So we’re engaged! I have had my taste of wed­ding plan­ning for, let’s see, about a week now, and I have been through the seven stages of grief already. None of it had any­thing to do with Ryan (thank God) or my fam­ily (hur­rah) or even his fam­ily (whew) but still, my crazy is bub­bling up to the sur­face and it is wholly self-generated.

We want a venue where we can have both the cer­e­mony and the recep­tion, prefer­ably down­town with a sky­line view, and some place with a full kitchen that will let us pro­vide our own caterer. Already that knocks a lot of poten­tial spaces off of the list. We went to see Poten­tial Space #1 on Fri­day and fell for it hard and fast. It’s unfor­tu­nately booked through the end of the year on Sat­ur­days. So we thought, “No prob­lem. We’ll get mar­ried on a Fri­day night.”

Then I started look­ing at Jew­ish cal­en­dars, to make sure that we wouldn’t be get­ting mar­ried on, say, Yom Kip­pur, and learned (duh!) that rab­bis don’t marry cou­ples on Shab­bat. Well, crap. This sent me into a spir­i­tual tail­spin of sorts. Fine, I’m a half-assed Jew, but I still want a rabbi to marry us.

Which brings me to another matter–no one else really cares about the rabbi. Ryan: an athe­ist. My par­ents: would hire an Elvis imper­son­ator if need be. Ryan’s fam­ily: are just happy he’s mar­ry­ing. So maybe the solu­tion is to have a pri­vate, parents-and-anyone-else-who-cares cer­e­mony on a week­day evening, and then have the party/reception as planned on a Fri­day night. Would you care if you didn’t see your friend get mar­ried, or does it really matter?