Warning: wedding rant ahead

This weekend, my fantasy football team is playing Lunchboy's fantasy football team. Inter-house tension will ensue. But seeing as my quarterback is Donovan McNabb and his is Eli Manning, I think we know what's gonna happen. That said, I have a feeling that bets will be placed and rewards of a slinky nature will be placed on the table. We shall see what Sunday night brings.

On the wedding front, things are moving along nicely. Place--check. Date--check. Officiant--check. This weekend we are interviewing a couple of photographers. After doing some online research, I discovered that I am a total photography snob, the result of spending almost four years with a former photojournalist/sports photographer/narcissist/sometime wedding photographer. What can I say? I got spoiled by watching Voldemort shoot friends' weddings for $1000 and then hand over the proofs and negatives without getting testy. Most wedding photographers, I discovered, do not do this. Instead, they charge phenomenal amounts of money to take pictures and then hold the negatives hostage unless you drop even MORE money on a wedding album. It's a total racket.

My morning triumph today was finding out that a really good photographer is willing to drop his astronomical prices by almost half because he doesn't get a lot of business in February. Go winter weddings!

If your eyes haven't glazed over by now, you deserve a medal.

I put some thought into starting a blog for all my wedding-related rantings, mostly so that I could rave about my mother, who is proving to be the main obstacle in most of the planning, primarily because she is insane. She was like this last time, but I racked up her obstinate behavior to the fact that she didn't like the fact that I was 3,000 miles away. No. No no no. Her obstinacy is no illusion and it is trumped only by her desire to make this entire event all about her.

It doesn't help that my brother has moved back into my parent's house for the umpteenth time, and so now my mother can indulge her inability to cut the apron strings. She can also channel her time, money and energy into my brother, who is 27, employed, and just doesn't like paying rent. Translation: when I ask her to help with small tasks, I get answers like, "I can't--I have more pressing things on my mind. I'm too busy taking care of your brother and father to think about this right now."

Those "things" become less pressing if she's given the opportunity to make planning as complicated as possible, usually by exercising guilt and passive-aggressive tendencies the likes of which neither Lunchboy nor I has ever seen before. She will help, but only on her terms and only if we acquiesce to her Nutcracker-like vision of a winter wonderland wedding, complete with theatrical lighting, white frosted branches, a mysterious fabric tent-thing for the ceremony that bears a distinct resemblance to several BAD costumes on the original Star Trek, and the spending of much money, which she assumes we will front because "I just don't have a lot of disposable income right now." It doesn't matter that we're aiming for simplicity and elegance--her ideas are BETTER but not so good that she will pay for them.

I'm not being nice, I know. But if you'd been exposed to the full force of her guilt-tripping passive aggression, you'd be keeping her at arm's length, too. The wedding is 6 months away and she's already driven me into two sleep- and appetite-vaporizing anxiety attacks. Hence the wine and Ativan.

OK, done now.