Dishing For Dana

As you hopefully know, I blog every Sunday at The Broke-Ass Bride. The Original Broke-Ass Bride herself, Dana, suffers from the autoimmune disease  uveitis, which causes inflammation of her eye and can lead to blindness if untreated. She’s had eleven surgeries in the last nine years and has a twelfth coming up, and her medical bills are stacking up, even with her health insurance coverage.

True to form, Dana’s found a creative approach to help her escape her medical debt while helping others at the same time: launching the fundraiser Dishing for Dana. You can read all the details here, but the short version is this: Dana is collecting comfort food recipes from various and sundry bloggers, and online access to the collection of recipes is your reward for a donation of any size. Larger donations get additional incentives, like a paper copy of the Dishing for Dana Recipe Collection for $40 or more, and a Fresh Hubby rap for a donation of $500 or more (Oh, if only I had an extra $500!).

10% of all donations up to the fundraising goal of $22,000 will go to the American Autoimmune Related Disease Association ($2,200). After the fundraising goal is met, 50% of all further donations will go to the AARDA. The AARDA brings awareness, patient services, and research funding to the area of autoimmune related diseases, which encompasses a myriad of health conditions (seriously, have you ever watched House?) including lupus, rhuematoid arthritis, psoriasis, Type I diabetes, Celiac’s disease, Ulcerative colitis, and many, many more.

So you get the good feeling of helping out one awesome lady, PLUS the mitzvah of donating to a worthy charity,  AND ON TOP OF ALL THAT you’ll get a bunch of new awesome recipes for delicious comfort food.

This is a really important cause to me, and not just because I adore Dana. At least two members of my Bridal Hootenanny have autoimmune diseases, as do several people in my family and other close friends of mine. Also, it isn’t officially recognized, but my I’m-not-a-doctor-and-I-don’t-even-play-one-on-TV opinion is that eczema is autoimmune related.  So I really hope you will all take the time to check out Dishing for Dana, and hopefully donate and/or contribute your own comfort food recipes!

[You won’t want to miss out on how to make HitchDied Apple Pie.]

Advertisement

Triple Double

Today was a good day.

I’d been trying to write a post about suffering from depression for a while now, letting a draft malinger on my dashboard since at least the New Year. But I struggled with it. I struggled with the wording, sure, but what I was really struggling with was baring so much of myself to this audience. It’s easy to be Puff; it’s harder to be Sean, you know?

So, paradoxically, when I started to think of the post as a Wedding Undergraduate piece, something that would reach a much larger audience than my humble little wedding blog here, the words started flowing so much more easily. Because writing for HitchDied, I felt like I was setting myself apart as The Depressed One.  [Even though I knew that other people in my little circle within the wedding blog universe had struggled with depression.]  But writing for A Practical Wedding, I felt more like I was speaking out on behalf of, unfortunately, a pretty sizeable group of people who have had depression intersect with their life and their marriage.

So to everyone who thanked me today, everyone who hit the “Exactly!” button, everyone who shared their own story of their depression or their partners’, I wrote that post for you, so thank YOU.  Thank you so much for giving me the motivation I needed to write something I absolutely had to express.

And thank you for responding so warmly and kindly. Even those who are lucky enough to not have any depression in their lives. The comments and twitter messages and e-mails from old friends and total strangers alike touched my heart and moved me to tears.

I got a call from my beloved mother-in-law Viki, telling me how proud she is of me and how much she loves me. I told her I hadn’t really emotionally processed the whole thing yet, but I felt great.  And THEN I got a call from my ALSO beloved father-in-law Tom. Tom, who’s supposed to be my ally as a emotionally-reserved-WASP thrust into the Ginsberg Globe of Goo.  Tom, who started the conversation by telling me that my post made him cry. Which, in case that weren’t enough to break me, he then proved by crying a bit over the phone. And then he told me “Collin is lucky to have you, and so are we.” And then there was entirely too much crying for a pair of WASPS to admit to. So let’s just pretend we both nodded and swallowed heavily and carried on with our business without any emotion cracking our face, shall we? “Thanks for calling, sir.” “You are welcome, young lady who is betrothed to my son.”  Yes. That is how the conversation ended.

I’ll end this conversation by reiterating my gratitude to the A Practical Wedding community, to Meg for running the post, to Assistant Editors Alyssa and Lauren, to the readers,  and to the commenters.  And I also want to express my gratitude, if I haven’t enough, to the HitchDied community, to our family and our friends, both in the real world and in the intertubes. To anyone who may be new here, welcome, I hope you stick around.

I felt very loved today, almost overwhelmingly so. I think, maybe, this is a bit of a preview for how our wedding day will feel. And that’s really exciting.

Today was a good day.

Cyber Bridesmaids

First, have you guys heard the awesome story of how this wedding blog community banded together to get Sarah & Tony some more time with their wedding photographer? Well, we did. Don’t miss it. We’re like a band of cyber bridesmaids, which really makes me want to print ceremony programs so I can flaunt ya’ll.

Many of the Cyber Bridesmaids are also celebrating International Women’s Day today. I am one of many awesome women bloggers participating in the In Her Own Words event on One Cat Per Person and Any Other Wedding today. Here is my post.

Banner: Joshua Gomby

Today’s also a good day to check out my non-wedding blog, Double R Diner, if you haven’t already.  If you like my movie reviews or Not the Knot posts, you’ll like Double R Diner. Me and my co-blogger Ramona are celebrating IWD/Feminist Coming Out Day by chatting about our feminist origin stories.