Two years

Two can be such a beautiful number.

How has the second year been different from the first? In many little insignificant-yet-significant ways.

We have more things, more clothes, a new bookshelf by the entryway and new upholstery in the dining room. We color our hair less. Marlon weighs less (and dresses better, if you ask me). We switched bed sides. We fight much, much less than we did in our first year, despite me being somewhat less eager to please and prove myself as a wife. In fact, I don't remember a single fight we had this year.

We are beginning to see our dreams slowly being fleshed out into reality. We have savings (!) and earn more as a unit. We've rented out our spare room. We don't spend a bomb on groceries anymore. We do Iyengar yoga for beginners on Monday evenings. Actually, we exercise together, period. (Although we swim less often.) We cook together less often, but we still do sometimes, which I find extremely therapeutic and enjoyable. We are supposed to be closer to having a baby, but we keep moving the "deadline."

I would like to be trite and cutesy and say that the only things that haven't changed are the love and happiness of being married to my husband. But that wouldn't be true, because they have -- they've grown greater and deeper, and have simply become, in a word, more.

Happy second anniversary, sweetie. I love you!

Da who???

okay. so the reason i haven't blogged about the wedding yet is that i want to select and upload all the photos first. which is way, way harder than it sounds. with four 4.7-gig dvds full of keepers from the dastardly dynamic dagooc brothers of mangored, it's taking marlon and myself days to plow through everything.

there are tons of beautiful shots, and we're having a hard time keeping it down to the 250 we're allotted for the album. what i'm enjoying most, though, and find irrestible to blog, are the shots that definitely won't make it into the album. and although i know you want to see pictures of the white dress, my glowing gorgeousness, etc etc, i know i won't be able to sleep tonight without blogging about this mystery.

picture this: it's a beautiful december afternoon in our little chapel in batangas, and our phenomenal photographers are attempting to take a lovely portrait of the mother of the bride in her gleaming golden dress.


or of little alexa tamayo, the pretenatually photogenic baby sister of my two flower girls dani and ela.


ngunit umihip ang masamang hangin. because instead, they wind up with a snap of...


MYSTERY CREATURE!!!


she's not related to me. she's not related to marlon. not a friend, and as far as i know, not a supplier.

SO WHO IN F*CK'S NAME IS THIS WOMAN????? ANSWER MEEEEE!!!!

in need of eye relief? check out some of the official wedding photos on mangored's blog.

The day that was

before i start blogging, a sneak peek. switch on your speakers or put on your earphones -- although i don't expect anybody to know the song, it's a gorgeous one.



on-site avp by mg digital video.

This is it

the past two weeks have been something else. sometimes a crazy looping roller coaster, sometimes an easy coast, sometimes a slow trudge, sometimes a frenzied skitter, sometimes a happy and joyful dance.

yet i know tomorrow will be nothing like the past two weeks. it will be nothing like the past, period.

so what will tomorrow be?

a smooth glide, a light step, and a leap into a future that was totally not going to happen.

wish me luck.

All botched up

so after weeks of looking at/re-editing/sending/following up/choosing pantone chips for/double-checking invites that looked like this, in (reddish-purple) plum and (teal-ish) turquoise...

my printer sends me these horrid chocolate brown and grass-green invites. one hundred fricking twenty of them.

at first i am stunned. then i flashback to the meticulous process (see above) i went through just to idiot-proof the design. then i whine about it to all the art directors at work, who, while deploring the color job, say it's a kick-ass piece of work. this is why i love working in an office full of kick-ass creatives -- my seatmate cecil did the layout for me for free. "maganda naman siya eh," volunteers jl. "itapon mo na lang yung original file."

then i get online and, with almost eerie calm, proceed to inform the owner of the print shop of the matter. after checking the damn things, he promptly offers me a free reprint, which is just as well. dahil kung hindi, aba pucha, one email to the phalanx of bridezillas in my egroup can potentially derail his business for at least a few months. you have no idea how seriously brides take supplier reviews. really.

since he vows to personally take responsibility for the outcome of the reprints, i am placated. really, if not for the service given me by the owner, i would be bashing this place to kingdom come. which is a shame, actually, because i was pretty happy with them until all this happened.

the reprints are done in a week, which is still too long a delay for me but what can you do. the print shop's peace offering arrives -- the colors are still not true to the original file. at this point, i am still not happy, but not willing to put off delivering the invites for another week. so i simply choose not to feel bad about anything i'm going to give my nearest and dearest, and accept the prints. i tell the owner as much. he feels bad about the whole thing and offers me free thank-you cards -- a very gracious offer, which i am gracious (and penny-pinched) enough to consider.

now most of the invites are out, the guests are informed -- and on the whole, pleased and wowed by them (except for one major drama). and that is that.

One year old

wow.

time has gone by so fast. the two people who got engaged one year ago today seem so different from who we are today. in a good way, of course.

wow. ang lapit na. or, in the language of a couple who's had too many tearful farewells at airports, "just two more goodbyes!"

while sorting through photos of ourselves for the wedding slideshows, i came upon marlon's picture of our paris trip, which i had totally forgotten that he'd taken. reminiscing through the photos was a beautiful way to celebrate the one-year anniversary of our engagement, and i'd like to share some of my favorite shots with you.

(yes that's a gargoyle on the left. marlon took this from the notre dame church tower.)

Happy house

during the glee club’s tour of Europe in 2000, seventeen of us were thrown together into a multi-room nunnery in koeln, germany, left to fend for ourselves with no host parents – just a bunch of groceries, a kitchenette, the erratic and befuddled but well-meaning protection of a filipina we soon nicknamed tita lost (you can guess why), and each other.

maybe it was because we felt we had to compensate for our kawawa-ness (“ang saya-saya namin kahit wala kaming hosts!”) or because we really did have fun, but we soon came to call ourselves the happy house.

since then, the term “happy house” has been passed down in glee club/acs tour tradition as a house, typically small, crammed full with too many self-reliant, noisy, happy ateneans.

i don’t know why i chose this title for this post. it’s funny that my idea of a happy house is one that’s stuffed full of friends. because pretty soon, i’m going to start making a happy house of my own, with just two people rattling around in it – marlon and myself.

setting up our own home is one of the things i’m really looking forward to about moving to lah-lah land. apartment-hunting is scheduled for month's end, when marlon and i hope to find a two-bedroom place that won't make us wish we had just eloped and run away with our savings intact. marlon will move in in december, and will carry me over the threshold (he better start pumping some serious iron) in the second week of january.

(yes, my one-way ticket has been booked. eeek!)

i’ve been hoarding house magazines (real living mostly – just tried out a new mag called homestyle and i don’t think i'll be buying it again anytime soon) and make daily pilgrimages to my favorite house sites: domino, apartment therapy, design sponge’s sneak peeks. at the bookstore, i make a beeline for the house and interiors books: the relaxed home, nest for two, and jeline’s fab flea market style book are all on my wish list.

for the meantime, i’m stocking up all this information and just waiting for a chance to unleash it. since we’re just renting, though, and are on a pitiful newlyweds’ pittance (good luck recovering from the wedding), i don’t know how much of my knowledge i’ll actually get to let loose upon our poor unsuspecting apartment. and a lot of the places i want to shop at – evangelista street in bangkal, cubao x, landmark – will be lost to me once i step upon singaporean soil. still, it’s fun to dream

i realized how house-happy i’ve become when the first thing i thought of buying on our honeymoon was block-printed indian bedlinen and table cloths, the handcrafting of which rajasthan is famous for. and i was thinking in exclamation marks: can you imagine?!!! our bed made with block-printed indian cotton sheets!!! block-printed by hand!!!

not to mention how i gushed for a full month, maybe more, to anyone who would listen, about the gorgeous, 100-year old, pure silk carpet that ambushed my heart in mumbai:

i swear, marlon and i sketched out living room layouts in june with this in mind. except he's stopped, and well, i haven't.

and i'm already eyeing my bookshelf and calculating how i'm going to arrange them into something like this (from the domino site) when marlon and i combine our sh*tload of books. di baleng marami, basta cute.

and after living with so many dogs for so many years, it's my chance to finally have a cat! then again, a cat toilet-training (can cats even be toilet-trained?) on 100-year old silk carpet from mumbai might not a happy house make.

In the background

i was writing this over at the wedding blog. but then i realized it really didn't have any place there. so i'm bringing it over here.

i wanted to post the sketch of my wedding dress today, but i didn't feel like it. and i felt bad that something could happen that would rob the joy of sharing my wedding dress -- my beautiful, beautiful dress -- with all of you.

see, marlon and i are sad about something. it's there in the background, and we can't simply wish it away.

i remember a conversation we had with gerwin late last year, right after his wedding to charlie. he said something like, expect that everything that can happen, will happen this year. all the conflicts, arguments, and everything our good friend murphy can come up with, will come up.

wala lang. i just remembered that.

this is strange and mysterious; i'm finding out just how much i love -- want to love -- someone. and it isn't marlon. i hope someday she finds out too.

it's times like these that i remind myself that our commitment isn't to being sad and wishing things were different or better. it's to a whole and joyful family, to love, to aliveness, and to our special day being a day where all these are present -- not just for marlon and i, but for everyone. and we're committed to finding love, aliveness and joy each step of the way.

even in the little things. like my wedding dress. if it's up on the other blog, then you'll know i've picked myself up and not let the sadness rule me.

so even if i don't feel like blogging about the wedding right now, i will keep blogging -- and sharing. and even if we just feel like rolling over and giving up, we just won't.

You had me at "verbal barrage"

with me in charge (more or less) of the wedding, the boyf has been tasked with planning the honeymoon. it took us the greater part of a year to decide, but we finally set our sights on a couple of days in boracay, a short visit to the family in kolkata, and a week-plus roaming the wonders of rajasthan and agra. (palace of the winds! taj mahal! amber fort! gorgeousness!)

yesterday, marlon forwarded me a lengthy missive from a mr. tapas banerjee of trinetra tours in delhi. and by lengthy, i mean three pages when cut-and-pasted into a word document! within seconds i knew this was going to be interesting.

'Namaste' & Greetings Mr. Plazo !!Good Morning !!Many thanks for your mail. We take this opportunity to confirm our best intentions and knowledge to the cause of your trip. It is a pleasure to welcome you & your traveling partner to our country.

Before I serve my verbal barrage on to you, I just wish to inform you that I would be delighted to offer you references from All Over The World including Singapore too.

kapow! you've got me mr. banerjee! something about the self-deprecating, candid and enthusiastic tone just got me. and so i read on.

more choice excerpts:

For your entire journey, we are upgrading your transport to a fine Toyota MUV (Innova). This car will substantially add to your traveling comfort, especially on some bumpy roads where the top quality suspension would not let you feel any discomfort. However, the biggest and the single most achievement of this car is its Air-conditioning, [natawa talaga ako dito! omigosh! this is so true! especially in india!] which ensures that you are cool and fresh even if you are traveling under the mid day sun in warm country.

Besides the car, your driver would be special. He would be your 'Man Friday'. You would of course have local guides conducting your city tours in each city, but, besides that, your driver would be your most invaluable friend. He would not only be knowledgeable about places of interest in between journeys as also in cities, but, he would be a very nice human being with a pleasing personality for whom nothing would be trouble.

pero dito talaga nahulog yung loob ko sa kanya:

I apologise for my unending chin wagging, Mr. Plazo. I love the business and the gossip opportunities that come with it. Actually, the home dinner that I am proposing is in my house. Both me and my wife, Krishna love meeting people and making friends. I got into the business primarily because I could travel with tour groups making friends and sharing experiences. However, with the business expanding in the last 7-8 years, I am more or less now confined to my office ensuring standards that we are so paranoid about. Hence, whenever possible, I invite clients to our home for a meal with myself and my wife, Krishna. Home dinners are my major personal interaction with clients and I look forward to this eagerly. Little do the visitors realise that they would be subjected to my verbal diarrhea!!

ang sweet diba? anyway, i checked out a couple of the hotels and sites on his itinerary. and. oh. my. gawd.

behold rohet garh, a gorgeous 17th century home-turned-heritage hotel in jodhpur. swoon.

i may have died and gone into a taschen book.

and check out the luxe desert camping digs in manvar.

and one of the client references describes their driver as "a prince among drivers."

i do believe we have a winner.

Oh, and...

... the wedding blog's up!

All I need to know

up until last night, i knew a million things about my wedding.

i could have told you the name of the church and why we chose it, how much we had paid to reserve it and the supreme hassle of confirming the overseas bank transfer to singapore. i could have told you the exact date and time of the wedding, and a funny story about how my sister asked me to please get married in 2007 instead of 2008. i could have told you all the things marlon and i considered -- getting overseas friends and family home in time, where to put them up, and how to tell them. i could even post the save-the-date card that i made myself using photoshop.

i knew figures -- budgets and buffers and guest lists and contingencies. i knew where marlon and i could pull out extra money and where we could save.

i knew exactly what the colors would be, since i had spent a large chunk of one workday afternoon ripping out pantone chips from a book we have at the office. i could also tell you how all four designers i consulted about the wedding outfits absolutely loved the colors, and how i basked in the glow of being the ultimate "different" bride, blazing brilliantly past the trap of trends, consciously eschewing some version of last year's pink and chocolate brown or tiffany blue. i could have posted my color boards and described in detail the process that left me with the perfect color combination.

i could have named everyone on the entourage list and told you what they meant to me and marlon. i could have posted the carefully selected and compiled attire pegs that would give you an idea of what they would look like on the big day.

i could rattle off the names, services, rates, availabilities, pros, cons and general reputations of everyone from the venue rental to the caterer to the priest to the hair and makeup artist by heart. i could say the same of everyone on my shortlist, and why i hadn't yet decided. i knew marlon and i would serve hot chocolate and batangas coffee before dinner, and that my music was not going to come from some cheesy string quartet.

i could show you a flamenco guitarist's email address i had saved in my cell phone, and tell you why brazilian jazz bands are just way too expensive. i could tell you what ceremony songs i had wanted since i was a college freshman, what i would make my friends sing, and even where they would practice and how early in advance.

i knew exactly what i wanted to happen, from the passport-inspired invitation to the gallery of travel photos i would set up with the help of a professional event stylist i had hit it off with. i even knew what people would say, or what i wanted them to say about the wedding: that it was fun, personal, intimate, laid-back, so full of details, so romantic. i knew what all of that would say about me, about marlon and i as a couple, about the fantastic and wonderful life we were sure to lead after the wedding was over.

i knew. i use the past tense because i don't know any of these things anymore for sure.

none of that matters, because now i know the most important thing of all.

i know that marlon loves me, and that i love him.

and that we're starting over. and that our life together doesn't have to be anything that we previously thought it would be.

and really, that's all i need to know.

The making of a blushing bride

trial hair and makeup last week with angie cruz and ojie rayel. i'm just posting the one with the updo because the lighting in the other photos is crappy.

i was not only amazed that angie managed to cover up my seven (yes, seven, it was horrible) zits, but that he/she didn't drop his makeup bag and run away screaming when he first saw them. he called attention to them rather tactfully, which impressed me: "is your skin, er, under treatment?" my mother and i tripped all over ourselves to assure him that the breakout was highly abnormal.

angie's just gotten signed to do makeup for shu uemura, and ojie's done a couple of preview and cosmo covers. the lighting in the photos is bad, and my sister just took them using her sony ericsson daddy phone, but the quality was superb, rates even better. booked 'em right away.

must thank loi for referring them.

Slowing down

lately i realized how fast-paced my life is. so many things have happened to me, and i haven't had time to really stop and write about them. that's worrisome, because many times blogging helps me savor, learn from and immortalize the moment. i'm worried i've been letting too many of those moments just zip by.

suddenly the tour is three months behind me, and in not communicating how meaningful it was to me, the meaning itself is beginning to slip away, and the details are beginning to lose their crispness and clarity.

i have been wearing my newfound identity as a bride for a month now, and all the little unfamiliarities and insights and surprises that came with slipping on that identity are also fading.

things go by so fast! i often find myself too tired to write about all the things that have happened to me. the iffy internet connection at work lately hasn't helped either.

i need to slow down. weekends like this -- quiet, at home, not a lot to do -- help, but sometimes they're just too short.

--

this weekend was nice though. friday morning, i spent with a young and enthusiastic designer who not only totally got what i wanted, but trimmed his rates so that they fit neatly into my budget. and let me tell you, after all being confronted with one heart-stopping quotation after another, plus a slowly inflating budget, it was all i could do not to jump up and down and clap my hands with delight.

in the evening, a despedida for gutsy at her place. she's leaving for oz to study for a year. intimate party, lots of great food, and (as the theme for the evening) lots of embarrassing photos of ourselves. there were almost too many embarrassing photos of jd and andrei, considering they weren't even at the party. my photos were reverse-embarrassing: i was so thin pre-marlon that i'm embarrassed for myself now! not good. as sir jojo once said to me as he attempted to snatch a piece of iloilo butterscotch out of my hands:ang traje de boda!

we ended up staying at gutsy's until 5 a.m., since mimi, our designated driver, was knocked out cold by a heavy dose of cough medicine. oneill fell asleep on the chair in gutsy's sala that is extremely cushy but looks uncannily like a giant sanitary napkin.

had giggly wedding talk with the girls, and -- surprise surprise!-- jay tamayo, who assured me that our wedding budget was commendably low for tagaytay. grabe. everyone is so excited for this wedding. it's the next big gc/acs wedding after aui's. a full third of all the guests are the choir. wonder what it will be like when they all stand up to sing -- sasabog ata ang chapel on the hill.

--

stayed in bed most of the weekend and caught up on my "to watch" pile of dvds. marie antoinette last week, misery and little miss sunshine this week. i must say misery is one of the creepiest films ever -- so much nail-biting tension packed into one slow zoom-in of james caan's face as kathy bates' character puttered closer and closer to his bedroom door. (it also helped that he had some very expressive winces and facial tics. galing.)

went to a bridal fair and found a great deal on white gold wedding rings, so i paid the reservation fee after discussing it with marlon and sleeping on it. eavesdropped at a couple of bickering couples ("hindi, hindi ko naman sinabing walang kwenta yung wedding cake!"). was dumbstruck at how crappy some suppliers are and how much pretense they employ to get people's business. generally enjoyed being by myself since everyone was hounding the couples.

finally, thankfully, got to blog.

and it's sunday night all too soon. another fast-paced week coming right up.

Huwhapakkkkkk

this can only be cosmic retribution for every time i crowed over a 33.3-peso purchase at an ukay-ukay or a 200-peso pair of sandals at landmark.

this morning, i found out what a wedding gown costs. and now, at 7:10 p.m., my heart has resumed close-to-normal functions, finally sending up some much-needed blood to my brain, and i am actually capable of having thoughts on the matter.

i can't believe that i will be spending more on approximately 12-hour use of a couple of meters of cloth than on a 24-hour rental of a 2-hectare farm and garden.

i can't believe i've dreamt of wearing this garment my whole life and now i''m mentally running for the first burlap sack i can find, and dying it white. (with maybe some touches of gold.)

i can't believe marlon and i are going to spend so much on me. can't the four bridesmaids, two mothers, three secondary sponsors, two flower girls, three ring/coin/bible bearers, best man, maid of honor and marlon wear it too? can't we all just share and be happy?

i can't believe that wedding dresses in singapore cost at least 24 times more.(kamusta naman at wala talaga akong tiwala sa mga sastre nila doon.) this information was volunteered just a couple of minutes ago by marlon, to explain his unnatural calm when i told him the figures.

magtanan na lang kaya kami.

or maybe i've been shopping at too many ukay-ukays for far too long.

Pockets of comfort

my mind is still buzzing with thoughts about getting married and moving to singapore, which i touched on a couple of hours ago, and which i feel rather anxious about at this point.

but i was lucky to find little pockets of comfort while surfing the net at work:

- when i was nine, i saw a bed like this in an old issue of architectural digest. i decided then and there that i would have one just like it someday. they have it over at ikea singapore. oh, and this one is lovely too.

- in an old post (and column), jim offers wonderfully reassuring insights on marriage.

- and the dresses at pronovias are absolutely beautiful. (still got a little bit of a spain hangover there.)