Don't tell Paul, but I'm not getting married.
Cold feet don't just happen in January.
No, they happen year-round. My fiance has this terrible habit of getting a toothache before weddings. He is miserable when he has them, just inconsolably cranky. Both of his kids suffered through his toothaches for their respective nuptials. Knowing this, I jokingly referred to this as his cold teeth.
Now it's been a few weeks and his doses of amoxicillin have done the trick and he's feeling great again. But my tiny fragment of a joke left me wondering about how I'm handling my premarital anxiety.
A few weeks ago, I would have said superb. I've been lifting weights and using our elliptical machine at home for stress relief and weight loss because I gained a great deal of stress and weight when this global pandemic started.
But now... prepare to watch me spiral.
I tried on my wedding dress and, of course, it doesn't fit. (Do they ever?) Alterations had to be done, but what do you do in the midst of a provincial lockdown? No tailor is available. I almost wish I didn't try on the gown. Boobs exposed, I look like a bride only from the waist down. I belong on a pole the waist up. Perhaps not one that is well frequented, either.
I tried to be positive about it, that - yay! - I had successfully lost weight. But I was absolutely shocked and, of course, I lost it wrong. Who knew such a thing could be done.
A week ago, I checked in on all the experts who were going to make me look halfway decent for a day. And lo and behold, my makeup artist had quit and the whole establishment is closed anyway. The lady at reception told me that I would need to bring in my makeup, of which I owned none. Yes, past tense. Owned.
You don't have to tell Chelsey Cosh twice to get her shit in order. I now own one of everything and have watched YouTube tutorials until it turned out pretty okay in my humble opinion. Not spectacular or bridal or anything in that ballpark. But decent.
I will be practicing again next weekend, despite hating the feel of it on my skin. So, I can safely say I must double the alloted time on my wedding day for me to do my makeup half as well as the professional. I'm aiming for half. Okay, that's too ambitious - a third will do.
And that's if we can even get married. Currently, I cannot get a marriage licence, the only document I need to legally perform this hoedown - my appointment for late April was cancelled by the government and the shutdown has been extended at least until the final weeks of May. That gives me June and the beginning of July.
Are you feeling frustrated yet?
If it isn't already abundantly clear, I do not advise getting married during a pandemic.
I don't really advise doing anything this year.
I've been trying to remain goal-oriented this year to give life purpose. 2020 was a surprise, but 2021 I will seize back a modicum of control.
And, boy, do I mean a modicum.
It may seem like small potatoes, but the Oscars were coming up and I'd done my level best to watch as many of the nominees as possible. It's been tricky, what with closures of cinemas, but I've strived to get 'er done.
These are not ambitious goals, but let's aim for the achievable.
Unfortunately, time was not on my side and I didn't even get close to what I was hoping for. Bear in mind, I'm a completionist. I watch the shorts, the foreign language features, all things animated ... but not this year. This year didn't have enough days in the week for me to accomplish this most minor of goals.
I'm turning thirty this year, and since I am the planner in my circle, I am fairly sure I will not be having any kind of birthday celebration. Right now birthdays are pretty much against the law.
One of my friends is a nurse dealing with a mental health crisis because of an idiot premier who decided to add more restrictions to a stay-at-home order in response to growing numbers but doesn't accept federal help or medical advice about where all the damn cases are cropping up. Let's just throw darts at the problem and see what sticks.
Anyway my friend - let's call her Nurse Angel because she is both - is currently reading a self-help book entitled The Untethered Soul and I'm hoping she's having more luck than me because "untethered" is an understatement.
Everything is spinning out of control, in my humble opinion, and yet I've been able to get both my father and fiance vaccinated based on age and hotspot postal codes (respectively). A week ago, I watched my father walk through the screening tent with glee and proceed to get his jab with both middle fingers in the air, whooping like he's going to a rock concert.
Boy, do I miss Rock concerts. I think I may still have deferred tickets to REO Speedwagon.
Anyway, despite this positive news, I can't help but feel glum because I cannot get myself vaccinated on account of being too damn young despite working overtime throughout all of this bullshit as a frontline essential worker. But because I don't fit in the right category as designated by the aforementioned idiot premier, I don't get to feel a little bit safer. I continue to shake with fear.
Alas, mass unemployment plagues the country, so I should shut my mouth because at least I have a damn job.
I feel selfish. Yet another byproduct of this spiral.
Oh, and after weeks and weeks of delaying the inevitable, I listened to the notification on my phone warning me that my phone's SD card had an issue that needed fixing yesterday.
Full disclosure: I cheaped out when I bought the card in the first place. It was too good a deal to pass up, and I had to buy two: one for me and one for the fiance. So, frugality played a huge part in my decision.
Anyway, I backed up all my data and anyone who had ever had to do that knows it's a massive pain in the ass. It takes far too much time and is rife with arduous sorting of documents and photos and videos. You have to decide whether you truly need that vacation video from Cuba where you drank all the mojitos and danced in the middle of the hotel's live entertainment performance. So I kept it just in case.
But at the end of this process, I hit, yes, please reformat.
And the corrupted card just didn't. Instead it sabotaged my phone's power and, since phone is my third appendage, my keeper of all things important now that my memory fails me on the regular, I lost it. On and off and on and off it went.
Finally, I ripped the case off the phone, dug out the magic pin that pops open the SD card holder, seized the damn card, and chucked it on the kitchen counter with a few expletives and a lot of tears. I guess I will have to delete that video after all.
And to top all of these layers of problems that sit like blankets on top of each other, overlapping at the edges, I heard from across the pond today that my grandmother is dying.
My grandmother who lived with me until the age of 9 and told me one day my name would be in lights.
My grandmother who always supported me and gave me the courage to just be me and know that is more than enough.
My grandmother whom I love more than anything.
And I cannot see her.
And I cannot begin to describe the pain.
And all the little things that bothered me before seem meaningless.
No amount of four-letter words are going to ease the pain and moving throughout the day, just grappling through each motion, feels like a betrayal, as if I'm not paying enough attention to the person that matters most, the thing that holds more weight than anything possibly could. Life feels bipolar, as if being anything other than a mess is confusing, but I have no choice but to pull it together.
Life makes no sense.
And maybe it never will make sense. Because it's actually death that makes no sense to me.
When I collapsed at the end of the day on more than one occasion, if I'm being frank, drowning in a puddle of my own tears and wanting to watch Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann turn 40 instead of some foreign language short about depressing subject matter that I did not have the composure to contemplate right now, I felt like my future husband was there for me. He picked me up again and again. He held me together. He picked up the takeout. He drove me to wherever we needed to go. He even filled our backyard with flowers to remind me that there is light and there is colour.
So cold teeth, feet, arms, legs, mouth and nose be damned.
No, they happen year-round. My fiance has this terrible habit of getting a toothache before weddings. He is miserable when he has them, just inconsolably cranky. Both of his kids suffered through his toothaches for their respective nuptials. Knowing this, I jokingly referred to this as his cold teeth.
Now it's been a few weeks and his doses of amoxicillin have done the trick and he's feeling great again. But my tiny fragment of a joke left me wondering about how I'm handling my premarital anxiety.
A few weeks ago, I would have said superb. I've been lifting weights and using our elliptical machine at home for stress relief and weight loss because I gained a great deal of stress and weight when this global pandemic started.
But now... prepare to watch me spiral.
I tried on my wedding dress and, of course, it doesn't fit. (Do they ever?) Alterations had to be done, but what do you do in the midst of a provincial lockdown? No tailor is available. I almost wish I didn't try on the gown. Boobs exposed, I look like a bride only from the waist down. I belong on a pole the waist up. Perhaps not one that is well frequented, either.
I tried to be positive about it, that - yay! - I had successfully lost weight. But I was absolutely shocked and, of course, I lost it wrong. Who knew such a thing could be done.
A week ago, I checked in on all the experts who were going to make me look halfway decent for a day. And lo and behold, my makeup artist had quit and the whole establishment is closed anyway. The lady at reception told me that I would need to bring in my makeup, of which I owned none. Yes, past tense. Owned.
You don't have to tell Chelsey Cosh twice to get her shit in order. I now own one of everything and have watched YouTube tutorials until it turned out pretty okay in my humble opinion. Not spectacular or bridal or anything in that ballpark. But decent.
I will be practicing again next weekend, despite hating the feel of it on my skin. So, I can safely say I must double the alloted time on my wedding day for me to do my makeup half as well as the professional. I'm aiming for half. Okay, that's too ambitious - a third will do.
And that's if we can even get married. Currently, I cannot get a marriage licence, the only document I need to legally perform this hoedown - my appointment for late April was cancelled by the government and the shutdown has been extended at least until the final weeks of May. That gives me June and the beginning of July.
Are you feeling frustrated yet?
If it isn't already abundantly clear, I do not advise getting married during a pandemic.
I don't really advise doing anything this year.
I've been trying to remain goal-oriented this year to give life purpose. 2020 was a surprise, but 2021 I will seize back a modicum of control.
And, boy, do I mean a modicum.
It may seem like small potatoes, but the Oscars were coming up and I'd done my level best to watch as many of the nominees as possible. It's been tricky, what with closures of cinemas, but I've strived to get 'er done.
These are not ambitious goals, but let's aim for the achievable.
Unfortunately, time was not on my side and I didn't even get close to what I was hoping for. Bear in mind, I'm a completionist. I watch the shorts, the foreign language features, all things animated ... but not this year. This year didn't have enough days in the week for me to accomplish this most minor of goals.
I'm turning thirty this year, and since I am the planner in my circle, I am fairly sure I will not be having any kind of birthday celebration. Right now birthdays are pretty much against the law.
One of my friends is a nurse dealing with a mental health crisis because of an idiot premier who decided to add more restrictions to a stay-at-home order in response to growing numbers but doesn't accept federal help or medical advice about where all the damn cases are cropping up. Let's just throw darts at the problem and see what sticks.
Anyway my friend - let's call her Nurse Angel because she is both - is currently reading a self-help book entitled The Untethered Soul and I'm hoping she's having more luck than me because "untethered" is an understatement.
Everything is spinning out of control, in my humble opinion, and yet I've been able to get both my father and fiance vaccinated based on age and hotspot postal codes (respectively). A week ago, I watched my father walk through the screening tent with glee and proceed to get his jab with both middle fingers in the air, whooping like he's going to a rock concert.
Boy, do I miss Rock concerts. I think I may still have deferred tickets to REO Speedwagon.
Anyway, despite this positive news, I can't help but feel glum because I cannot get myself vaccinated on account of being too damn young despite working overtime throughout all of this bullshit as a frontline essential worker. But because I don't fit in the right category as designated by the aforementioned idiot premier, I don't get to feel a little bit safer. I continue to shake with fear.
Alas, mass unemployment plagues the country, so I should shut my mouth because at least I have a damn job.
I feel selfish. Yet another byproduct of this spiral.
Oh, and after weeks and weeks of delaying the inevitable, I listened to the notification on my phone warning me that my phone's SD card had an issue that needed fixing yesterday.
Full disclosure: I cheaped out when I bought the card in the first place. It was too good a deal to pass up, and I had to buy two: one for me and one for the fiance. So, frugality played a huge part in my decision.
Anyway, I backed up all my data and anyone who had ever had to do that knows it's a massive pain in the ass. It takes far too much time and is rife with arduous sorting of documents and photos and videos. You have to decide whether you truly need that vacation video from Cuba where you drank all the mojitos and danced in the middle of the hotel's live entertainment performance. So I kept it just in case.
But at the end of this process, I hit, yes, please reformat.
And the corrupted card just didn't. Instead it sabotaged my phone's power and, since phone is my third appendage, my keeper of all things important now that my memory fails me on the regular, I lost it. On and off and on and off it went.
Finally, I ripped the case off the phone, dug out the magic pin that pops open the SD card holder, seized the damn card, and chucked it on the kitchen counter with a few expletives and a lot of tears. I guess I will have to delete that video after all.
And to top all of these layers of problems that sit like blankets on top of each other, overlapping at the edges, I heard from across the pond today that my grandmother is dying.
My grandmother who lived with me until the age of 9 and told me one day my name would be in lights.
My grandmother who always supported me and gave me the courage to just be me and know that is more than enough.
My grandmother whom I love more than anything.
And I cannot see her.
And I cannot begin to describe the pain.
And all the little things that bothered me before seem meaningless.
No amount of four-letter words are going to ease the pain and moving throughout the day, just grappling through each motion, feels like a betrayal, as if I'm not paying enough attention to the person that matters most, the thing that holds more weight than anything possibly could. Life feels bipolar, as if being anything other than a mess is confusing, but I have no choice but to pull it together.
Life makes no sense.
And maybe it never will make sense. Because it's actually death that makes no sense to me.
When I collapsed at the end of the day on more than one occasion, if I'm being frank, drowning in a puddle of my own tears and wanting to watch Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann turn 40 instead of some foreign language short about depressing subject matter that I did not have the composure to contemplate right now, I felt like my future husband was there for me. He picked me up again and again. He held me together. He picked up the takeout. He drove me to wherever we needed to go. He even filled our backyard with flowers to remind me that there is light and there is colour.
So cold teeth, feet, arms, legs, mouth and nose be damned.
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