Little Cup o' Mine

So among the trio of hilarious gifts I received today from Melinda was this ceramic version of a paper cup often seen in the hands of New Yorkers who have gotten their diner coffee to go. I have no idea where she found it, but it cracks me up and I plan on using it forever, now. I have no need for any other coffee cup. I have found my true love.

It was a good gift and it cheered me up, which I needed on spending my first Christmas alone. I didn't think it would be so bad, but spending Christmas alone actually is very sad and I hope never to do it again. Even working on Christmas (which I've done a number of times) wasn't as bad as sitting alone with the dog and cat and watching the TV for, oh, I don't know, maybe 12 hours. I crammed in a marathon of Christmas-y movies including Love Actually, Scrooged, Nightmare Before Christmas. I also watched disc one of the House of Elliot, which came to me via Netflix - the other true love of my life.

Well tomorrow it's back to work, which I am dreading because our new editor lives only to bring us pain. But that is another story for another day.

Merry Christmas

I hope I'm not being too old fashioned by wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, instead of Happy Holidays or Happy Shopping Season or whatever is trendy right now. I still think of it as Christmas. Call me crazy.

The Great Mouse Caper

So you would not believe how incredibly hard it is to find Mickey Mouse-related items for children these days! My search was for Toddler 3 girls clothing, but I was also interested in any books or stuffed Mickeys they might have.

I started my search at what I thought was the most obvious place, The Disney Store. Boy, was I wrong! It's all Princess stuff for the girls (Belle, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid) and Pirates of the Caribbean and that Cars movie for boys. There was also The Incredibles, a few Winnie the Pooh items, and Dumbo - I didn't even know kids these days knew about Dumbo!

Disney really needs to go back to its roots. Obviously Mickey still sells. Kids still love that giant mouse. And Disney still uses him and the Mrs, the dogs and the ducks as their mascots. When people think Disney they don't think Captain Jack Sparrow, they think Scrooge McDuck, especially now at Christmas.

So after combing the entire mall, I'm embarrassed to say I finally found some Mickey gear at KMart. I guess I should be glad SOMEONE still appreciates the power of the Mouse.

Washingdog Square

This is what I love about New York.

I know I haven't been here that long - only about eight months, and there are people, I'm sure who would say, "You can't go around saying, 'This is what I love about New York' when you haven't even been there a year." - but I don't think this will change.

What I love is that you can go to a place that you think you know so well; where you think, perhaps, you've seen just about everything there is to see - drugs, sex, Jews for Jesus, 9-11 conspiracists - and then one day you go there and, inexplicably, there's a Wiener Dog convention.




How did they all know when and where to show up?

And how is it a collection of such odd and oblong little dogs would put one into such a state of wonderment that no number of men dressed as women shouting at trees could ever match?

Coming Soon....

....New City. New Postings. New Life.

Sound exciting?

Don't count on it!

Say my name, say my name

So I just realized last night, as I was filling out the return card for this wedding that's vexing my life, that my name is spelled incorrectly on the front of the envelop that was mailed to me. I'M IN THE FRIGGIN' WEDDING and they've misspelled my first name.

I realize in the Deep South, they like to anglo-cize everything, but these people are Greek like me! Well, okay, the mother isn't but, still, she should know my name by now. She's known me my whole damn life. I was outraged. Outraged. It's bad enough I have to sit at work everyday and hear PR people and old ladies mangle my name, as if they've never heard it before, as if it weren't the most popular name in all of the Spanish-speaking world and half of Europe, but these people KNOW me. They've known me for three decades. They've wiped snot off my nose and picked olive pits out of my ears. If they can't get my name right there is not hope for me here. None. I'm just going to have to switch countries - that's all there is to it - and preferably, ahead of this wedding.

Wedding Nightmare No. 2:

This whole thing is getting out of hand. Seriously. This has to stop. Do other people involved in weddings (exempting the bride) have crazy dreams like this?

So, last night's nightmare was about a wedding dress or the lack thereof. In my dream I was sitting in a church, in the pews and I was getting married just after whatever regular service was being held.

There were only a handful of people there and I have no idea who the groom was. But I was sitting there in the church in my blue jean, cut-off shorts and white t-shirt freaking out because I didn't have a wedding dress (don't know how that detail slipped my mind when I was planning this "dream" wedding).

So I run out of the church and go to my childhood home (where we haven't lived since I was six, but is just down the road from the church were Tammy's wedding is being held) and started going through the closet looking for something I could throw together as a dress. There was a large white skirt with lace on it, which I had to safety pin to make fit and a lacey, white sleeveless shirt that I put on. I didn't get as far as the shoes in my dream. And while I wasn't thrilled with my outfit, it was better than cut-offs, my dream self thought.

That was pretty much the whole dream...only it was much more emotional that I've led you to believe with my above description.

I can't totally blame this wedding nightmare on the wedding I'm in, though. I also blame the Gilmore Girls, which had some weird marathon going on last night, catching everyone up on the season so far, I guess, because the new episodes start next Tuesday. Anyway, I fell asleep to the episode where Lorelei finds the perfect wedding dress for her and Luke's wedding and everything else falls in place (or at least, so she thinks at this point in the series). Because there was so much emphasis placed on the wedding dress, I can't help but think that had at least some influence on my dreams last night.

Seriously. After all this, I am never getting married.

Wedding Bliss

Update: The candle battle rages on. My mom has now given me money to go buy the larger candles. I think I'm caving on this one. My will is not as strong as hers.

In other wedding news, there are two (count them, one-two) wedding showers this weekend for the bride, which I will be attending. One of these showers is being co-hosted by my mother (which comes as a surprise to no one, I'm sure). The other is a "couples" shower and I'm unsure, etiquette-wise, if I'm supposed to take a gift. Guess I'll have one in the car just in case.

This is a very bad season to have a Greek wedding. We Greeks are fasting for Lent, which means no animal products in our diets. This makes it very hard to enjoy wedding showers and bachelorette party weekends in Florida when most everything aside from the vegetable tray is off limits. Luckily the wedding, itself, is well after Orthodox Easter, which is a week after Western Easter this year, just FYI for those of you keeping score at home.

This, coincidentally, is the same weekend as the afore mentioned bachelorette party, which I would like to go to but won't because it overlaps with Easter. My mom expects me home for Easter, and quite honestly, I can't imagine myself on the beach during the holiday. So I won't be going. This didn't stop me, of course, from getting into a fight with my mother about it last weekend. She was trying to tell me that bachelor parties were for boys and that "good girls" don't do that kind of thing and that I wasn't going. Clearly she has no idea what I was talking about, but I didn't have the energy to try and explain it to her and anyway she wouldn't have listened since she knows she's right already. She's very stubborn. Like a mule. So instead I told her that "I was 30 years old and I'll do whatever I feel like doing."

Granted, this was a stupid fight, especially since I had already said I wasn't going. But I get tired of her telling me how to run every small detail of my life. For example, a few weekends ago she was giving me job advice, even though she has never had an office job and certainly knows nothing about my profession. She can't even read English!

And now, the best news. The bride's maids dresses are in. My mom has mine now. I can't wait to see it this weekend and report back in full detail on exactly how bad it makes me look. Maybe I can even muster up a portrait of the dress. Oh will the glories of being the koumbara ever end?

Pre-(Somebody Else's) Wedding Jitters: Another reason weddings suck

Had my first wedding-related nightmare last night. Can't remember exactly the details, but I was at work, which in my dream shared an office with my old university radio station. And this girl, who I worked with at the newspaper in Savannah was the afternoon DJ. I knew in the dream that she had asked me to pick up some of her shifts that week.

So, I'm sitting across from her, typing away and she's yelling at someone on the phone along the lines of, "No. She can't make it. [pause] Because. [pause] Yeah, she's right here." And she transfers the phone call to me. It's the bride-to-be, whose wedding I'm in and she's saying she needs me at 4 p.m. to help with something. I'm at first confused by why she was first talking to the DJ and I ponder this out loud and then think, the bride-to-be (heretofore referred to as Tammy, for not other reason than I recently read that Sweet Potato Queens book), so I think, Tammy must have dialed in on the main number and they transferred her to the DJ because they knew I was working for her. This logic somehow made sense to the dream me...although even dream me was questioning the validity of it.

Anyway, I tell Tammy that I can't possibly make it at 4 p.m. because I'm working. Can't we do it later, I ask. She hangs up the phone. So I try to call her back to suggest that I can leave at 4 p.m. and meet her at 5 p.m., because my boss (my real boss, not the DJ whose shift I'm NOT picking up that afternoon) has popped his head out of the office and said it was okay if I needed to leave early. But my phone doesn't seem to be working. At first, every time I pick it up to dial there is someone dialing in and I keep getting voice mails from some random PR guy. After I check those messages, I try to dial her again and nothing happens. I just get a dial tone. So I grab the phone of the DJ, asking if her phone is working. I pick it up and dial my phone and it rings. I call my home phone and it rings. So I start to dial Tammy's number and realize I don't know it. I look in my address book, an old phone number. I look in my mobile phone address book (Don't ask. I don't know why I didn't just use my mobile to call her. It's a dream, people.), nothing. So now I'm feeling pretty frantic and also bad for upsetting Tammy. I call my parents to get the number and that's the last thing I remember. I don't know how it ended. I think that's because, about that time, I got a wet dog nose to the face and a hopeful, "Time to go out?" lick to the cheek.

I can't believe the stress this wedding is causing me. Not getting married is rough on a girl, I tell you.

My Friend's Big Fat Greek Wedding and My Mother

My poor mother, who is on the verge of giving up on my ever getting married, has decided to drive me crazy by taking over one of my oldest friend's weddings...or at least my participation in it. First there was the mother of the bride, now I give you mother of the koumbara.

My job in this wedding, is essentially: to buy a bunch of accoutrement needed for the service, make sure the crowns don't fall of during the wedding, make sure the bride doesn't trip on her dress during the "first steps as man and wife" and facilitate the exchanging of rings, which in a Greek wedding is (needlessly, if you ask me) complicated.

Battle One between my mother and I began over the crowns, which she insisted must be all white and which I said come in as many different choices now as wedding dresses and she needed to stop being old fashioned. After conferring with the bride, I picked one that I thought was pretty and matched the bride's dress, which isn't white.

Battle Two now rages for the candles. I bought the small beeswax candles, because I thought there was no point in wasting money and wax on the large candles, since all the bride is going to do is trash the candles after the wedding or stick them in a drawer never to be seen or heard from again.

My mother, however, has polled the ladies of the church and come back with the demand that I go by the large candles because "it looks better." Or something like that. I have yet to decide what to do on the candle situation.

Coinciding with Battle Two was Battle Three over the gift I was going to buy the bride and groom. I hadn't actually decided since I haven't been to the store yet (this wedding is in May), but it turns out my mother has already gone and bought a gift from me and had it sent to the bride - a china place setting. A very unlike-me gift, which the bride will immediately know came from my mother, who also bought the exact same gift on behalf of herself and my father.

Sunday night, on the phone, after the latest candle fight, I asked if she wanted to be the koumbara, instead. Now she is acting like her feelings are hurt.

All of this has reinforced my decision that should I ever get married, it will be in Vegas.