends will carry your train while you try on wedding dresses. Good friends will hum the wedding march. Best friends wil morph the wedding march into the Imperial March from Star Wars when they get bored. Last Friday, I flew home to California to go wedding dress shopping, a concept that I was about as [...]
On the move again
I’m surrounded by way too much crap to fit in the few boxes I have. I thought I’d saved more of the many boxes my parents have sent over the past eighteen months. It certainly seemed at times like I couldn’t turn around without stepping on cardboard. Yet here I am, packing once more, sticking [...]
How I got engaged — and why
In early August, I believe, Drew took me on a dinner date to Chinatown, where I had chicken curry in a coconut and he made fun of me for using chopsticks. (He’s just jealous of my hand-eye coordination.) We strolled around outside for a bit, enjoying the summer evening, eventually ending up on the 18th [...]
Heartstrings
When I was four or five, my parents acquired a piano out of sheer misfortune. Someone owed them some money, and instead of paying, gave them an old, untunable piano that had sat in a church somewhere for the past half-century. It had misshapen legs that didn’t touch the ground, and the ivory on the [...]
Deadline in five minutes? That leaves four minutes to drink coffee.
I am continually running late, to my own dismay and that of the people around me. No, that’s inaccurate. I am continually just in the nick of time for things. I’ll get to work two minutes before our morning meeting starts (at 9:30). I will underestimate my commute, though I have been making it for [...]
Trib Apps in tiaras
I looked at my boss, sitting next to me in a hanging acrylic bubble chair, and then at my project manager, enthusiastically showing off her astoundingly large tiara collection, and back at my boss. “Sometimes,” I began, and shook my head. “Sometimes I’m pretty sure my life is actually a sitcom in another universe.” He [...]
Together, we’re family
Had you told me five years ago that my mom would become a baseball junkie, I’d have assumed that you confused her with someone else. My growing-up years heard her disparage professional sports — all sports — as pointless wastes of effort and money; glorification of an unsustainable lifestyle riddled with the seediest of human [...]
Shopping for the silly
He’d had way too much coffee; he admitted that much. So as he hugged me, kind of swaying to his own internal beat, I grabbed his hand as if we were dancing. “What is this? Are we doing this?” I asked, grinning. He twirled me in the frozen food section. A cart-pushing lady nearby laughed: [...]