The Actual It

            Today was awesome. Insane, but awesome. My brother now has a wife. Who is awesome. And comes with awesome family.

            I don’t really think much more can be said, other than today was just one of those days that can’t really be categorised with any others because it just so entirely outranks any sense of awesome that I’ve ever before experienced. Which is pretty impressive really. Everything from the almost military operation at the hairdressers’ this morning, to the repeated realisation that this is how my hair will actually look for my brother’s wedding, this time of trying on my dress isn’t just trying it on, but me actually wearing it for my brothers wedding, this is the actual it, all the way through to seeing everybody at the church, the service where the preacher lost a page of his notes, but made it through ok anyway, and then on to the reception in the evening, and hearing the speeches and trying not to burst with pride for my family.

            I really couldn’t ask for anything better. Except perhaps to also be given an ability to put that into a sentence that doesn’t splurge across eight lines of the page...

Brothers, sisters-in-law, and sisters-in-law squared?

I’ve already kind of covered the part where this wedding feels weird because it’s my sibling being decidedly grown up, and that’s just a little unsettling, but I haven’t covered the part where, because he’s my sibling, not just a friend, I now get a whole load of extra family. Which is awesome, because I love family (awwwww). Obviously I recognise that some families function differently to others, and that some aren’t exactly brimming with happiness, fluffiness and goodwill for all, but I seem to have been blessed with a rather sweet deal, family-wise. And I’m increasingly discovering that this extends to the new family that I’m gaining tomorrow as well.

As today was the day before the day, there was a pretty full schedule of things that needed doing, from cleaning the church to decorating cupcakes. But unlike most things involving my family, it was really well organised, with us all split into teams with a list of tasks so we all knew what we needed to do and how to do it. Amazing. Even more amazing though was how welcomed into the home of our new family we all felt. You hear nightmare stories of monstrously problematic in-laws and such things, but there was nothing even vaguely resembling such a figure. Only warmth and welcome.

To be honest, I was probably the most problematic person by a long shot, because I managed to be rather ill this morning, which sucked for me, but meant that my team, consisting of me and the bride’s sister, Cat, was reduced from two to one, and Cat’s workload was doubled. But they refused to let me feel as if I was letting the side down (despite the fact that I clearly was), and Cat soldiered on while Laura, the bride, set me up in her own bed upstairs with a sick bucket. Not exactly bridezilla and the terrifying in-laws.

And the story gets better. Having slept for most of the morning, I was feeling a little better, and was well enough by the afternoon to go with Cat to a friend’s house whom she was going to be pet-sitting for over the next week so she needed to pick up the house-key. And we’re not just talking about your standard pets; this friend has not only a cat, two guinea pigs and some fish, but a pair of ridiculously cute tortoises. As Cat drove us to their house, my excitement about a pair of pet tortoises grew to levels probably higher than is rational, but it fit with the day and with the joy of not feeling so sick anymore.

We spent about an hour or so at the friend’s house, just hanging out, chatting, and of course being introduced to all the animals; happy times. We also managed to forget to collect the key that we went to collect in the first place, so Cat’s friend had to drop it round later, but hey - there’s only so many things you can remember in the presence of tortoises. After having spent some good, relaxing time with the tortoises, I felt pretty much completely better and was able to contribute to the work of our team again in the evening. The conclusion I came to from this was that tortoises have magical healing powers.

Before long, my brothers and my parents went back to the house that they were staying at and left me here as part of the bridal party. It was strange saying ‘bye’ to them, knowing that the next time I would see them would be at the actual wedding. I remember thinking, ‘I’m glad he’s marrying into this family’.

We all got takeaway pizza and Laura, Cat and I practiced make-up for the big day. Well, Cat practiced putting it on me because, as I may have mentioned, I’m not exactly an expert with the stuff. We tried to work out what the terms of our relationship are: clearly Laura and I will be sisters-in-law, and obviously Laura and Cat are already sisters, so Cat and I are…..sisters-in-law squared? That’s what we decided, anyway.

A good day; mental, but good. And now to try and sleep before what will, no doubt be an absolutely manic but awesome day tomorrow. Hah.

Truth Universally Acknowledged

            I was out in the city centre this afternoon doing last minute, pre-wedding shopping with mum and dad: for me, a flower for my hair; for dad, a tie (it’s a very good job I was there when he was looking for a decent tie, because the ones he was looking at, well….just not the right colours…and yes that’s ‘colours’ in the plural because it was spotty….). I also wanted to buy a simple silver ring, because I always wear rings but none of mine are exactly bridesmaid material, so I wanted to buy one or two so that my fingers wouldn’t feel lonely and empty all day…. Don’t worry, I’m aware that this is weird.

            Anyway, I was hanging around in the jewellery section of Debenhams (I actually had to look up how to spell that….how odd), waiting to meet up with my parents again and increasingly coming to the conclusion that Debenhams is waaaaay out of my financial league (the cheapest rings there were around £50; I ended up buying mine from Hennie’s, where you could buy 10 for about £3…). As I stood there, obviously looking dazed and confused by the finery around me, I was pounced on by one of those make-up-sales-people that hang out in places like Debenhams.

            To say that I’m not a person who wears make-up regularly would be a bit of an understatement. I don’t own any, and I probably have only marginally more skill at applying it than my spotty-tie-for-his-son’s-wedding father does. Well, ok, I’ve probably got a lot more skill at make-up application than dad does, but that’s more a reflection on dad than any suggestion that I know how to use that stuff that many girls (and I guess some guys?) spend quality time poking themselves in the face with for fun and frolics. This is all just explanation for why I literally burst out laughing when the make-up sales woman approached me, a hopeful glimmer in her eye.

            My excuse for what happened next is that it’d been a pretty surreal day already, what with my ridiculous early morning for no reason, the repeated realisation that the wedding is the day after tomorrow, and then of course having my hair cut at the quite-posh-hairdresser’s where the bridal party is going on the morning of the actual wedding. This combination left me feeling very-slightly-rather insane, and kind of how I imagine being high feels like. So, when the make-up sales woman approached me, I decided to just go with it. I gave her fair warning that I was pretty much a hopeless case and she wouldn’t be particularly successful in her attempts to make a customer out of me (as if my explosive laughter and disbelief weren’t warning enough), but it turned out that she was bored and just wanted something to do, so she didn’t really mind.

            She led me away, still vaguely protesting and with the occasional maniacal giggle (is that a thing? I know you can have maniacal laughs, but can you giggle maniacally? Let’s go with yes, yes you can), toward her little stall thingy, and got me to sit on one of those funky stool things. She talked me through what she was going to do (you know, so that I could replicate the effect myself at a later date…should I so wish….I don’t need to say anything, do I?), you know: moisturising and skin-invigorating and all that jazz. She then proceeded to enthusiastically stroke my face with her make-up brush which was filled with an orange-ish cream which, I won’t lie, did distress me a little – I may not care enough about my face to put make up on it, but I’d rather not look orange (don’t worry though, it turned out alright – she knew what she was doing…phew!...).

Then came the bit which made her give up on me altogether. She asked me how that made my skin feel. Fresh? Invigorated? Vaguely damp? Oh, no wait, that last one was what I answered with. Her face kind of fell, and before she could master her features again I saw a kind of bewildered pity cross them. Apparently no one had ever described their skin, post-swabbing by this amazing moisturise-y invigorate-y stuff, as ‘vaguely damp’ before. She tried to laugh it off, but I think deep down her heart was breaking for me.

I was reminded of so many instances in my smallish-person days, when I wanted to be like my brothers so I had ‘boy’s haircuts’ and wore ‘boy’s clothes’ and did ‘boy things’. I had in fact been looking at photos of those days with my middle brother, Michael (not the one getting married, that’s Stephen) only the night before as we searched for pictures of the groom in his smallish-person years. How many times in my life have I earned those looks of slightly awed pity from my female friends as they try to comprehend my lack of desire for covering my face in strange chemicals or fighting the battle to control my hair. It appears that I still have the power to earn them; some things will never change. One of these things which will never change is that I frequently agree with Jane Austen, but rarely with Mrs. Bennet: it is often much more fun to buck a trend than to bow to it.

Good morning, Sunshine!

            *Author’s note (is that phrase appropriate here?....it doesn’t really matter that much does it…): because of such awesome things as the wedding, there have been many blog-worthy musings while I’ve been away from the computer, so I wrote them on paper (a strange concept I know) so now they’re all going up at once….this probably doesn’t make much difference to your life, but that tiny bit of OCD in me (don’t deny, we all have one, it just comes out in different ways and measures) compels me to tell you…*

Don’t you hate it when your body wakes you up at 05.40 for no particular reason. Especially when you have nothing planned for that day until 13.00. There’s something endlessly frustrating about knowing that your tired body could be sleeping. Right now. It’s only awake just to spite you. And then you’re on to the potentially insane, just-woken-up argument with and/or suspicion of yourself: your own body is against you. Ooo-ooo-ooo.

            But thankfully, after enough frustration and random tossing and turning, you get slapped in the face by full-awakeness, and the temporary insanity fades away in the echoes of that slap. You tell yourself, ‘Hey, this just means I’ll have more hours in my day’, and proceed to bustle through your morning routine, trying to inject a little extra energy and enthusiasm into washing and dressing because you realise that you have a real opportunity to be productive (which we all know is every recent graduate’s favourite thing…).

            But here comes the part that’s really annoying: I’m not home at the moment. I’m in a different city, staying in a friend’s friend’s house for my brother’s wedding, so I didn’t really bring things to be productive with. I don’t even have my laptop. In fact, that which I’m writing now is only in a notebook which happened to be shoved in my bag. So the closest to productive that I can get to with my 6 or so hours of extra time is writing a draft version of a random blog entry, made even more ridiculous by the fact that I don’t exactly do draft versions of stuff I write for fun…. Wow.

            *15 minutes down, 5hrs 45mins to go….where’s that book?*

Borrowed, blue, old.....?

            My eldest brother’s getting married on Saturday. How about that for a sense of the surreal!? So, the little boy who’s in the photo holding me while I scream as a baby, the boy who stole some of those breaded chicken wings we had as kids (which probably were not wings, now that I think about it…should I be outraged by that particular deception?) from my plate causing absolute uproar, the boy who I went on strike against as we waged war over how much he should pay me to help him with his paper round, the boy who made speeches full of righteous indignation about the evils of dog poo or of unbuttered bread in the presence of buttered bread….he’s going to be someone’s husband. The boy who frequently freaked me out by doing that-grown-up-thing, be it learning to drive, getting a job, going to uni…he’s apparently going to carry on to be a man who does the same thing by getting married. Freaky.

            But very, very awesomely cool. It’s hard to describe quite why or how it makes me this happy that he’s going to be this happy, but it does. Which is also pretty cool. What else is awesome, is that this is probably going to be the most exciting event of my year, and in a year that includes graduating from university, turning 21, and hopefully *really, really hopefully* getting my first paid job, that’s fairly impressive.

            It does build the pressure a little though – I’ve just been packing because I’m being picked up to go to the wedding rehearsal later this afternoon and then we’re all going to stay at a friend’s house nearby, so I need to have everything that I’m going to need for my role as a bridesmaid. Now, I have been known to forget things that I really need before, so there’s a sound in the back of my mind, reminiscent of an annoying high pitched whurrry thing, that I think is the mental-me running around in circles screaming ‘Don’t forget anything! Don’t forget anything! Don’t forget anything!’, which unsurprisingly isn’t actually very helpful.

            But I think I’ve got everything….

Graduate Entry to the University of Life

I just graduated from university the other week, and I feel that this must be one of the strangest stages of life. Period. I mean the sheer quantity of oh-crap-this-means-I’m-supposed-to-be-a-real-adult-now moments that I’m experiencing currently certainly make this feel pretty surreal. One of these ‘moments’ happened in Sainsbury’s supermarket just after graduation. My parents had come to visit for the graduation ceremony, so mum, presumably out of sheer pity for the bewilderment that was on my face as a result of having been officially released from uni into the wild, came and did my week’s grocery shopping with me.

As we meandered through the aisles, I was struck by a flash-back of traipsing after her through, what had seemed to me, the wondrous and yet slightly terrifying maze of Safeway’s (man, does that age me now? Should I be worried about being aged by things when I’m only 20?!) when I was little. I used to drag mum to the huge cheese counter (I don’t think they even have those anymore….huh) and beg her to load up on Edam cheese, which in my world was something like the greatest, most delectable delicacy known to man. Not only was its gentle flavour delicious, and its texture just on the right line of firmness, but it also came in massive balls wrapped in awesome, bright red wax. What’s not to love?! Especially when you’re a three year old whose favourite colour is red.

In fact, the extent to which I loved Edam cheese is something of a legend at home. Rumour has it (do you call the stories your mother tells you about your own childhood ‘rumours’? hmmm), that my passion for Edam brought me to commit crimes most foul on a regular basis. I would sneak into the kitchen, grab the Edam from the fridge, take as humungous a bite as a very-small-person can and put back the remains. I know: shocking. It got so bad that my parents were forced to install a lock on the fridge in order to keep their little marauder out. My need for cheese was so great, however, that I bent all of my very-small-person passionate determination, cunning and ingenuity on overcoming this obstacle until I managed to break the lock. I wish I could give details of said cunning, but these events predate my actual memory and my parents never told me, so it remains a mystery.

Anyway, waaaay off track. Present day, in Sainsbury’s, flashing back to being in Safeway’s. I was shopping for sensible I’m-a-grown-up-doing-grocery-shopping things, like mushrooms (not those ones – I’m pretty sure you don’t get them in Sainsbury’s anyway). Three year old me would have recoiled in disgust, no doubt pulling a very elegant, lady-like face to show her distaste at the mere thought of choosing to ingest mushrooms (which were clearly the devil’s work). Three year old me apparently also took great pleasure in embarrassing my mother by bellowing ‘Helloooo!’ to everybody else in the shop, as we made the rounds of Safeway’s, all the way to the Edam. How the tables have turned. In Sainsbury’s, mum delighted to publicly laugh at me about how grown up I am now compared to the wee scamp I was before. And yes I may have exaggerated a little there – I don’t think my mum has ever used the phrase ‘wee scamp’ in her entire life, but I’m trying to convey a level of embarrassment here, so I think we can allow a little ‘artistic license’.

I’m not going to lie, there is a massive part of me that longs for a time when the biggest challenge of my week was to try and increase the quantity of Edam that I could persuade mum to buy, and subsequently the quantity available for stealing from the fridge. The joy of seeing the employee at the cheese counter slicing off a huge segment of Edam and then handing it to mum was immense; the knowledge that our Edam supply was replenished brought me the satisfaction of a job well done. Mission accomplished. Unfortunately, it takes a bit more than massive slabs of Edam to achieve similar job-satisfaction when you live in the world of the grown-ups.

So apparently now I’m a grown-up. I’m a graduate; I’m nearly 21; I not only eat, but voluntarily buy mushrooms (still not those ones). Now I just have to find the equivalent of yesteryear’s Edam-thrill.

Rachel’s House of Attempted Humour and Probable Lameness

            Blogging. If I’m going to be 100% honest, I’ve always thought it was a bit of a weird thing to do – it definitely at least suggests that you think your own thoughts are unique enough, interesting enough for random strangers across the world to find them worth reading. But here I am. I’ll quite happily make my excuses, that various people among my acquaintances have suggested to me that I should blog (genuinely with reasoning from ‘I think you have an interesting perspective on life’ to ‘you, ya know, talk funny’. You know who you are.), but I guess deep down I must be arrogant enough to believe them. Either that or I’m just bored, which is definitely possible as the vast stretches of unemployment open up before me.

Yay.

Besides, what I hear from friends who’ve been at this job-hunting malarkey a lot longer than I have is that there are going to be some potentially entertaining stories in my near future, so hey I might as well share them with the other bored people out there who are looking for blogs to read. More to the point, the process of writing a blog might remind me how to write outside of science, which would be nice. (I’m taking things such as the fact that the first adjective to come to mind just there was ‘nice’ as definitive proof that I need reminding of how to write) So, consider yourselves warned. I will do all that’s in my conscious power to make this entertaining, even humorous, but it could all go (how to put this and keep it family friendly?) inappropriate-body-parts up.