The Midwest farmer's daughters

We were in the lovely state of Minnesota this past weekend and boy, oh boy, did we not stop moving! Planning a wedding is a serious amount of work, especially when you're doing it from miles and miles away. Despite the totally expected frustrating moments, (our rehearsal dinner venue informing us we could no longer have it there comes to mind) we still had a fantastic weekend filled with what Minnesota is known the least for: feminism.

As our weekend unfolded, we made a really great discovery: almost all of our venues are businesses owned and ran by women. I find this really exciting, because the Midwest is not exactly the place to go when you want to stand on your own two feet as a chick. Minneapolis is definitely progressive in many respects, but as soon as you escape that 60 mile radius around the city, you start noticing an ever-expanding smattering of pro-life signs and Christian billboards.

Here's the run down: our cupcake lady opened a bakery out of her own home. Our florist is a former resident of the Pacific Northwest who decided to follow her life-long dream of opening her own flower shop. (Side note: She's not only a vegetarian, but she rescues animals and her shop has pets crawling all over it.) The caterers we hired for our cocktail hour are two woman from Minneapolis who moved to the north woods to open an organic food share. Our rental company is owned by younger woman who just had a baby and her husband works for her. (She said she's kicked salespeople out before for asking to speak with her husband instead of her, even after telling them she was the owner.) Last but not least, the restaurant we're having the rehearsal dinner at is owned by a mother-daughter team. (You can blame them for the kitschy name of "The Lucky Moose.")

It has, indeed, been difficult at times to think about all of the money we're throwing into this celebration, especially in this here economy, but I feel honored in a way to be supporting these local women in their businesses. Inspiring indeed!

Plan B

Listening to a recent podcast of This American Life, I was struck by how it hit close-to-home for me... and pretty much everyone I know. It consisted of several tales from different people's lives and situations, detailing how their dreams quickly got put on hold to favor a "Plan B." Many of us swear it will be temporary and that's what gets us through the days of working our crappy jobs that sadly fall short of what we had hoped and planned for. This is a reality that many people face- sad, but true.

J Robert Lennon read an excerpt from his short story "The Accursed Items," in which he demonstrated that even objects can fulfill a fate different from the one for which they were intended. Even inanimate objects can have a "Plan B," creating an impact on life, fate, and feelings.

Due to partial busyness, some laziness, and writing dry spells, I leave you with someone else words to enjoy:

A bottle of pain reliever, brought along on a business trip, that proves, at the moment it is most needed, to be filled not with pain reliever, but with buttons.

Sneakers, hanging from the power line, with one half of a boy's broken glasses stuffed into each toe.

A Minnie Mouse doll, you found by the roadside, and brought home, intending to run it through the washer, and give it to your infant son, but which looked no less forlorn after washing, and was abandoned on a basement shelf, only to be found by your son eight years later, and mistaken for a once-loved toy that he himself had forsaken, leading to his first real experience of guilt and shame.

Love letters, seized by federal agents in an unsuccessful drug raid, tested in a lab for traces of cocaine, exhaustively read for references to drug contacts, sealed in a labeled plastic bag, and packed along with a plush bear holding a plastic red heart, into an unlabeled brown cardboard box, itself, loaded into a truck with hundreds of similar boxes, when the police headquarters was moved, and forever lost.

Nude polaroids of a fifteen-year-old female cousin.

An icicle, preserved in the freezer by a child, which, when discovered months later, is thought to be evidence of a problem with the appliance, leading to a costly and inconclusive diagnostic exam by a repairman.

A gay porno magazine, thrown onto a ball field from a car window, and perused with great interest by the adolescent members of both teams, two of whom meet in the woods some weeks later, to reproduce the tableaus they have seen, leading to a gradual realization that they are in fact gay, an incident, the memory of which causes one of the two, when he is well into a life that is disappointing emotionally, professionally, and sexually, to fling a gay porno magazine out his car window, as he passes an occupied ball field, on his way to what will be an unsuccessful job interview.

A biscuit, crushed into the slush of a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot.

The orange tobbaggen, whisking her to her death.

A resume, that portrays its author as utterly unqualified for the position for which she has applied, but which, because it smells good, leads its reader, a desperate, experientially undernourished middle-manager at an internet-based retail corporation, to invite her into the office for an interview, which, although further portrays the applicant's complete unsuitability for the job, provides the middle-manager with a physical impression to complement the good smell, which impression is intensely exciting, forcing him to hire her as a supplemental secretary, much to the bafflement, chagrin, and eventual disgust of his extent secretary, who, during her employer's lunch hour, removes the resume in question from his files, and personally delivers it to the CEO, and is with the CEO when he barges into the middle-manager's office, and finds the unsuitable supplemental secretary standing beside him, crying silently with her dress half-off, while he sits in his reclining office chair, sweating profusely, and holding a plastic letter opener in a threatening manner.

The houseplant, that will not die.

Fifty pairs of old blue jeans, found at second-hand clothing stores, and brought at great expense, on a trip to eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, where rumor had it, old blue jeans could be sold for a lot of money, but where this was no longer true, as so many previous visitors had heard the same rumor, and done the same thing, creating a glut of old blue jeans, which were not even all that stylish there anymore, and causing the entire trip to be ruined by the necessity of hauling around these huge suitcases full of other people's jeans, which smelled kind of bad, as if those other people were currently wearing them.

The urine sample, produced for the cancelled doctors appointment, and forgotten in the back of the fridge.

My eyeglasses, covered with a thickening layer of dust that I never seem to notice, and simply adjust to, until, at last, I clean them out of habit, and discover a new world, sharp and full of detail, whose novelty and clarity I forget about completely within fifteen minutes.

Your signature, rendered illegible by disease.