Could I Care Less? Let’s see.

Dudes, I care a lot about my wedding. You can probably tell that by how I write about it so much? I am not one of those breezy “it’s just another day” engaged ladies. I am a Bride with a capital B and occasional silent “zilla” suffix.

I’ve spent so many more hours and dollars tears and furrows on this wedding than I’d really care to admit.

And yet, I am regularly confronted with wedding things for which I can not summon even a crumb of enthusiasm: Table numbers. Escort cards. Out-of-town bags. Favors. Centerpieces. Pretty much everything that can be categorized as a “detail.”

All of which are things that are on the agenda for this week, while my mother-in-law is in town. Which is bizarrely shifting my thinking to a place where I believe I hate my wedding or at least don’t particularly care about it. I have a weird detail-induced false consciousness going on here.

But Viki’s picking up my slack, so boxes are being checked even though my heart is not in it right now. Viki is awesome. She pretty much single-handedly assembled all of our centerpieces this afternoon. Seriously, I pitched in with a little Windexing here and a little price-sticker-peeling there, but she was the heart and the brain of the operation. I was like, the gall bladder. Helpful, but hardly vital.

So cheers for friends and family being on Team Wedding. I’m still hoping my interest and excitement in my wedding pop back in to place in a timely fashion, but at least I’m not the only one who knows how to fly this plane. [Could I mix any more metaphors into this entry? Probably not? I’ll just end here, then.]

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The Knot’s “Crazy” Colors Break My Brain

Before I got sidetracked by actually offensive wedding website content, I started out my last blog post about this week’s Knot newsletter.

The Knot’s newsletter, per usual, also offended me. But only because things that don’t make any sense offend me.

This week the Knot is showcasing “20 ‘crazy’ color combos that actually work.”  CRAZY, you guys.  Like for people who see colors as numbers, these colors are the square roots of negative integers!

The slideshow header reads, “There are certain colors that we all know match: black and white, blue and silver or purple and gold.”  Wait… what?

Purple and gold?  REALLY?

[Colour Lovers]

Let’s ask two of the most hated men in sports:¹

[source]

[source]

Well, I guess Minnesota based/originating² sports franchises can’t be wrong, right?  So I’m just going to take the Knot’s word for it that purple and gold are one of the classic color pairings.

Let’s move on to the color combinations that are crazy… crazy like a FOX… a fox that ate a box of crayons!

Crazy color combo #3: Peppermint and Aqua

Peppermint is a green leafy plant.

[source]

Peppermint on the Knot, however, is red. I guess because of candy canes? No matter.  Point is: Red and light blue is about as crazy a combination as peanut butter and honey.  Like, it’s not the most traditional palette in the world, but in the world of weddings, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.

Crazy Color Combo # 8: Gray and Lemon

Again, this color combination is so popular over the last few years’ of hip weddings it is pretty absurd to post it in 2011 as some kind of outre suggestion.  Plus I’m 95% sure we talked about gray and yellow as symbolically paired in a high school English lit class.  I think they were paired to represent despair, though.  So maybe it would be an usual selection for a wedding scheme.  If not for… you know… it being a huge fad.

Crazy Color Combo # 10: Eggplant and Gobstopper Pink

Also known as pink and purple. Which you’ve probably never seen together. As long as you’ve never set foot in the Girl Ghetto Aisle of a Toys R Us.

[source]

Crazy Color Combo # 17: Chocolate and Vanilla

RACIST!

Color Combo # 20: Bubblegum and Grassy Green

The inspiration board for this pairing shows a lot of flowers. I wonder why.

Well, I don’t know about you guys, but my mind is BLOWN.  Those crazy color combos are changing the way I think about the world.  What if what I think “red” is has nothing to do with how you see it? What if neither of us is right? What if nothing exists outside of our perceptions? Dude… I am TRIPPING.

¹I’m from Pittsburgh. I know from reviled athletes.
²So I just fact-checked this, and I guess the Lakers grew out of a defunct NBL team in Detroit? But I had never even heard of the NBL before this very moment.  And I don’t know how to re-write this sentence to make it make sense.  Look, point is, purple and gold are important to Minnesota for some reason.  I don’t really want to deny them, because they are so nice up there and they have such awesome accents.

More on Blush and Bashful

I have wedding colors.  They are sort of arbitrary.  They say nothing about me. They say nothing about Collin.  But so far, I’m glad I have them.

It’s worse than just having colors.  I have colors and I can’t describe them without at least a complete sentence.  I remember when I picked up my first wedding magazine I laughed my ass off at some editorial note about the important distinction between “tangerine” and “orange” and how one might look better with turquoise and the other might “pop” off lavender, or some such.

I have bought into that nonsense, and now I have wedding colors.  Here’s how it happened:

If I have a “signature color” it is brown, but I don’t really want brown as a wedding color, for a very stupid reason: Collin’s sister got married last summer with her bridesmaids in brown, and I want our wedding to look different.  There is that reason, and an even dumber reason, which is that I’m pretty sure if I asked The Knot they would tell me that brown is sooooooooooooooo five weddings ago.  Embarrassing, yet still influential.

So when asked, and asked, and asked and asked what colors I was thinking about for the wedding, I started to say gold.  Gold appeals to me for all the same reasons that brown does, but it has the bonus of being shiny and festive!  People would nod and say, “gold and what?”  I would try to change the subject.

Then I started to think about how I have a ton of people in the Bridal Hootenanny, and that I really want them to be identifiable as Guests of Honor, and also look good all standing near each other in the ceremony.  I figured the best way to accomplish this would be to provide a color palette.

I asked Collin about his favorite color.  “Blue.  No, wait. Green.  Mmmmm.  Blue.  But awesome blue, not lame blue.” I looked elsewhere for color guidance.

Martha Stewart told me I should love pink and gold together.  I don’t.  The Knot thinks yellow and gold are a “pretty color combo.”  I think someone with a great eye for design could make yellow and gold look good together, but my eye for design has cataracts.  Plus I suspect certain friends of mine would punch me in the face if I asked them to wear yellow.  If yellow were spiritually important to me, I would probably risk the face punch.  But I don’t care about yellow, at all, so I’m going in a different direction.

Although really, I don’t care about any colors.  And yet, I’m about to describe the color palette for my wedding in enough characters you can just barely tweet it:

Our palette is mixed metallics, with an emphasis on gold and copper, with very little silver except as accents.  Pewter is ok, as is bronze.

Do I have any emotional attachment to metallics? Nope.  Will our guests learn something about us from the color scheme of our wedding? Maybe they will learn that we’re kind of lazy.  I hope, however, that having this color scheme in mind will function as a heuristic for everything from invitations to bridesmaid/Bridal Hootenanny attire.  And I hope that it makes everything look a little bit more “together” without requiring me to have any design skills.

So, do you have colors? Were they easy to pick, or did you find yourself putting on a blindfold and pulling crayons out of a box?

The Avocado Fridge Problem

I don’t want my wedding to look dated.

Wait.  Clarification:  if my wedding looks dated to my children, well, of course it does.  If it looks dated to a friend getting married in ten years, fine.  But I don’t want it to look dated at the moment it is happening to the people who are there.

I realize worrying about this is a waste of life.  I don’t understand wedding trends, at all.  I just pulled up The Knot’s lists of hot wedding trends for 2010, 2009, and 2008.  Half the items are the same throughout the years (variations on “rustic festive”), but others insist that something is the new something (e.g., “steel gray is the new chocolate brown”), implying that if you pick the old something, your guests will judge you for it.

So, here’s my problem.  I started consuming wedding images about five months ago.  In that time, I fell in love with certain design elements (like I mentioned the other day, the birdcage veil).  I assume those have been trendy for a while now, or they wouldn’t have trickled down into mainstream wedding literature.  My wedding isn’t for at least a year.  If I wear a birdcage veil, will I look like someone on vacay from three years ago?

If you have an Avocado fridge in your kitchen left over from the 1970s, there’s something charming about it (I’m talking aesthetics here, people, let’s just assume it still works and you aren’t regularly suffering from food poisoning).   If you buy a new avocado fridge today, it could have the “retro-chic” appeal of a milk glass cake stand, a  Knot-approved wedding trend for 2010 (which I’m guessing means something that’s been a staple of bloggy weddings since I was still in undergrad).

But what if you bought someone an avocado fridge in 1982?  Wouldn’t you be much more likely to get hit with the Present Face?  There’s a dead zone in the continuum from original to trendy to ubiquitous onward to retro-chic: played out.  And as much as I don’t want that for my wedding, I don’t have the time, or energy, and least of all the savvy to figure it out.