The End is Nigh

This weekend, in what must surely be the earthly fulfillment of the third sign of the Apocalypse, I - - me, Groomzilla, lover of all things bridal and matrimonial and nuptial - - almost became mentally overwhelmed by a sudden onslaught of wedding planning. Almost.

Aside from a brief break on Friday night to celebrate our Sixth Year In Love and a few drinks on Saturday night and a few hours of fitful sleep, M. and I have spent the past 48 hours Getting Ready for June.

We figured out room rates. We assigned rooms. We cut and trimmed and smoothed and glued invitations. We went to Crate&Barrel and Williams-Sonoma and Bed Bath & Beyond and fine-tuned our gift registries. We held our tongues, mostly, and settled - - M., for the old granny place settings, and I, for the KitchenAid mixer in Caviar. We made maps. We agreed on appropriate dress code verbiage. I bought a suit in just about the exact color and style I'd wanted. We stuffed, double-checked and sealed envelopes.

I couldn't even make it through a ninety minute yoga class without finding myself perpetually distracted and redistracted by the nagging questions of whether or not I had remembered to delete the Henckels knives from the BB&B registry after adding the Wusthof knives to the C&B registry, and whether there was some sort of glaring error on the invitations that we'd somehow overlooked which would cause everyone to show up in July or in 2009, and whether the stray thread that the suit lady pulled out of the inside of my suit jacket would leave me stranded one-sleeved at the altar.

And and and.

My yoga teacher kept telling us that the true meaning of life was in the journey, not in the arrival. Which sounds good on paper, but I'll be damned before M. and I allow all of this Journeying to result in anything other than a huge and rousing and spectacularly successful Arrival.

And then this morning at roughly 8:17am, standing under the fluorescent haze of the 52nd Street branch of the U.S. Postal Service, I peeled and stuck the final 87-cent stamp on the final envelope, carried all 68 of them (minus 5 internationals) to the Stamped Envelope slot, praised Allah and Yahweh and Buddah and Mother Moon and Anyone Else I could think of, and let 'em drop.

Other than the fact that the man presently gracing the 87-cent stamp (they make these, you know) is Albert Sabin - - noted virologist, discoverer of the polio vaccine, assumed nerd and loser in love - - it was, all in all, despite the emotional duress, a Very Successful Weekend.