I Might Even Needlepoint It Onto A Pillow.

So, a bit after we got engaged, I went over to Offbeat Bride and joined the Tribe, the forum for fans and followers of OBB who are actively planning their weddings. Reading the blog and forum posts have already helped me start a little post of my own in my head, but today I got help from an unexpected source. Two, actually.

I forget why it came up today, but CE and Shift AB started talking about getting married...or specifically, how they don't want to get married if they can help it. Actually, AB just doesn't want to get married yet, but their point was still the same: they didn't want to be tied down. They're both in committed relationships and don't plan on changing that at all, but they still see a wedding ring as a noose. AB said, almost verbatim, "There are still so many things I want to do!"

I said this then, and I'll say this now, and I'll say it over and over until my tongue falls out of my head, and I feel so strongly about it I'm even going to go over the top and bold this sucker: If getting married means you no longer get to do the things you want to do with your life, you're marrying the wrong person.

AB conceded this, then said that usually getting married led to people assuming that Family Life would begin immediately thereafter, namely Having A Bunch of Kids. Also, "people" usually included the bride, whether the groom is aware of it or not.

Let me get this out of the way now, for anyone who was wondering: Ryan and I are not having kids anytime soon. We both want kids, at least two but maybe three, and we're not putting it off because we're hesitant about that. To be honest, I'm getting as bad as my mother when I see babies in public, to the point where Ryan will start quietly ticking at me until I punch him in the arm. It's just going to be a long time before we can.

The same year we're getting married, Ryan is planning on going back to school to get a Master's in Education--hell, he'll theoretically be starting the program a month before the wedding. The program is about three years long, and it's as likely as not that he won't be able to do a full- or even part-time job at the same time. We may not even be able to afford an apartment, let alone a baby, even if I have a full-time job (and sell photography on the side and whatever else I'll be doing for the next 18 months to save for the wedding). Then, after he graduates, he has to find a good, secure job, and we have to get financially secure enough to have our own place. Ideally a house, but that's unlikely.

So: marriage, diploma, career, home. THEN babies.

If I hear one squeak about babies between the exchanging of the rings and the acquiring of a lease or mortgage, there will be blood.

Glad we have that straight.

And no, this isn't the blog post that's slowly forming in my head, which is tentatively titled Taking Back The Wedding. This is just stuff.

I'm exhausted and frustrated with life in general and I really wish I didn't have work tomorrow but I do so poop.

Blah Blah Blah ARGH Blah.

Today was a pretty good day...ignoring the baby barista, who I mentioned in yesterday's entry, who just annoys and frustrates me to my very last nerve.

Ergh.

Tomorrow is my day off! I am so happy for this! Whee!

The best part of my day is when I can do something little for a customer. Yesterday, a man didn't have enough for a grande iced mocha, but he did have enough for a grande iced latte. I made him the mocha anyway, for not getting angry at me about the price as SO MANY OTHER PEOPLE DO.

Today, I gave a regular a grande coffee instead of a tall. He comes in a lot, and looks like he has a lot of trouble...exhaustion lines on his face, sunburned, bad skin, dusty clothes. I have the vibe that he's either homeless or "just" impoverished. He only ever gets coffee, except when he has a treat receipt, then he can afford something a little nicer, like a frappuccino. He's always very polite and nice to me, and I worry for him, so I try and "supersize" when I can to brighten his day.

For the most part I "reward" people for not being angry, not being jerks, or not giving me attitude when other people readily will. Call it a Good Human reward. :)

Off to food!

yipyipyipmochayipyipyipfrappucinnoyipyipvanillayip!

Nothing like reading about major upheavals in friends' lives to make you re-examine yours. I'm not pregnant, unemployed, or newly single...my life is actually pretty steady, if unexciting and toeing the line of soul-killingly dull. Yay?

Today was...up and down. Newest coworker is a puppy. He follows us around and yips and doesn't want to take things seriously and uggggh. On the other side, he's a good kid. Wants to learn, wants to help...just doesn't ever react seriously to being told to do something, or how to do something.

And when I say that he's a good kid, I mean that...the kid part especially. He's eighteen. I have never felt so old in my life. I know my parents, relatives, and "older" friends are all rolling their eyes at my right now, but G'AH. I haven't seen that much energy since my junior year of high school, and I really hope it wasn't as annoying to anyone then as his is to me now. It's just...the lack of maturity--real maturity, not just no-more-telling-fart-jokes maturity, because come on, farts are funny--is startling and impossible to avoid.

Throw in the next-youngest partner, who is 19, and have her trying to teach him things, when she takes crap from No One and he's Mr. Snarky Pants and they're both working drive-thru and aaaaaaa IS IT TIME FOR MY BREAK YET.

But anyway. Good kid. Just...hard to take for 6 1/2 hours.

Oh, and he's from a right-wing, Republican, Christian, home-schooling, seven-kids-parents-still-together "nuclear" family. He thinks "hippie" is a dirty word, and I haven't even mentioned the bisexual Pagan part yet. FUNTIMES.

The day was pretty busy. This is good and bad. Good because we did pretty well on tips, and the day went pretty quickly, and I like it when it's busy and there's a line of drinks on the bar and I'm just knockin' 'em down and kickin' butt. Bad because it was exhausting. Also, I didn't get my first ten minute break for three hours, my lunch for 6 hours, or my last ten...ever (for the record, the first ten is supposed to be around two hours in, your lunch fourish hours in, last ten two hours or so after that). BJ and Sameh have this happen to them all the time, because they work at stores that are far and away busier than mine, but it was still exhausting. And boy was I starving by the time lunch rolled around.

Tomorrow is hit-or-miss, first Saturday since school came back on with no home game, so we'll see how busy it is or isn't. Sunday is my day off, and I am counting the minutes.

Next week is basically the same as this week, working pre-closing shifts all week. I have Thursday and Friday off, so I'll have a "weekend," which is nice, even if I'm hoping someone will switch me so I can have Wednesday off at the same time as Ryan...

...that's a long sentence, and I think it's time to stop typing now. Until tomorrow!

And Marie Claire can go fuck herself.

I informed Ryan this past week that if there is only one thing that will be outlawed in our house when we have kids, that one thing will be fashion magazines. Alcohol, cocaine, rat poison, AK-47, fine. Cosmo, HELL NO.

Any magazine that even subtly insinuates that you must have a certain weight, height, size, shape, hair color, eye color, skin color, sexual preference, diet, wardrobe, exercise routine, pet, car, job, personal life, etc or else suffer the social consequences of being Weird is just not allowed in a 1/2-mile radius of my impressionable child, especially if that child is a girl. I refuse to allow any literature that portrays "weird" as anything other than "not mainstream". Weird is not bad, it's just different, and different isn't bad either, dammit.

Watch almost any TV show or advertisement, any movie, open up almost any magazine, and you'll see Beautiful People doing Cool Things. I'm in my twenties, and I still want to be that Beautiful Person playing with that Cool Toy; young children have no chance. Everywhere you look, you're being shown that if you don't look like This, you're just plain Doing It Wrong.

Just yesterday, I saw a Benefiber commercial on TV featuring a Beautiful Person. She was tall, blonde, slender, with big boobs and a teeny waist, with perfect skin and teeth. She was dressed in a white outfit that only covered her breasts and legs, and that just barely. For a FIBER SUPPLEMENT. If you need sex to sell your fiber supplement, then YOU'RE just plain Doing It Wrong.

Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Elle, Seventeen, even "health/fitness" magazines like Shape are all about one thing: selling a product, which means selling an image, which means selling the idea that you're ugly and stupid unless you fit that image. If you go to Cosmo right now, one of the first things you'll see is a big box with "Want a Guy To Follow You Anywhere?", "Fierce Footwear", and "Why Stop at One Orgasm?", plus boxes with "Guess the Sex Position!" and "Sex Position of the Day!" and a man with his shirt off. Even with the aforementioned Shape, a relatively safe magazine focusing on fitness, health and exercise, the first thing you'll see is an advertisement for an appetite suppressant--because healthy women don't have appetites, right?

And every single magazine has tons of pictures of women--in the articles, in the ads, on the covers--that fit into the mold: big breasts, teeny waist, perfect skin and teeth, toned everything. Nowhere do you see a stretch mark, a pimple, a split end, a mis-matched pair of breasts, a gray hair (unless it's an ad marketed to the Mature demographic), a broken fingernail, or anyone above a size 6. And that's just unrealistic, dammit.

Real People have boobs ranging Honkin' to Non-Existent, and that's fine. Real People have skin that's smooth as satin or pocked with scars and blemishes, and that's fine. Real People have blonde hair, brown hair, black hair, red hair, silver hair, white hair, pink hair, blue hair, no hair, soft hair, kinky hair, hair with split ends, and that's fine. Real People are shaped like hourglasses, pears, upside-down pears, triangles, upside-down triangles, sticks, squares, and circles, and THAT'S fine.

You want to see a perfect body? A perfect person? Look in the mirror. You are who you are, you are WHAT you are. Some people just aren't born to have six-pack abs, or smooth hair, or porcelain skin, or an hourglass figure. And there is absofuckinglutely NOTHING wrong with that, there is nothing wrong with YOU if that's how you are. Walk down the street, and you won't see supermodels--you'll see real fucking people, with real fucking bodies.

These magazines insist that the only things that matter in life are (a) fashionable clothes, (b) hot guys, (c) sex, and (d) obtaining all of the above by looking "hot". I'm not apologizing for refusing to let that shit in the same house as impressionable children, and let's face it, we're impressionable children right up until we're 30. Then we become insecure adults, and that's a whole new set of problems.

If my daughter whines and complains and wants to read fashion magazines, fine. She can buy them herself when she's 18. The only way she's allowed to before then is if she shows that she knows herself well enough, and is confident enough, to not be influenced by them (plus saves up her allowance to pay for it herself). I want my child to figure herself out in her own time, through her own experiences, using her own powers of deduction and reasoning and no one else's, not even mine.

I know: I say that now, but just wait until the time comes and little Lucy is being SUCH a whiney little bitch about how all my friends get to read Cosmo, MOTHER, why can't I, you suck SO MUCH, I hate you FOREVER, and then we'll see how well I can stand my ground against the raw power of Teenage Girl Angst.

Bring it.