Unda Presha

I was feeling a lot of pressure, mostly internal, to make the wedding turn out to be this fantastically beautiful and magnificent affair, although free of opulence and over-design.  A semi-formal affair with simple-yet-elegant designs that everyone would appreciate.

To be honest, the best I think I can hope to do is pick the venue and the centerpieces and maybe some other small decorations around the perimeter.  And I think I had a crisis about that - I know I had a crisis about that - last night, when I was thinking too hard about how I wanted it to look and then looked online at party pictures and realized that everything was going to look the same except maybe the centerpieces.

It's like my apartment.  I live in an apartment complex with probably 200 other apartments that look almost exactly the same as mine.  They're all painted the same, with mostly the same carpet, and everyone has this weird stupid mirror somewhere in their dining area that they can't get rid of or cover up.  Everyone has the same overhead fans and the same blinds and the same doors and the same kitchens.  The best I could do was hang things on the wall, put up curtains and stick in my own furniture.  But even with these minor superficial changes, the apartment is still basically the same as all the other apartments, it just looks pretty.  So I guess that's closer to where I should set my aim, because there's nothing much I can really do about the standard white tablecloths and the standard ugly chairs with the ugly patterned cushions and the brassy gold frame and the overhead lighting and the huge tables where everyone feels so far away from everyone else.

And I realized, while thinking back to all the time I'd spent looking at theknot.com recently, that they know this, too.  They know this!  But they really play up choosing your colors and your centerpieces and I really, really bought into it and put myself under pressure to make them all JUST RIGHT!

I'm a little mad at myself for getting caught up in it so easily, but I guess at least that wore off before it became too much and took over my life!  I don't think that I usually get so swept up in things like this, but I guess I really bought into it, especially looking at websites like theknot.  It's still helpful but it isn't my wedding-planning headquarters.

I'm still going to look into picking out little things like centerpieces and place markers, but I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that this will make the difference.  It's not going to happen where people will sit down and say, wow, this is a wedding unlike one I've ever been to before - I mean, look at that flower arrangement!