Wednesday, March 23

The Last Movie Star: Long Live Elizabeth Taylor

I can't help it.  I have to.





Leslie: Please, don't mind me. Do go on.  I'll listen, quiet as a little old mouse.

Bick: You'd be bored, honey.  This is dull.

Leslie: Why, l'd be fascinated.

Bick: We're talking about politics.

Leslie: You married me in Washington, remember, darling?  l lived next door to politics. Brought up with it.  Please go on talking. l'd love it.

Bick: This is men's stuff.

Judge: Leslie, how about a cup of coffee or a drink?

Leslie: Men's stuff!  Lord have mercy!  Set up my spinning wheel, girls.  I'll join the harem section in a minute.

Judge: Don't you go worrying your pretty little head about politics.

Bick: You mean my pretty, empty head, don't you, Judge?

Another man: Could l get the coffee for you?

Leslie: You, too, Uncle Brutus?

Bick: You don't feel well, Leslie.

Leslie: I feel just great!  My adrenaline glands are pumping beautifully.  If l may say so before retiring...
You gentlemen date back 1000 years.  You ought to be wearing leopard skins and carrying clubs.  Politics!  Business!

-Giant


“I swear to GOD George, if you even EXISTED, I’d divorce you.”
-Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?


"My mother says I didn't open my eyes for eight days after I was born, but when I did, the first thing I saw was an engagement ring. I was hooked."

"I've been through it all, baby, I'm mother courage."





To a woman who graced us with violet eyes, stood up for those who couldn't, remained loyal to friends, gave us movies worth cheering over, battled addiction, raised children, gave generously, married all the men she slept with, lived to squeeze out every bit of passion she could muster, and, in general, just made this world a more interesting, scandalous, and humanitarian place, we'll miss you. 

Monday, March 21

"Advice"

If there are two things in life a person receives constant advice about, it's children and marriage.  I understand this idea, in general.  I want advice in marriage from my grandparents.  Not only have they been married for 55 years next month, they've had a happy if not always easy marriage that was based in faith, in work, and in love.  For them also, I know that it's important to them to pass that knowledge on so that I can learn from their successes and mistakes and make a happy marriage for myself.  Clearly I'm at a point where this wisdom is relevant and needed.  In my life, for myself, all I've ever wanted was a happy marriage.  I'll sacrifice any amount of pride, freedom, sleepless nights, or selfishness to wake up next to Bobby 60 years from now.  I'll take sound advice from any place I can get it.

On the flip side, the random little gems of marriage "wisdom" that people throw at me are baffling.  I have been asked personal questions that I can't write without shuddering, questions that embarrassed the fool out of me in front of Bobby.  These little gems scare me, quite frankly.  They portray marriage as a light-hearted joke.  The media paints wives as naggy, overwrought women exasperated with their lazy, horny, moronic husbands.  They never have sex.  They can't stand each others company.  They tolerate each other and, outside children and a shared bed, their lives rarely cross.

To make matters worse, there's the children thing.  Everyone but everyone thinks they have wisdom of child-rearing to impart on the world, and since I am with the person I will make children with, everyone but everyone thinks it's their place to instruct me on children.  The child-rearing advice doesn't bother me too terribly; most of that I have my own opinions about, due to growing up with much younger siblings and two degrees in psychology/counseling.  It's mainly the opinions about when Bobby and I should have children that bugs me so much.  For a long list of reasons, I'm not ready to have children just yet.  My biggest fear is that, like much of the marriage business, I'll end up like these people I see.  Their lives totally revolve around their children.  They have no friends, no social life, no ideas or thoughts outside of what new thing their child did this week, and no life after children.  Mothers who identify themselves only as what relation they are to their children- no longer wives, friends, sisters, daughters, career women, just mothers.  Those things terrify me, and I am simply not ready.

While I'm scared of the way some other marriages are, I'm finding hope in that my marriage will be what I want it to be.  I've met several couples who are themselves only better after marriage.  I've yet to meet parents who are more than parents, and maybe that's why I'm still scared of that and not marriage.  Either way, I don't have to know what I want my parenting to be like just yet; I'm not a parent.  I know what kind of wife I'm going to be, and if my idea of that changes, so be it.  The only thing I want is to be still madly in love with Bobby 50 years from now, no matter what everyone else says.  It's a trepidatious adventure, a daily walk through what I want my life to be with Bobby.

Wednesday, March 2

Interracial Couple

I was inspired recently by a blog that my Best Friend Since Preschool recommended.  The Offbeat Mama blog (found here) is written by a wife/mother and about her adventures through both.  The blog entry was entitled  Why Our Multi-Cultural Family Rocks and talked about her experiences in being married to and having children with her husband, a man from Cambodia, and all the things she learned from such.

Quite similarly, my fiancee is quite the nuance to some.  Over the phone, you'd never mistake him for anything but the Kentucky boy that he is, especially when he feels passionately; that draaawl slides out and sticks right to my heart.  In person, however, he's 6'1" and looks decidedly... ethnic.  Bobby is 3/8th's Chinese; his father is 3/4's Chinese, his grandmother's father was English, her mother Chinese from Hong Kong, where both grandparents still live today.  Bobby's mom is Irish and Native American, all of which boiled down together to make a very tall ethnic lookin' man who, with short hair looks sorta Asian and with long hair sorta Indian.  However, he was raised in Kentucky, played football, baseball, soccer, ate fried chicken and mashed potatoes, watched Saved by the Bell, and wears jeans and white or black undershirts most of the time.  He's a blend of different ethnicities but is culturally American.  I don't much think about whether he's Chinese or Caucasian or Indian (I like referring to him as "ethnic" just because it tickles me), I just think he's amazing and I want his last name.

Back to the blog- I began wondering whether Bobby and I were an quote-un-quote interracial couple.  I don't necessarily feel interracial because, unlike the Offbeat Mama, my future husband was raised in Kentucky, not Cambodia.  I wonder, though, if people see us as interracial.  I broached the subject with Bobby the other night, who is so very good about my exploration into the idea of "I'm not marrying a blonde-haired white kid who's six generations are from Alabama" (like me).  I get tickled when people mispronounce his (our) last name, Kwok, which is pronounced exactly phonetically; I love hearing about his grandmother's doing Tai Chi in her backyard; I fantasize about people's reactions when they see my last name before meeting me; I looked up the Chinese symbol for Kwok only yesterday, which, by the way, is 郭.  Between Bobby and I, we have determined that sometimes we are interracial and sometimes we're not.  To us, I think we're just Heather and Bobby, the dynamic sushi-eating, nerf-gun shooting, happy life-ing duo; to some, they see us the same way.  To others, I think we're the nuance that they sometimes see Bobby as, especially when they hear our last name.  We've also decided that we don't much mind either way.  To be thought of as just a couple is freeing; never mind what we look like, we just are.  On the flip side, it opens an opportunity to show people how not-different we think we all are.  Somewhere over the course of my 6 years in college and graduate school, my unconscious perception of the gap between "me" and "them" narrowed.  I like to say that in my hometown, there are two religions, Baptist and Methodist, and that pretty much describes the cultural make-up of the town: white and black.  Meeting so many different people in college slow weathered away the differences in my mind, until I don't make as many assumptions any more.  For those that do see us as an "interracial couple", maybe there's a possibility that the ethnic Kentucky boy and the blonde Alabama girl can throw a little dirt in that gap.  And for those that don't, well, we watch the Bachelor together just like everyone else.

I'll tell you what we are definitely, and that is happy

Tuesday, March 1

AWP Numero Tres

Lesson #7: Who's designing bridesmaid dresses these days?  Hannah Montana?
I have recently entertained the thought that picking out bridesmaid dresses will be more difficult than picking out the actual wedding dress.  And not without reason.  What in the world is *this*?


Or *this*?

Why is it so hard to find bridesmaid dresses that have sleeves?  Are we assuming that all bridesmaids are now 17 years old and a size 2?  My bridesmaids are women, not girls and not sorority sisters that traipse around in cotton minis and Ugg boots.  I wouldn't wear these shiny pastel strapless frocks.  Give me *this* for less than $150.






Specifically second from the right.  A woman's dress.  A dress with structure and character, a dress to wear to church, work, a date, another wedding.  A dress that says summer, semi-casual and fits all body shapes.  I was told recently of a bride who picked out dresses from a particular store (starts with "J" and ends with "Crew") that didn't make dresses over a particular size, a size that disqualified one of her bridesmaids.  I am very familiar with both the bride and bridesmaid, who have been friends for well over 10 years.  I was appalled that this store doesn't make above this size, and even more appalled that the bride gave little thought to her friend of a decade when picking out dresses.  I would like to avoid this and other such pitfalls when making my best friends buy and wear dresses in pictures that will hang on my wall for 50 years.

Lesson #8: Slow and steady wins the race
My darling fiancee has been confused as of late.  He's been baffled at my "hit the ground running" approach to wedding planning.  When I first starting writing this, it had been exactly 33 days since the proposal , and we have already secured a ceremony site, reception site, and a photographer.  Early this month, I got *the dress*.  I have a wedding planning notebook with divided sections and lots of graph paper with lots and lots of lists.  Maybe the lots and lots of lists are a little overboard, but there's a reason behind the madness.  I attended a wedding recently in which my roommate was a bridesmaid and best friend to the bride, and the wedding planning was total chaos.  There were so many small details to which she hadn't attended that the day before the wedding was madness.  I really want to enjoy my wedding, to enjoy the showers and RSVP's and building excitement without worrying that the programs haven't been printed until the day of the wedding (no kidding).  For now, six months before the wedding, I am at a lull in planning.  I'd much rather be in the lull than in a panic two weeks before.

Lesson #9: Sometimes I can actually get tired of wedding planning
Part of the reason I hit the planning so hard to begin with was that I was so excited.  I couldn't wait to play with paper and dresses and all such, so I went ahead and did it.  I am so glad that I did, because a couple weeks ago I hit a wall and wanted nothing to do with my lists and notebook.  I still don't want much to do with such.  At the moment I am much more concerned with other "things" to do and be done besides wedding planning, so much so, that I actually started this post, oh, a month ago and have just now gotten around to finishing it.  More posts to come about what sneaky somethings have been occurring at Windchase.