Running on Empty

Oh man, do I need a vacation. I can't wait for our honeymoon, lax days digging my feet into the pristine white sand of the beach - that's the life. Instead of hitting snooze this morning on my alarm, I accidently turned it off, and when I woke up on my own later and was therefore a bit late to work, I didn't even care. I'm so burnt out, so tired of the day-to-day mentality, I offered no explanation for my tardiness or even bothered to care in general.

As it turns out, having this wedding is much like taking a vacuum cleaner to every nook and cranny of our checking account. I can't complain too much because it is no one's fault by my own that we've been breaking budget left and right - I am absolutely unfaltering on my dream wedding - so I've had to take the sacrifices we've had to make in stride. It's only temporary, and it'll be oh-so-worth-it in the long run. I went to Tahoe over the weekend to help count RSVP cards with my mom while Matt was having a night out with the boys, and my mom was telling me how she recalled hearing my sister-in-law (my brother's wife) tell her mom how she couldn't wait till the wedding was over and how appalling that was that she could have such an attitude. But here's the thing: I couldn't cut into my SIL for that comment and partake in my mom's favorite pastime of gossiping because I know what she meant. It shouldn't be confused by thinking that such a comment means I'm ungrateful or that I don't want this wedding because nothing could be further from the truth. Mostly I just don't know how wedding planners do it for a living - deal with the stress, the thousands of errors from the vendors, the daily (and extremely worn out) conversation about the budget and where corners can be cut. Perhaps it's helpful that it's their only job - to plan weddings - and it's not with their money. Currently, I feel sick, tired, run down, and incredibly, insanely excited. Really - despite the consistent nonstop flow of my life and my enormous disdain for all things monetary, I can't wait to marry my Matt in front of all our friends and family. It's true that no wedding is ever impeccably perfect and regardless of how mentally beat up I currently feel, undoubtedly one day I'll look back on this time with fond memories; however, at this exact moment in time, it wouldn't break my heart to just fast forward to August 5 so I can start reaping the benefits.

On a brighter note, I sold the monster, missing grill emblem and all. In fact, I sold it on Thursday not long after I made my post decrying my terrible collision with irony (pun intended). I had mentioned I got a phone call from a girl who wanted to come look at it that day, but I had, unfortunately, driven the Honda to work, and she was unable to come look when I got off work due to our conflicting schedules. On my drive home from work, I got a call from the girl's parents who were very excited about coming to look at the car behind their daughter's back - they came over immediately to look at it, poke at the tires, scratch the leather; they test drove the car, and by God, they bought the f***er, very few questions asked (which incidentally is probably exactly the way the sale with that car needed to go).

After I'd signed over the title and filled out a Bill of Sale (and we exchanged information so I could mail them the missing emblem), Matt and I went out for dinner and few beers to celebrate unloading such an egregious problem. I was slightly melancholy - God knows why - and even got a little teary-eyed after a couple beers, commenting to Matt that, "if I had known it was the last day I'd ever have the Jetta, I would've driven it to work" (to which he, understandably, rolled his eyes). I have an uncanny habit of getting attached to inanimate objects, but I woke up the next morning with "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead" in my head which speaks largely on how I really felt about the car. The car is officially no longer our problem, and the Honda's not too bad - it gets me from point A to point B, though the superficial part of me can't help laughing hysterically when I catch a glimpse of me driving the Honda in a window reflection.

Yesterday marked one year of my ownership of Freedom the deployment kitty (unfortunately she's not terribly fond of Matt). Monday marked one year since Matt went back to Afghanistan after his R&R. It was strange to think that a year ago we had been exchanging our goodbyes in the airport, hugging, crying. "See you in 9 months!"

I often fantasize about how my future will turn out - daydreaming, if you will. I'm constantly playing out scenarios in my head, scenarios that are somewhat predictable because of the path we've chosen in life. While Matt was deployed I found it extremely difficult to picture life post-deployment. Diving head first into a deployment is rarely a comfortable situation and never a predictable one; it's a path that is arguably chosen for you (oh, sure, I know it's easy to say that a soldiers have chosen deployment when they enlist in the army, but the timing of a deployment is never something that can be planned - it just happens). No matter how close to the end of the deployment we got, I found that I never knew or was even able to guess the way it would end.

I remember watching Matt board onto the plane last June 12 and thinking to myself that this could be the last time I ever saw him. It's morbid, but it's the reality of war. And even further past the mortality worries, there's also the constant wonder of what so many months of separation can do to your relationship. I can't recall exactly where I first heard the quote or who said it, but I used it more than once in Military Bride: "Distance is to love like wind is to fire: it kindles the great and diminishes the weak." Hoards of relationships in our unit had already failed due to infidelity during the course of the deployment, and hoards more ended at the close of the deployment because time had further frayed the edges of a love that was apparently already threadbare.

During the deployment, while I consistently felt physically alone, I never felt as though the ordeal was something I was facing by myself. While I was lonely here at home, Matt was lonely on the other side of the world. Never once did I view our respective loneliness as separate entities - granted we weren't always readily available to support one another in our darkest hours, this was something we were doing together. And we were going to come out of it together. CaliValleyGirl recently wrote a post about Deployment as Couple's Therapy, and for us, it truly was (though, like she says, "That is not to say that my boyfriend and I needed couples therapy before he left, however, I do think that our relationship actually benefited more from our separation, than was harmed."). I think it's so important not forget that, notwithstanding distance, you're still a part of a pair, half of a whole, or however you want to look at it. I knew so many wives who made the deployment all about them and their sufferings - this isn't about who was left behind, and it's not even necessarily about waiting. It's about being supportive and being capable of looking beyond yourself in order to offer that support. The love that can survive a deployment is the kind of love that needs to be more prevalent in the world - it's that selfless (and truly unconditional) love that can handle anything. I'm so grateful to have Matt home safe and sound and so grateful at how our relationship has pulled through. It's damn good to have him home!

Is It "Hit and Run" if the Other Driver Doesn't Realize They've Been Hit?

I am never ever selling a car privately ever again. It's a toss up whether it's more stressful to own the car or to try and pawn it off on someone else. When you want so badly to get rid of something, it's the lack of interest that really brings you down.

Last weekend Matt and I went to San Francisco to visit Matt's great aunt and to catch an A's game in Oakland while we were there (I have pictures from the game, but unfortunately my mom took them and hasn't yet figured out how to operate the camera with her new computer, so hopefully I'll add those pictures to this post next week pending the outcome of My Mom vs. The New Computer). On our way home we stopped in Sacramento to pick up our spiffy "new" 1990 Honda Civic, which is in excellent condition considering it's 16-years old, and which, humiliatingly enough, I bottomed out backing out of Matt's parents' driveway as they stood at the bottom of the driveway waving goodbye. Hey, thanks for the car. So much for the "I'll take good care of it" promise...

I started running an ad for my car last Saturday in the local paper, and we left it parked in a busy parking lot with a "For Sale" sign and my cell number taped in the back window while we were out of town last weekend. This combination produced a phone call Sunday evening - you can't even imagine how thrilled I was to get a message from a potential buyer. Apparently when you're selling a car, the first call is always this exciting. Unfortunately it didn't produce much. I returned the girl's call to discover much to my dismay that she couldn't have been more than 16, lived in a town over four hours away, and didn't want to get financed through a bank, but would like to make payments to me. Yeah. Right.

I don't really know what I was expecting in selling the car - the two "reliable" sources I know who'd sold their cars privately made it sound like they'd snapped their fingers and found a buyer, so I was extremely discouraged, nevermind I've only been actively trying to sell the car for about a week. Tuesday I cleaned the hell out of my car - scrubbed it to the nitty gritty, literally. The car hasn't been this clean since we bought it. I emptied everything personal out of it and snapped some modelesque photos ("Yeah, baby, that pose right there. BEAUTIFUL!") which I posted on cars.com on Wednesday. As my luck would have it, the ad had not been posted even 3 hours on cars.com when I left my office for my lunch break and proceeded to rear-end an enormous van with no brake lights. I swear to God this stuff only happens to me.

We were right in front of a 7-11 when said "accident" took place, so I expected the man driving the van to pull over into the parking lot so we could to the customary exchange of insurance information, phone numbers, contract to surrender first born child, etc etc. Except, the man didn't pull over. This surprised me a little - the last time I got rear-ended, I was so upset I didn't even wait for a parking lot and just got out of my car there in the street. I started flashing my lights at the guy, waving my arms out the window like a maniac to signal the guy to pull over at his earliest convenience, and otherwise making a wonderful fool of myself. We passed a shopping center - huge parking lot - and the guy just kept on going. I stopped following him when he got on the freeway because obviously there's no good place to pull over there. If it had meant that much to him, he would've pulled over immediately, and I honestly started wondering if he'd even noticed the wrath of my Jetta at a whopping 5 mph. The worst it did to his van was smudge the bumper a little with the paint off my cheap plastic bumper.

Luckily, my car didn't fair too badly either, though I did lose the VW emblem that sits in my grill. There's now a big, gaping symmetrical circle in the middle of my grill where once the silver VW initials reined in terror. I returned to the scene of the crime in hopes of finding that damn little emblem - when you're selling a kind of crappy car, you have to bank a lot on the looks of the it, and that big gaping hole is about attractive as an open wound. I had to call the parts department of the dealership and order a new one which surprisingly was not too terribly expensive and could probably mean the difference between a sale. The downside was that the part had to be shipped and wouldn't arrive till Friday, at the earliest; I figured this wouldn't been an issue since the calls haven't exactly been pouring in. Out of fear of damaging the Jetta even further while waiting for the emblem, I even took the Honda to work today, I was that confident I wouldn't get any calls on it.

As you've probably well guessed by this point, I received not one, not two, but THREE calls from potential buyers today. Honestly, I get one call all week and I get in a wreck and it's like my car is suddenly a hot commodity. One girl was ready to look at the car today, so I was a little sour that in all my infinite wisdom I decided to take the Honda to work today. I'd be willing to show the car without its trademark in the grill - I mean, I've ordered the thing and that has to count for something, right? I have two people coming to look at it tomorrow, so I'm crossing my fingers that something comes of this - it would be a dream come true if I were able to sell the car within a week ('cause, you know, then I wouldn't have to pay insurance on it this month).

I guess there's a couple morals to this story, the first being that if you're selling a car, you probably shouldn't drive it if you can help it - it's just tempting fate. The second moral I can't exactly remember - something about irony and life being a bitch - and the third moral is that if you are going to sell a car, cars.com is a lot better than your local rag. Apparently more people browse the internet than read the paper. Go figure.