stinkerpants design

Wow, I am totally mortified.

Friday was, overall, a horrible day.

It started out in the morning. I was facing a packed day, with work and wedding things to accomplish. I was driving down a busy street in San Francisco, on my way to have my eyebrows done (very important, haha), when I’m hit by another car. Yay. I get out and look at the side of my car, and it is messed up on three different panels.  Luckily the woman who hit me (she tried to change lanes without looking) pulled over, but I really do not want to be dealing with this right now–especially since she specifically didn’t admit fault at the scene. Now we get to pay a $500 deductible which we may or may not get back (pending our insurance’s investigation), 3 weeks before the wedding.

After I spent an hour on the phone with our insurance agent, I had some irritating personal things to deal with, only to come home to find an ominous email from one of my bridesmaids. Sure enough, when I was finally able to talk to her on the phone, she told me that she has to drop out of our wedding for health and monetary reasons.  I was totally understanding about this and didn’t get upset with her. It would have been nice to know this earlier than three weeks before the wedding, but whatever. I am trying to take things in stride these days. I had to take my FMIL on an errand, so I tried to forget about it (sort of).

Then, about an hour later, I realized that the programs I’d slaved over are now printed with the wrong information. UGH. I’d dropped them off at the shoe place in our town about a week earlier to be bound, so I decided to stop by to see if they were done. I was hoping they weren’t, but had a feeling they were. As a preface (I was planning to post about this eventually), I made a few concessions by having the programs bound at the shoe shop. First off, they only had a straight stitch, and secondly, the machine they used left some little grooves on the paper. At that point, I was over it and just wanted them done.

I went into the shoe shop with FMIL, and the super nice wife of the shoe guy was very excited to tell me that they were done. My heart dropped a little, but I decided not to care. After all, I am taking things in stride. So she goes to get the programs and shows them to me, and they are bound with tan thread. I said, “oh no, they’re the wrong color.” I said this really calmly, because at this point I am so traumatized by the stuff I’ve been dealing with all day that I think I might be incapable of feeling. So she calls the shoe guy over, and he’s a little bit argumentative with me at first, telling me that I never told him I wanted black (which I soooo did). Obviously it was a miscommunication.

I realized that there was nothing to be done about it, and that it really didn’t matter. So I said, “you know, it’s not that big of a deal, I’d just like to pay for them.” He obviously felt bad about it, which in turn made me feel bad about making him feel bad.

I could feel myself getting a little bit emotional and really wanted to leave the store. I took out my credit card and asked him how much I owed him. He said something like, “is it really a big deal?” He didn’t say it in a confrontational way–more like a concerned way. I said, “you know, it’s not. It’s just that I’ve had a really bad day.”

And at the end of that sentence, I start to cry. Oh yes, that’s right. I start to cry in the middle of the shoe shop. Which of course makes him feel even worse, which only makes me cry harder. FMIL Puff, standing beside me, looks at me and says, “Hmm. You easy to cry.” OMG. I say to her, through snot (lovely, huh?), “I am not easy to cry. I have been planning this entire wedding by myself for a year and a half, and no one understands why I am stressed out.” Snot. I am trying to gather myself, but I totally can’t. I keep trying to give the guy my credit card to get out of there, but he won’t take it.

So there I am, crying in the middle of the shoe shop. A full-on Ugly Cry. And I can’t stop. I have been trying to handle the stress of my life for the past however-many-weeks, and it all came pouring out in the middle of the shoe shop, in front of the shoe guy, his wife, and apparently his whole family. I. was. mortified.

Suddenly I am surrounded by people. A girl about my age asks me if she can give me a hug. She tells me that she got married two years ago, so she knows exactly what I’m going through. Another woman in the store says her daughter was recently married and that it’s really hard. They were so nice to me. The girl even got me a kleenex.

I turned back to the shoe guy and asked him once again if I could pay.  I tell him that they look nice and that it doesn’t matter.  I hope I told him how appreciative I was (I will definitely go back and thank them when I’m not a total mess).  He took my credit card and barely charged me anything for all the work he had done.  He was so nice.   I was finally able to leave the store with FMIL, who was totally bewildered and still could not figure out why I was crying.

I went home and cried some more and it felt SO GOOD.  So good.  I called my mom, who laughed at me and made me feel even better.  Then I went out to dinner with Mr. Stinkerpants, and he bought me a gigantic margarita, which also helped.  It was blue.  And then the next night, we went camping, which helped even more. I am now over it.  The only thing that is still bothering me is the unknown of the car accident.  I’m also a little perturbed that my bridesmaid couldn’t have told me earlier that she wasn’t planning to come.  But alas, there’s nothing to do about it at this point.  :-/  I’ll tell you this: there is no way in HELL I intend to reprint any of those programs!  Those suckers are done.

I can tell that I am getting to the end of this process now, because I’m having meltdowns (apparently I don’t handle prolonged stress very well!) and I have no desire to fix any of my DIY projects.  It’s a good thing I didn’t leave any of them to the last minute, or I would have let it all go.  At this point, the only part of wedding planning I’m going to miss is checking the mail!