everyday ordinary
trying to live without losing my soulArchive for wedding blues
say yes to no cable.
there are many advantages to not having cable. by some unfortunate occurrence we have found that we get cable without paying for it. i think that’s illegal, and i can only hope that we get caught soon.
having cable unfortunately causes me to periodically get sucked into watching hours of really mind-numbing shows. this is not helped by the “marathon” phenomenon, where… just as if you bought the season on dvd… you can watch hours upon hours of the same show as it travels through the whole season in a day. with the added bonus of the same commercials cycling over and over again.
currently, as i’ve come back from being in colorado with my soon to be in-laws, and i’m taking a vacation from my vacation, i’ve flipped between two marathons that are happening right now… “say yes to the dress” and “the deadliest catch“. both reality shows, one about buying a wedding dress, another about deadly crab fishing on the bering sea.
as i’ve been planning my wedding lately, the dress show of course grabs my attention. at some points, it causes more shock and fear than the deadliest catch. i have to keep reminding myself that only a very slim percentage of the population has their wedding dress shopping experience filmed at a high end bridal store in new york. but still.
one funny side affect to watching a lot of discovery channel reality shows is that i find that doing everyday tasks suddenly becomes narrated with the same voice overs that explain the minutia of the wedding dress industry or the crab-catching business. and as i’m making my bed, in my head i’m explaining how i hate folding corners to an imaginary camera. that’s the joke about reality shows. they have stuck cameras and commentary into the mundane and private and made it into a cable tv show. and somehow, if it’s on the tv (especially if it’s a marathon), it’s entertainment.
so when while brushing my teeth i find myself looking into the imaginary hidden camera in my mirror, i know it’s time to turn off the tv, grab a book, and try and regain some conscious thought.
the industry
tomorrow i will be in my 3rd wedding in 6 months, taking a trip down the aisle for the 5th time in my life (not including being a flowergirl). in may, however, i will get to do it in white.
or cream, or ivory, or some other color. but whatever color my wedding dress will be, it will probably come from the cutting floor of a sweatshop in a poorer country than my own. “…[O]ne person’s luxury is produced by another’s labor.”
that’s a quote out of one of my favorite, most painful books that i’m currently reading. it’s called one perfect day: the selling of the american wedding, and it will take your breath away… and not in the seeing-the-bride-walk-down-the-aisle way, but in the what-the-hell-are-we-doing-way.
how about this food for thought.
“what does all this wedding industry hype mean for the woman who turns to the bridal magazines for guidance adn inspiration? One of the things it means is that an expectation that getting married is going to be a very costly endeavor has been drummed into her head will in advance of the start of her wedding planning. If a bride has been told, repeatedly, that is costs nearly $28,000 to have a wedding (the average amount spent by americans getting married in 2006), then she starts to think that spending nearly $28,000 on a wedding is just on of those things a person has to do, like writing a rent check every month or paying health insurance premiums. (Or, she prides herself on being a budget bride and spending a mere $15,000 on the event). She is less likely to reflect upon the fact that $28,000 would cover an awful lot of rent checks or health insurance payments…The bride who has been persuaded that $28,000 is a reasonable amount of money to spend on her wedding day is less likely to measure that total against the nation’s median household income–$42,389 in 2004– and reflect upon whether it is, in fact, reasonable for her or for anyone to spend the equivalent of seven and a half months of the average american’s salary on one day’s celebration.”
which should then only horrify us more as we think about the majority of the world, where $28,000 could be the equivalent of 121 years salary to half the world’s population living on 2 bucks a day.
