I’ve moved over to a domain name of my own, added a couple pages, and did a complete redesign on a new platform.

Those of you who subscribe with an RSS reader, please make sure to switch the URL over to http://www.soullikeaspider.com/blog/rss.xml to keep up with my blog over at the new domain.

The new Soul like a Spider

(1) I don’t want to move again until we settle down.

My parents can tout a statistic of having moved fifteen times in twenty years. And while they have lots of very cool stories of all the different places they have lived, I do not want to duplicate that statistic. When we signed our lease we also signed an agreement that said that the maximum our rent can go up is fifty dollars. In addition, once we finish out our two year lease, we can resign and there is will be no early termination. So, as unbelievable as it is, we can stay here as long as we want/need to without having to worry about timing our move out.

(2) Houses make me anxious.

Is owning a house something that everyone indicates is patriotic, but is no longer practical? Or will my desire for a house turn on just like people tell me my baby clock will kick in (which also is totally absent right now)? Doniree, a friend and blogger, one of whose clients is UMoveFree.com which helps people find Rockwall apartments for free, recently shared a post with me from Caffeinate Me that expressed similar feelings:

“I know my parents frequently encouraged me to buy a home (near them, of course) while they were still cheap – just as an investment. [… ] Owning a home is the so-called ‘American Dream.’ You know, Dog, 2.5 kids, picket fence, house. We’ve all had it drilled in to us since childhood.”

There are countless stories about people wanting to move out of state but because of the market they are stuck. People are getting trapped in their houses and mortgages, or at the very least they are losing money on them. And yet, right and left I keep hearing people tell me that I need to jump on it. Until I am fully committed to living in that one house place for at least the next five to ten years of my life, I’m not going anywhere fast. Because once I get a house and a mortgage, that means I’m a real adult and officially Tied Down. I know it may sound silly and I know people love houses, but I’m just nowhere near ready.

I really don’t want to own a house except for being able to paint, having a time-controlled thermometer, and buying things like this bowl which I saw at Target while shopping with my sister.

I said, “Once I’m a full adult I’ll have to get one of these bowls.”
“A ‘full adult’? What does that mean?”
“Well… You know, once I have my own house, kids, a mortgage, a dining room table, and I’ll actually have a reason to use a bowl like this. If I got one now it would just sit around.”

(3) I love this place.

My last and most important reason we haven’t moved is that we absolutely love this apartment. It’s about fifteen minutes from everything: my parents, work, and our friends across town. If we were much closer to the rural area of town we would be tucked in miles of forest, but I live thirty-seconds from a Kroger and a major highway. Our apartment itself is extremely nice, we fit in it well and we also have room to expand. The management is nice and the maintenance people are responsive. We are very happy here and all things considered, we hit a sweet spot as far as housing goes.

Maybe I’ll look back on this post in a couple of years and laugh at myself. Until then, I’ll try to resist the urge to hug the front door of my apartment.

Friday evening I took my husband out for a surprise dinner at Fuddruckers with all our close friends, which was a blast. We got to see a couple of people that we haven’t seen since Christmastime and the burgers were fantastic as usual. The only problem was is that I didn’t plan properly. It seems like Summer itself took so long to get here that all my mental planning space was thrown off when I got back from our summer vacation over the 4th of July and realized I had less than a week and a half to pull something together for his birthday. The plan was to go to dinner and then see Harry Potter 7. Dinner was at 5:30 PM and the earliest showing for HP7 was at 10:20 PM. A few days before the event I checked the movie times again and several more showings had appeared and so I selected a 7:30 PM. Two full hours for dinner? No problem. I however forgot to account for a couple of things.

(1) Dinner with friends always seems to go longer than planned. Time flys when you’re having fun, I got it. So, we got there at 5:45 PM, got our food by 6:15 PM, and with all our talking, 7:00 PM was there in no time. No time to talk.

(2) The showing for Harry Potter that I picked was the first major evening showing after the opening midnight showing. This means that everyone who either couldn’t make it to the midnight showing or was too geeky for a midnight showing was at the showing I picked. I didn’t account for waiting in line/arriving early for busy movies. I also didn’t account for the 20 minutes it takes to get to the theatre.

So not only have botched the timing for dinner, I’ve also botched the timing for the movie. As a result, we barely found two seats together for ourselves, and the three people that joined us for the movie were left to their own devices to find remaining seats. This mostly caused me anxiety. I try not to get anxious and bent out of shape to the point where I can’t sit still until I make someone fix my problem, because that always irritates me in people. But I still get anxious and mentally guilt myself.

Friday night comes and goes, got nervous about the whole said opportunity, went to bed, and Saturday morning rolls around. Opportunity falls through. I spend most of the rest of the morning brooding and feeling sad for myself. Later than afternoon we went to go see the house that my parents just signed a lease for. They are moving a few miles away to a house that fits them better and one that is not on the dirt road that has peeved them since day one of living there.

The house is absolutely beautiful. It’s spacious, wood floors, and a large deck that leads out to a backyard that is right on a canal into a major lake. It was a strange experience because on one hand I was feeling sad and couldn’t quite take everything in, and on the other hand it just felt like I was walking in a stranger’s house. It won’t really mean anything besides feeling like a house hunting trip until I can see my parents’ furniture and possessions in the house. I’m attached to the house they are leaving in some ways. I grew up in that house. But it’s weird because when I go back into my old room I feel nothing. I loved my outrageously colored walls, but it didn’t feel like the shelter it did when I was in my angsty teenage years where all I wanted to do was be alone. I’ll miss the house for sure. I’ll probably write up some memories I had while there, but I feel like it’s time for everyone in my family to move on. The house was good to us and now it’s time to open the next chapters in our lives that are just waiting for us.

The house my parents are moving to doesn’t allow pets, so my dog officially moved in with us. He helped with a lot of the cheering up of my mopey self.

Saturday night we went to The Union Woodshop right around the corner from my house with a bunch of friends because one of my good friends, Drew, is off to Virginia until late this year. It was nice. It was really nice to get together for some good food, good wine, and let the yammering section of my brain calm down for a while and really enjoy being with the people I love.

It was a nice close to a little bit of a roller coaster weekend. After coming back from vacation I relish being back to normal life, so going back to work after a weekend is definitely not bad at all, but Mondays for whatever reason just seem to be grouchy. I think Monday and The Universe had a big fight a while back and they still haven’t sorted things out so we all get to feel the awkward tension when they’re in the room together.

In all this I just have to remind myself that tomorrow is a new day. It’s cliche, but I really appreciate waking up to a relatively blank slate every morning. It gives me a chance to get it together and to make sure Tuesday isn’t as ridiculous as the last four days have been.

“Carpe diem? Seize the day. Carpe carpe? Seize the fish.” – Riley Bowen

A new dawn of love is rising over our little white apartment
and when the light slips through the blinds I look over at my alarm clock
and you stir just long enough to tell me it’s only seven and that the day has barely started.

You help me keep it together (even though I’ve never had it together)
and the mystery and the universe contained inside you always reminds me
of new ways to count and shows me that I had no idea what my bright red heart was capable of.

Oh be with me, keep me into the storm of your love,
kiss me goodbye every morning and as long as the wind has lungs
let me attempt to tell you–to capture just a whisper!– of what I feel for you.

“I would be devastated if you ever went away,” I said to my sister after she clarified a grammar rule for me. We were having dinner at C.J.’s Cafe, a tiny diner in downtown Lake Orion whose floor creaks, chairs rock and whose walls are drenched in the color of heavy whipping cream and wrapped in cinnamon red trim, brought to light by tons of tiny light-bulbs on the metal chandeliers. The food is always better than I remember it being, and too many significant moments have happened there for me not to love that place.

“I would lose my…”
“Editor?”
“Yes! Editor. I would lose my editor, my personal fashion adviser, beauty consultant, shopping buddy–”
“Deanna, I did leave. What are you talking about?”
“Oh, right. Well, I’m just saying. I’d be sad.”

Later than night, my husband and I were off to run the last couple of errands we had before leaving on vacation, which included grabbing a bite to eat. He chose Fuddruckers. Once we got inside I remembered that I ate less than four bites of fish and my stomach growled.

“Second dinner!”
“Really? I didn’t know I was going to have to spend money on you,” my husband teased.

The dining room only had a few people in it so we laughed and ate dinner. Me, feeling silly, and him with the eyes. The rain storm lost in his pupils, the mischief that never dies, the smile with temporarily contained laughter that I wake up every morning to see again.

First dinner with my best friend, second dinner with my lover. Pure bliss.

One thing I loved about the wedding planning process was the precise decision-making. It was the one event that I could customize in almost any way I wanted to, and so I got in touch with my true tastes. I dug up all of my inspirations and loves and honed them into colors, dresses, suits, and invitations. It’s an incredible experience. Aside from neglecting the table decorations (because when the time came around to pay attention to them I was done caring about anything), everything else was exactly what I wished it would be. It was my quaint, weird wedding that made me inexplicably happy.

The Arts and Apples festival was taking place in Rochester the day we went wedding dress shopping, so the whole downtown was unusually full of people. It was sunny to the point where it seemed like the sun was dialed up just a bit brighter than normal. On the way we were listening to a piece on NPR by David Rakoff that was entitled “Frenemies” (a wedding toast, what a wonderful man) that was utterly hilarious and brilliant.

The first dress I tried on didn’t fit me very well. It felt awkward on my body. The second dress I tried on was alright. It fit me much better than the first, but I wasn’t in love. Then we came to dress number three. It fit me like a glove and had everything I was looking for. It was strapless but it stayed up well enough so I wasn’t tugging on the top of my dress and pulling it up all evening. It had lots of lace and intricate beading that made it ornate and complex. The back was a silk lace-up. The dress hugged me in all the right places and the it started to flare out right past my hip bones.

When I put that dress on something happened. It was like my mom, my sister, the Eva-Longoria lookalike assistant, the prom dresses, the entire store, were stripped away. I was alone with the mirror. The dress wrapped around me and stared into my soul. I was alone in the universe for just a moment with one dress. It looked me square in the eye, quietly, and I knew I had found my companion. And it didn’t deceive me: through all of my disaster dreams, my loneliness, and decisions, my dress was there for me. It was my constant, the one symbol holding everything together. (I know I’m taking this all too seriously, but even though it is just fabric and beads, it somehow turned into a very spiritual event for me in a way. Maybe that’s why I’m afraid to put it away.)

I don’t think anyone was prepared for the fact that I would find my dress and be one-hundred percent decided within a half-hour of arriving to the first store. While I was trying on dresses, my sister was holed up in her own dressing room trying on prom dresses. I barely saw her. It was treated like a regular shopping trip. We went to David Bridal’s (also known as Evil David’s by Beth Kander) later that day and nothing in the store even held a candle. I’m sure Evil David’s has perfectly lovely dresses, but my mind was already decided on one dress and nothing else would satisfy.

The best part about the whole situation was that the store I was at was consolidating inventory with their other location and were subsequently were selling their samples at half price. The even stranger thing: the sample size fit me perfectly without any tailoring. I nailed this section of the wedding budget completely on acciddent.

This is how a lot of things happened for me in the wedding planning process. The wedding hall, the shoes I wore… I didn’t know what I wanted until I saw them and I usually (but accidentally) found things within my budget. I mean, I knew the store was running a sale but I don’t think we had necessarily talked a budget before I said I wanted the dress, so how could I have known? It was like me and the dress were meant to be. My roommate just happened to mention that sale. I just happened to be willing to go look. The woman helping me just happened to pull the right dress. The dress just happened to be number three and I was in-and-out of the store in less than an hour. And the dress just happened to be exactly what I had always wanted and exactly within my (impossible) budget.

Again, the universe being nice to me.

While I particularly love walks with my husband or my dog, when I am walking by myself it helps me face things I haven’t given myself space to think about. For instance, how alone I was during the wedding planning process. I felt left out to dry, and so I planned everything by myself while swinging from the clothesline. I had people in my group of friends tell me to let them know if I ever needed help with anything. I didn’t need help. Carrying out tasks was not the issue as evidence by the fact that I single-handedly planned my whole wedding and nothing caught on fire. I needed a companion. I had my fiancée, but I needed someone to share all my wedding ideas with, someone to gush about the details with. (He was involved with planning and helped me significantly–it just didn’t matter to him all the emotional steps that were involved in picking my colors.) Instead, I ended up just consulting with myself at 2 AM in almost every night in a bonus room in the middle of winter. Maybe I should have just hired the Eva Longoria look-alike woman who helped me pick my dress. She did wedding planning on the side according to her business card. Pro-tip for my next life when I come back as a cat: hire Eva Longoria and let her be your best friend. Wedding planning isn’t supposed to be lonely.

And now it’s all just sour, and walking into a bridal store to get a bridesmaids dress for a different wedding made my stomach chain itself to my rib cage. I should be feeling nostalgic and squishy, not overwhelmed. I feel at least mildly better for admitting all of this.

The heat this evening reminded me of my family and our friends’ family would go camping every 4th of July in the thumb. After our adventures during the day, after coming home from the beach, we’d all walk down to the ice cream store, talk about the application of the word “stagnant” in culture and slurp our sugary treats on our way back. There’s not much that was better than those walks, except the occasional night when I’d be up too late and would be eating midnight Cheerios, the only one still awake on the camp site, fighting the mosquitoes and gnats away from the singular light in the tent.

The frogs in the pond behind the house sound like they are coughing or perhaps sighing. The wedding I went to this last weekend was wonderful. There were so many people I haven’t seen in ages in one place (sort of like a graduation party, except I didn’t invite them). Lots of catching up on all the boring details in my life the last four years (no time to explain all the granular level interesting tidbits)(it’s like the more large-scale the detail is, the closer to small talk we get), lots of enjoying the half-sunshine and lots of introducing my husband to people I’ve known for the better part of a decade.

I was particularly happy with the dress I had on. I had only tried it on once before when I bought it, and I was worried that with only fifteen minutes before needing to leave that the dress that fit me perfectly at Thanksgiving was going to suddenly show off a bra strap or refuse to fit me correctly. But no, it was perfect.

Aggressively blooming honeysuckle, dryer sheets. I want to go home.

We got up and opened the windows to reveal a warm morning bursting with light. My husband ate his usual breakfast: a glass of orange juice and a blueberry muffin made by the cafe my sister works at. I threw together a taco omelette stuffed with an assortment of diced vegetables I had laying in the fridge. While I cooked my breakfast there was a comedy special we had recorded playing in the living room. We relaxed together for the rest of the morning until we heard from one of our good friends, and the three of us went to lunch and sat outside on the patio of the restaurant and talked.

The night before, my husband and I were trying to decide what to eat and settled on a place right around the corner of our house. We were both relaxed, the downtown area was filled with more people than usual because of the nice weather. A clothing shop on the corner by the restaurant was spilling cream colored light into the street with a sign offering free wine inside. The sun had almost set, and the blue tint of evening settled in all the corners and shadows. We were seated in record time, almost accidentally, and the food was superb as usual. It was just the two of us in our little town. Smoky burgers, a busy restaurant bristling with life, a kind waitress with a gorgeous flower tattoo and large brown eyes, and my love across the table. I felt the universe open up for a moment and I knew I was exactly where I was meant to be.

Two nights this week have been ripe with stressful dreams. Both times, I’ve woken up to find my husband asleep next to me, warm, and that I have plenty of time to still get some rest.

If the world had ended on Saturday, I don’t know that I would have been disappointed. Not out of a loathing, quite the contrary. Aside from perhaps seeing my family one more time, there wouldn’t have been a better time. I was so full of contentment and bliss that I would have been perfectly satisfied if it had been my last moments. Time was passing slowly like most summer weekends, and such love and simplicity rarely meet in such a present, obvious form.

All weekend, all I could do was look over at my love and think “It just doesn’t get much better than this.”

Sheer bliss.

You know those days where you put on the outfit you had planned to wear to an event and no matter how much you try to make it work, it just doesn’t feel right? You can’t get the one weird seam to lay flat, or the sleeves feel funny on your arms, or the whole outfit is plain uncomfortable. That’s what happened when I put on the dress I had bought specifically to wear to my rehearsal. It was not cooperating. So I’m running around the house, tearing through my (just unloaded) boxes of clothing to find something I can wear. I finally settle on a dress that my fiancé bought me. I put it on, but it was too short to wear without jeans. So I threw on my skinny jeans and then was about to leave when my fiancé noticed that about ½” of my bright red bra was showing above the back section of the dress. Of course, nothing we did could fix this, so in frustration threw on a black sweater that I didn’t want to wear, but knew would cover my rouge bra strap.

At this point, we are almost running late. It takes a least a good half-hour to forty minutes to get down to Detroit where my rehearsal is, and we are less than an hour from the start time. My mother-in-law mentions that we still have to pick up the corsages on the way.

This is when I really start to lose it. My whole relaxing day of fun-filled activities had gone down the drain, and while I still managed to pull it together and have a great time with what little of the events I could still get to, this was the last straw. I did not want to be late for my rehearsal as well because it was the one big pressing thing in my mind I had left to do.

My clothes were still uncomfortable, we had less than forty minutes until I had to be in Detroit, and we were still moseying about the apartment. And the corsages! How are we going to have time to get to the corsages? It was too late to deal with my clothing and the floral shop where the cosages were was at least ten minutes out of the way. This is where I became a dripping kitchen sink; lots of crocodile tears started to erupt from my eyes with no warning.

In a moment of trying to keep his bride from completely breaking down all together, my fiancé sent me onto the rehearsal with box of Kleenex and my father-in-law. This is only part of the reason why my father-in-law is awesome, but he somehow got me from our apartment in Auburn Hills and to the door of my wedding hall on Belle Isle in Detroit for my wedding rehearsal in 20 minutes. I don’t know how he did it, how fast he was going, or how he managed to not get pulled over as an out-of-stater, but he did. While we were driving he asked me questions and got me to talk between sniffles. He didn’t become alienated by the crying woman on his hands (and if he did, he did a good job of masking it). He just made me laugh and told me some hunting stories about him and my fiancé, and got me to the location of my wedding.

Just after walking into the main hall, one of my close friends and stage-light/aisle-runner fixer (thank you and sorry, respectively), Drew, said “Deanna, it’s your wedding. Everyone else can wait.” That’s advice I should have taken much earlier on, but oh well. I’ll have to remember that for my next life when I come back as a cat.

Once my fiancé arrived, the rehearsal itself went great. Aside from feeling completely ridiculous and self-conscious from standing in the middle of the room in front of everyone, and the occasional outbursts of laughter from looks I exchanged with my fiancé, all was well. (And the lights. But we won’t talk about the lights. I have so many super heroes in my life.)

It was the first time that all of my family members and friends involved in the wedding were all in the same room together. My flower girls and ring bearers, my little cousins, were there trying out the aisle. The Olive Trio was playing the transposed string pieces I had selected. Both sets of parents were in the room, the photographers were already working on doing what they do best, and my whole bridal party was on stage and in line.

Everyone was in the same room. This was actually happening. It was one of the most surreal and yet fulfilling moments of my life. Everyone in the room cared about me and my fiancé. They were there to support us, back us up and celebrate with us with their presence and various talents. It’s overwhelming but incredible.

After the rehearsal itself was over we went over to Sherie’s house, another good friend of ours who was gracious enough to host our rehearsal dinner. We went with wings and pizza. Can’t go wrong with those, right? Everyone was happy, relaxed, and after all the hard work we all got to eat some good food and hang out together. I was feeling bubbly and sentimental, all our friends were laughing, and the parents were over in a corner of the kitchen engaging in an Emergent/Calvinism/Armenianism discourse. After the messy start to my day, everything was finally coming together. I’ll be able to look back on that night as one of the happiest of my life. Everyone was in the same room, everyone was happy, and my wedding was the next morning. It doesn’t get much better than that.

After almost everyone had left, I handed my engagement ring off (it locks in with my wedding band) to the best man and told him in no uncertain terms that I would be unhappy if something happened to it. I then kissed my fiancé goodnight and headed to my parent’s house to try to get some sleep before my wedding day.