Do You Know the Way to San Jose...

So, I traveled to California for work last week – San Jose, to be exact, to attend a mobile learning conference. The conference was great. I spent my days in little, windowless rooms of learning, soaking up as much information as I could, and my evenings wandering around downtown San Jose, which offers a very interesting mix of shiny new glass buildings and scruffy, smelly pan-handlers.

The hotel, itself, was very nice. I had a lovely view of the pool, there was a beautiful spa where I indulged in a relaxing massage after a long day of air travel, and my bathroom had a telephone in it. I find that last detail to be very intriguing, especially in this day and age, when we all have cell phones. The phone was mounted right next to the toilet and I couldn’t help but wonder who is making calls while sitting there? What is so important that your call cannot wait a few more minutes? And who is using a hotel land-line phone these days? The only thing you really use it for is to ask for a wake-up call or to order room service. So, either people sit down for a bio-break and suddenly, realizing how tired they are, decide that they must at that very moment, call the front desk to request a wake-up call, or they are sitting there thinking, “Hmm, I’d really like a burger and some fries – Might as well call room service and order it up right now!” Or, is the hotel just extremely worried that you might fall from your perch, injuring yourself, and need a phone mounted just high enough to not be able to reach from the floor, to call for help?

I always find it interesting to go to places like California or meet people from areas of the country that are incredibly happy with and proud of where they live. If you meet someone from California they will almost always say something along the lines of, “Oh, it’s a wonderful place. I just love it there.” I’m from Buffalo, and we don’t say things like that. Now, I’ve lived in a few different places – Rochester is great, I really do enjoy living here, Atlanta is a fun place to visit and spend some time, but I was born and raised in Buffalo, and when you start out in Buffalo, you’re always from Buffalo, no matter how many years you’ve lived somewhere else. The thing is that no one proudly proclaims that they are from Buffalo. They look down and dejectedly mutter, “I’m from Buffalo,” and wait for one of three inevitable responses: Oh, you get a lot of snow up there, I love buffalo wings, or how about them Bills?  And we’ll grouse and complain about Buffalo, rejecting it as a boring, politically disastrous little city, but the second someone else has a negative word to say about it, we will defend the honor of our homeland like a proud, angry lion. We will gallantly proclaim ourselves Bills fans, despite our four consecutive Super Bowl losses and the following two decades of painfully bad seasons. We will adorn our cars in Sabres decals and still shake an angry fist when one anyone yells, “No goal!” And we will insist that buffalo wings in any other part of the country are not real wings at all. 

We are a proud people – but only when defending the city we always dreamed of leaving. 

Of course, visiting and living in other parts of the country, I and many other Western New Yorkers eventually realize that our area is not so bad. Sure, our winters can be freezing cold and snowy, but when you look at other areas with wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes, suddenly a little (or a lot) of snow doesn't seem so bad. Our biggest problem tends to be fighting each other for snacking supplies at the grocery store only to find out that the big storm they predicted side stepped us and hit New York City instead.

Always a Bridesmaid...

This Saturday my one-and-only little sister will be getting married. It’s a small, non-traditional wedding, in every sense of the word, which I kind of love – I’ve never been one for traditions, and at the end of it all I will have a brand-new, wonderful sister-in-law…Yes, you read the correctly. We live in New York State, which thankfully is legally progressive enough to officially allow such things and I couldn’t be happier or more proud. Love is love is love…

All that being said, I have once again been thrust into the role of Bridesmaid, although, since we are going non-traditional, right down to the very private ceremony in the middle of a park, my sister has insisted that I am not a bridesmaid or a maid-of-honor. I am her witness, which is just fine by me – people smiling at you with pity in their eyes and saying “Always a bridesmaid never a bride,” gets old really fast. There’s no mortifying or demeaning saying for a witness, but I’ll let you in a on a little secret – being a witness is still basically the same thing as being a Maid-of-Honor. I still have a dress from a bridal shop, I will still carry a little bouquet of flowers, and I still have to hold the bride’s dress while she pees. Some things just don’t change. 

I’m very lucky. I’ve never had to deal with a bridezilla, and my sister has been even more easy going than most other brides. It’s a little bit interesting to navigate the wild world of wedding planning with two brides instead of one, especially when they have different tastes and ideas of what they want, but for the most part, it’s been smooth sailing. The other witness and I don’t have matching dresses, I didn’t have to have my shoes dyed, and I won’t be put through an awkward wedding-party dance – which, let’s face it, would be extra weird for this wedding party, which consists solely of two straight, female witnesses.

How many of you are now singing Marvin Gaye’s Can I Get a Witness in your head? Just me? 

Now, typically, a post on my blog about someone’s pending nuptials would be fraught with slightly amusing, self-depreciating lamenting about going to yet another wedding sans date. I’ve actually never gone to a wedding with a date, which sounds a bit pathetic, but it’s really equal parts bad timing and the fact that I’d rather go solo than drag a male friend to a wedding where he won’t know anyone and I’ll have to field questions about the nature of our relationship all night. So I’ve gone solo and moped through the slow songs and told myself that I WILL have a date for the next wedding. 

Well, that date and day have finally arrived, and I have to say, more than anything, it’s just a huge relief. Instead of feeling sorry for myself or wishing I could share such a wonderful day with someone, or pretending that I am completely fine with being a strong, single female (which I was and am, by the way) I can focus on all the other tiny bits of crazy that lead up to the big day. 

The dress – for instance. The other witness and I shopped for an entire day (I’m talking over eight hours straight of trying on dress after dress after dress) trying to find complimentary dresses, so that we wouldn’t match, per say, but we wouldn’t completely clash either. Finally, exhausted and unwilling to zip up one more hideous frock, we decided to get the first ones we tried on, bridesmaid dresses in the same style but different colors. I didn’t love the dress, but I didn’t hate it as much as I hated the idea of putting myself through any more changing room try-ons, so we put in our orders.

Several weeks later, my dress arrived and it wasn’t exactly the color I was expecting. Instead of the soft, light purple in the catalog, it was a bright, shiny purple tent. Yes, a tent. A giant, triangle-shaped tent – I guess most tents are relatively triangle-shaped, aren’t they? I laughed when I saw it, and immediately made an appointment with a tailor to get it fitted – surely this giant, shiny purple tent would need to be taken in, a lot. It was the size of a house, and though I am never described as anything close to twig-like, I am definitely not house-sized. 

So, a few days later, I went to the tailor and stepped into the dressing room to try it on for the first time. “It’ll have to be taken in on the sides, a lot,” I yelled out to the sweet little old Italian lady as she patiently waited on the other side of the door. “It’s huge!” Then I slipped it on and zipped it up, and promptly wanted to cry.

It fit.

It fit like a freaking glove.

You’d think that would be a good thing, right? You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. Not only did I suddenly feel like the world largest woman, since the tent-sized dress fit me, but the thing stuck out from my sides in an inexplicable fashion. Even the tailor tried to figure out how to bring it in on the sides without completely compromising the fit of the dress, but alas, it was not to be. So I had it hemmed up, because it’s also tea-length, which, for my male readers, means it comes to mid-shin, which also means it made me look about two inches tall, and then went on my way.

For the first day or two, I was okay with it. It’s my sister’s wedding. I’m not going to make a fuss about the dress. Then the reality that I would have photos forever of me in the giant bright shiny purple triangle began to set in, as did dread and a bit of panic. Finally, I told my sister about the dress and how it looked and she explained that she didn’t want us to match in the first place (remember, we are witnesses, not bridesmaids, and apparently witnesses do NOT match), and she insisted we go on our lunch break, that day, back to the bridal shop, and see if we could find something on the racks, in my size, in the right color. That is a much more difficult task than you would think. We grabbed about twenty dresses of different colors, lengths, and sizes, and I had about fifteen minutes to throw them all on, get them zipped up, decide that I hate them, and move on to the next. All the while, my sister, calling and texting random vendors about wedding plans, was nudging and rushing and pushing me through the processes in a way that had my heart racing and my anxiety at lethally high levels. At the end of the most rushed and sweaty dress shopping experience of my life, I finally left with a dress. It was the last one I tried on. My sister hadn’t seen it. It was dark grey. I loved the way it looked. She determined it was too close to the black of her dress. So, after work, back I went, returning the dress, and dragging another friend (Hi, Rachel!) through the shop, grabbing twenty more dresses to try on. Luckily and thankfully, one of the first ones we grabbed was a winner. I got the double bride approval, it fit perfectly, it did not in any way resemble a tent, and off I went.

I still have to go back to the tailor to pick up the hideous, shiny purple tent, but I’m in no hurry to get that and add it to my collection of bridesmaid dresses I shall never wear again – I’m starting to build a collection akin to the one in the movie 27 Dresses. 

The wedding is in two days. My hair has been cut and dyed. The shoes have been bought. I have prepared a bag of emergency necessities for the brides that include things like a sewing kit, scissors, bobby-pins, and band-aids. My nails have been painted – incidentally, my toes are the same blue as my dress, which only makes me look a little like a corpse, when you look at my pale legs and blue toes. Tomorrow I will try spray tanning for the first time, to fix the pale leg problem, and I am taking every precaution to not look like Ross from Friends after his tanning mishap. I will not be in a booth and there will be no counting Mississippily.* I will be airbrushed. It will be interesting. Maybe they can airbrush in a six-pack on my stomach, just for fun. 

I joke and complain and poke fun at the preparations, but the truth is that I couldn’t be more happy for my sister and her fiancé. It will be a perfect day, a beautiful ceremony, and hopefully I will avoid getting hit by bird poop as I stand witness to their love in the park. 

*Sorry about the Friends reference. Couldn't help myself.