Purpose of weddings: Wealth transfer?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of weddings, and I think I’ve thought my way into reconciling the fact that M and I can’t afford our wedding – my dad gifted us the funds for it. I tend to strongly align myself with the “if you can’t pay for it yourself, you can’t have it” camp, so this new perspective comes somewhat as a surprise to me.

Modern western family economics is based on a premise of independence. Once we’re officially adult (say, 21? 18?), the ideal out there is that we’re supposed to be completely self-sufficient. And I pretty much buy into this ideal. Except, it turns out, I also think it’s a kind of screwed up model.

If I want to have a kid or two (I do), and I want to raise them in a house and generally give them things that kids should have, the way things work these days is that I’ll need to take on a mortgage that could take decades to pay off. Meanwhile, raise your hand if your boomer parents live alone or with their partner, in a 3 bedroom house that is bigger than the one you’ll get when you finally finish scraping a house deposit together. I mean, does this make sense? The point at which I’ll have what I need to raise a kid will be the point at which the kid is an adult themself.

Back when the global economy was still growing, there was some logic to the model. Each generation could expect to make more money than the one before them. But now that the global economy is screwed* and contracting, the days of doing better than your parents, as a generation, have ended. The boomers are probably the most economically lucky generation that will ever have existed (cue any boomer reading this to start griping about how tough they had it in their 20s).

So, back to weddings. When my dad married my mom, he lived with his parents until his wedding day. Getting married was a major marker of entering adulthood. And part of the function of weddings those days was for the community to help the couple set up their new household, by giving them gifts of basic necessary household stuff. I think some kind of ceremonial marker of adulthood, in which the new adult is given economic help, makes a lot of sense. That this takes the form of a wedding, of course, is not fair (assumes everyone gets married; assumes everyone gets married at a convenient youngish age).

These days, marriage and weddings are different. I’ve been independent from my parents for years. I’ve been living with M for years. People are asking us what they can get us as wedding presents, because giving us kitchen appliances and such makes no sense. But man, how useful would have been, when I was say 22, if there was some kind of big celebration that involved the people who could afford it giving me a few sheets and a blender? Young people still need help, and probably we need it more than our parents did, but the cultural mechanism for a bit of inter-generational wealth transfer has disappeared.

All of which is to say, I now feel better about the fact that almost everyone I know is getting parental help to pay for their wedding. It goes against the independence ideal which is the backbone of all personal finance advice, but maybe that’s ok. It doesn’t excuse the decadence of the average wedding though. Seriously, if you need financial help and your parents are providing it, that money needs to be going towards a house deposit fund, or paying off student loans, or some other thing that affects long term net wealth. Weddings are still a consumption item.

*In my opinion, the global economy is going to stay screwed. But some people think it’s going to turn around. Dog knows that’s a massive debate that will go on forever. For now, I’m not interested in having that debate on my blog.

Book review: Is the Offbeat Bride book worth reading?

Everyone knows the Offbeat Bride blog, one of the earliest bridal blogs and the first to glorify non-mainstream weddings. And everyone knows its central message is authenticity, as in, if you really like Doctor Who, go ahead and have a Doctor Who themed wedding. But what might have seemed a very relevant and even groundbreaking discussion at first, has become absorbed everywhere, and now even Style Me Pretty brides constantly mention that they want their wedding to “reflect our personalities”.  The whole Be True to Yourself thing is kind of yawn-inducing at this point. So when, on a bookshop shelf, I came across the book that spawned the website, I wondered if there was anything in it that we haven’t heard before.

From the tag cloud in my sidebar you can see that one of my most frequently used tags is ‘authenticity’. And if you asked OBB, they’d say, Hey, We’re all authenticity all the time too! What I mean by the word is not exactly the same thing that they mean by the word, but, in the Venn diagram of authenticities, there would be some overlap. For instance, this: ”…we didn’t put ourselves in debt. Instead of paying to create a fantasy land, we picked the best things our everyday lives had to offer and crafted an extra-special everyday.” Exactly, exactly, exactly.

That said, the discussion around money issues was not a very compelling one. I’d been keen to check out what the book had to say about it ever since, way back when, Meg on A Practical Wedding let us know that she contributed a sidebar in the book on the topic. So yes, you know what’s going to happen now, brace yourself for some more of my apparently unavoidable APW headdesking…Initiate:

Inevitably, the scant few hundred words about money talk a lot about emotions, and zero about actual numbers. There are four bullet points, two of them employ the phrase ”feels right to you”, one says, “You don’t have to spend money in ways that make your feel financially uncomfortable”, (Teh Wisdom flows!), and the other one says, “…there are times when you’re willing to throw money at a problem to make it go away. Do it.” Arg. I hate financial advice about emotions, because it isn’t actually financial advice, and money, perhaps unlike other wedding stuff you can talk about, lives in the world of objective truths. It’s a bad idea to go into debt, whether that feels right to you or not (and evidently, going into debt for a wedding feels right for a lot of people). *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*

The most useful part of the book for me was the discussion about navigating religious differences, particularly when you want a secular wedding but some of your family members are religious. Or as in our case, they don’t necessarily know that we don’t share their beliefs. Thanks to the advice in this book, we are strongly considering incorporating an ambiguous moment of silence during the ceremony, where people can think happy thoughts, or pray, or send vibes, according to their world view. We’ll also be taking heed of the caution to not discuss our wedding’s religiosity or lack thereof ahead of time with said family members.

But ultimately, the most engrossing part of the book is the awesomeness of Ariel Stallings herself, author and founder of all the Offbeat offshoots. It didn’t take many pages of reading before I was sucked into her coolness, and the book is mostly a record of sorts of her own wedding experience. It’s like reading her personal wedding blog, except there’s chapters instead of posts and you get to read them all at once. Feeling teenagerish, when she says stuff like, “I wanted to dress for the wedding the same way I would for my faviourite kind of party, which is to say like a fairy-freakish electro forest queen”, apart from vigorously agreeing, I couldn’t help kind of wanting to be friends with her and wishing I could have been at that wedding. It sounds damn fun. Minutes after I finished the book I did the googling necessary to find her wedding pictures, and got totally adolescently inspired by this bridal portrait. She looks fierce.

She’s the cool older sister, and while reading the book I found myself constantly evaluating where my own wedding would sit on the offbeatness scale, and alternately feeling totally aligned with her, and then wondering if I was overstating my wedding’s offbeatness in an effort to be like the cool kids. But seriously, turns out my wedding is going to pretty damn offbeat, and the book provided some nice solidarity, even if she’s more extreme than me. So I’d say if you’re someone who is not having a mainstream wedding, and is looking for some like-minded reassurance, then yes, it is worth reading.

Six month panic: Bridal style

I think I’ve mentioned ad nauseum the fact that I’ve spent a good chunk of my life dreaming about wedding dresses. It’s what got me into wedding blogs in the first place. And then I spent so much time reading the blogs that my opinions on weddings changed. At various points I have fallen in love with a certain dress, or a certain design feature that I decided I was definitely going to have when I got married, and then a year later my ideal would change. I always wondered what would be the one that would stick, that would go down in history as my wedding dress, to be looked at one day when I am old. And now I’m pretty close to knowing. At this point, I’m very clear on the vibe I’m shooting for, but not yet 100% clear on its execution.

A big part of this has been determined by the context of the reception, and the fact my philosophy on style is always Context is Everything. My wedding is going to be a fun beach party. So I’m going to look like I’m at a fun beach party.

Let’s start with hair. It’s hot, so my hair needs to be up. Because the wedding is low budget, I won’t have a professional hair person coming, so it needs to be something I can do myself. And because I’m doing it myself, it needs to be something that doesn’t stress me out by taking three hours and/or being difficult to execute. So I’m thinking something like this:

Bonus: When, not if, the humidity turns my hair into a thicket, it will look intentional (that’s the plan anyway).

For jewellery, I like the exuberant, natural, a bit chunky, kind of free spirit look. I dig this kind of stuff:

Fiance: “You’re so African at heart. You’d wear a necklace of mini elephant tusks”
Me: *considers* “Not if they were ivory”

While I’m a huge fan of both multistrand necklaces and biggish dangling earrings, they’re probably too much to wear at once, so I’m leaning towards just the earrings. Something like these, perchance:

Ay, there’s the rub.

Now for shoes. Considering the facts of beach sand, my five foot ten height, and the evilness of heels, I’ll either go straight up barefoot, or where some invisible haurache style sandals. Check it out, you can make them yourself and customize them with different tying patterns, beading and such:

Like this, except not like this.

Now for the dress. What I have at this point is inspiration, and the knowledge that I want it short, in a weather-friendly material, with a bikini underneath and the ability to take it on and off quickly. (We’re encouraging swimming at our reception. The groom is wearing board shorts. Long pants in this weather = insane.) As a nod to my bridalhood, I’d like it in a fairly light color, but not white or ivory because I can’t pull either of those off. These things hit the right note, except for colour and length:

Also without the evil heels.

And that’s about where I sit folks! Now, back to the regularly scheduled words-only programming.

Six month panic: Health and beauty care

Because I like to turn everything in life into numbers and/or systems*, not long after I got engaged I signed up to The Knot so that I could get access to their planning timeline checklist. I read through it all, figured out that most of it was irrelevant to me, and decided to go ahead with using common sense instead. Also, in the early months of engagement, there’s really not much to do besides tell people, make a list of guests, book a venue, make a wedding website, and send out links to it. Which ok, is 5 whole things, but if you’re engaged for a year, that’s a really breezy task-to-month ratio. You’re advised to start thinking about the dress (hahaha. I’ve been thinking about the dress for a couple decades already), and looking into invitations, and a few other non-task type things, but really, not much is going on until you hit the W minus 6 months point.  Then shit gets real. No more arsing around, you have to actually get stuff done.

My wedding is in October, which means during April I hit my 6 months to go point. Apart from needing to organise actual logistics, it felt like a kind of ominous milestone. Have you ever noticed how many things in life take 6 months? For instance, if I want to have good posture by the time of my wedding, I need to start working on that right now. Like many, I’ve been targeting the wedding day as a kind of deadline for getting the rest of life together. Body-fat-percentage wise. Flexibility-of-hamstrings-wise. Earrings-wise. And so many other types of wises.

So this is how I found myself, instead of rushing to book a photographer (I’ve got a shortlist, but it’s such a slog to compare the galleries of 13 different ones and try to pick the best. I just have not been able to find the motivation yet), fiance and I got ourselves a health check and found out we both have high cholesterol. We have 6 months to sort all this stuff out! Time to start doing attempting pull-ups! Time to start stretching, and doing squats!

The upshot is, I now eat several servings of fruit and veg a day, we got ourselves a pair of rollerblades each, we went blading and got sunburnt and my nose peeled, and then I panicked about my absent skin care routine and bought a bunch of beauty products. I also crashed on my blades and gave my knee a fairly nasty scraping, earning myself something that has good odds of becoming a pretty large patch of scar tissue, and also rendering me unable to do squats because I can’t bend my knee when the patch is this tender.

But let me tell you about the skin care.

Paula Begoun has been writing about the skin care world, and what in it is evidence based and what is not, since the 80s. Turns out the world of beauty products is almost as prone to myth and the strident neglect of reality as the world of complementary medicine is (*coughhomeopathycough*). I shudder to think of the adolescent days when my dermatologist prescribed me alcohol swabs for my angry red zits. About as wrong a thing you can do to acne, short of, you know, putting food on your face or something. Eventually, Paula opened her own line of products, and, aww yeaaah, it’s all evidenced based. Get this, the product descriptions online each come with citations of peer-reviewed research explaining the use of each ingredient. It’s a vision of Utopia, truly.

I already had a good cleanser, so I got myself some toner, an exfoliant, a serum, and a sunscreen. Between all this and my recent introduction to the phenomenon that is tooth mousse, my bed time and morning routines have gotten a lot longer lately. On the hand, my skin is noticably softer, and I am optimistic that these two visible-only-to-me-yet-present sun spots, that horrifically appeared on my cheek in the last few months, will fade by the time of the wedding. Because with careful daily sun protection, the time that is estimated to take is six months.

But don’t worry, I have been panicking on more directly related to wedding stuff too. Like what I’m going to wear to my wedding. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post on that! For a day, this blog is going to abandon its thoughts only ethos, and join the Pretty Pretty party of frivolity. There’s going to be pictures.

*I can’t not systematise everything, apparently. When I was an undergrad I worked out very precisely how many hours to spend on each assignment based on the proportion of my final grade they counted for. I was like, “I need to spend 10 hours writing this essay”. It’s a compulsion.

Choose your bridesmaids by not overthinking it

Have you guys noticed the amount of bridesmaid drama on the blogs? It’s an ever-popular topic for the Ask Your Blogger to Solve Your Dilemma type of advice columns (you know, those contrived melodrama columns that make me yawn so). East Side Bride receives so many emails about bridesmaid crap that she started a second blog devoted to simply posting the emails. She quaintly calls it My Maid of Honor is a Cunt.

I think what is going on is that, like so many others things, the role of the bridesmaid has become regarded as ceremonial necessity. It’s not a proper wedding without at least one, and the role of the bridesmaid has become weirdly formalised. Take for example the list of tasks the bridesmaid is supposed to perform - The Knot (who else?), gives 24 duties. Now granted, some of these are not actually jobs, there’s plenty of fluff in there like “Keep the bride laughing” (memo to my bridesmaids: if you don’t extract at least one laugh from me per every 5 minutes of wedding reception, I’m cutting you from my friends list), but there is some legit actual work in there too. Let us take a sampling:

• Make sure everyone gets their bridesmaid  dresses, go to dress fittings, and find the right jewelry
• Host or cohost a bridal  shower for the bride.
• Keep a record of all the gifts received at various parties and showers (Wha..?)
•  Plan the bachelorette party with the bridesmaids
• Collect any gift envelopes brought to the reception and keep them in a safe  place
• Dance with the best man during the formal first-dance sequence and possibly be  announced with him at the beginning of the party. Also dance with other  groomsmen, the groom, and others.

What is the dance sequence stuff? That sounds like it belongs, if anywhere, in a world where young ladies also have such a thing as a debut into society, followed by attending balls as a means of finding a husband, and men ask for permission from their love’s father before proposing, and the wedding is paid for by the bride’s family, and that all sounds a bit like Regency England, or maybe a wealthy old money subset of southern US. I always get those two mixed up. I think it’s the carriages. Except even Emma and Mr Knightley did not hold a private ball as a wedding reception, so, burn. This formalised dance sequence oddness does not belong in our world, ok? What is it with this urge to build elaborate etiquette ceremonial behaviour into things that don’t need it?

And the same applies to the other alleged official duties of the bridesmaids. Act as official collecter of gifts? A shower and a bachelorette? (Quick aside: Words that are feminised by adding ‘ette’ or ‘ess’ on the end irritate my feminist sensibilties. Manageress? I don’t think so. My people don’t use the term bachelorette, we have Hen’s nights).

Anyway, I really like how Miss Manners describes the duty of bridesmaids. There’s only one: be a friend. Just, be a friend. Also note, there is nothing about matching clothing.

Things get so much simpler once you start ascribing to this view. No longer is the success/legitimacy of your wedding dependent on your bridesmaids’ ability to look equally ravishing in dresses of the same cut and shade of Tangerine Tango. Who cares if they suck at putting together a celebration of penises I mean Hen’s night. And hence, all angst surrounding bridesmaid antics or lack thereof, are instantly dissolved.

By extension, the angst of deciding who your bridesmaids should be also dissolves. In my opinion, you should only have attendants that are obvious choices. In fact, since their job is to be a friend, they choose themselves…by being your friend. The person who spontaneously decides to arrange a shower for you (if this happens, you should look into your daily hygiene habits. Hah! I kill myself), is performing the standard role of attendant, so then it becomes obvious to go ahead and call them an attendant. After we got engaged, my dear friend Z, who resides in Perth,  didn’t waste time going “We get to throw you a Hen’s night!” while dear friend R, who is living the Parisian dream, went “Oooh, can I please make you a garter? Or a ring pillow?” These chicks also happen to be close confidantes, so, done.

So easy. So simple. So melodrama-free.

Here’s my wedding budget

So after all my budget theory preaching, you’re probably thinking it’s about time I revealed my actual wedding budget.   I’ll do you one better: the line by line breakdown! Aren’t you excited? Doesn’t the prospect of looking at other people’s budgets get you all amped up? No? You don’t find it fun to obsess over numbers?

Jeez. Tough crowd.

I live in Singapore, so my mind thinks in Singapore dollars. Our wedding budget is (*fanfare*) SG$5000.

You probably don’t think in Singapore dollars, so you’re wondering how much money that really is. I’d go ahead and covert the currencies for you, but you know, cost of living stuff in a given area is always relative to incomes in the given area, and if you translated the cost of houses in South Africa into your local currency you’d be all, “I could have a mansion”. Plus, in Thailand you could have an amazing and massive meal for a dollar.

So refrain from using direct currency exchange as a converter, and use the Big Mac Index instead, which isn’t perfect, but at least does try to reflect the actual cost of living. I’ll tell you how many Big Macs I could buy in Singapore with that money, and then you work out how much of your local currency it would take to buy that many Big Mac’s where you live.

One Big Mac round here costs $4.85, So, my wedding budget is 1031 of them.

Ok, alright, fine, I’ll do the work for you. Here is my wedding budget translated into the currencies of various places using the Big Mac converter:

USA: $4.20 x 1031 =  US$4330

Canada: $4.73 x 1031 = CA$4877

New Zealand: $5.10 x 1031 = NZ$5258

Australia: $4.80 x 1031 = AU$4949

South Africa: R19.95 x 1031 = R20568
(see what I’m saying? One US Big Mac would buy you 4.75 South African ones, but the actual exchange rate between US dollars and South African rand is  like 7.8)

Attention England and Spain: Sorry, I couldn’t find the prices you guys have. I really wanted to know how my budget figures in pounds and euros. Maybe you could let me know your local Big Mac price?

Who else is craving a burger all of a sudden?

Ok, now for the line by line break down. I put this together, predictably, using that wedding budget calculator thing you are sick of me talking about. Then I started checking off all the things I know I don’t want to include, which was a substantial number of things (Get lost, Unity Candle!),  and filled in the fixed estimates I do already have.

Actually that last bit was interesting because it drastically changed the picture. The calculator wanted me to spend $1207 on food and $483 on booze. I’m having almost 50 people, so that’s like 10 bucks per person on drinks, which is totally laughable in all scenarios, except maybe if you home brew something, and then it gets downgraded to only pretty laughable. The amount for food is probably somewhat achievable if you’re self-catering too, but is almost half of the price I managed to get for catering.

I just want to quickly say two things here, and then I’ll move on.
1. I have a hunch that booze is much cheaper in parts of the world that aren’t Australia, NZ, and Singapore. How many Big Macs does a beer cost you, USAians?
2.  Nevertheless, these numbers and their apparent break from reality is evidence of the desperate need for a wedding paradigm shift, as I discussed in the podcast. What’s interesting is that this same iteration of the budget also allocated $733 all up for ceremony and reception decor and flowers, which seems excessive. If we’re going to afford our weddings, the paradigm shift is going to have to include a Step Away From the Pricey Decor clause. It’s a major component of wedding spending, and it needs to stop being standard and expected.

Based on the actual prices for food and drinks my venue gave me, I adjusted the catering to $1905, and $1000 for booze. I also already know that transport (ferry to the island) is going to cost about double what the calculator indicated, and I’m going to put our three nights’ stay at the resort down as the ‘facility rental’, and that’s going to be about 550 bucks.

I’m also allowing myself to cheat by not including it in the wedding budget if it’s something I’m going to use again (stay tuned for much more discussion about this in a future post).

So here, finally, is the result:

FrugallyWed’s Goal Wedding Budget

Facility rental                        550
Flowers and decorations  388
Drinks                                    1000
Food                                        1905
Bride’s wedding outfit        297
Attendants’ gifts                      55
Groom’s outfit                         46
Groomsmen outfits             119
Transport                                130
Photography                         447
Invitations                                64

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

Everything else we’re either not having, or it’s already included in the catering price (fire torches), or it’s something we’ll use again and thus I’m filing it under general life expense and not wedding expense. The main wiggle room comes from the flower and decor allocation – I plan to spend more than $55 on attendants’ gifts.

There you have it folks. Was that, or was that not, a whirlwind of excitement? Whew. Come, let me take you all out for burgers now.

Making my peace with/getting over A Practical Wedding, Part 2

(Quick note: Sorry I took more than 24 hours to put this up. Also, the other day I looked at my blog when I was not logged in as myself and there was an advert between the post and the comments. Wtf? I didn’t put it there and had no idea it was there. Have you guys been seeing ads on my blog?? I don’t know what’s going on. Since we’re chatting, I want to also apologise and thank everyone for their patience re: my frequent spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes. I read my older posts and want to punch myself in the face, as Rogue would say. Thank you for not doing that for me.)

As I mentioned yesterday, over the years, the content at A Practical Wedding has changed drastically as the site has grown from a one-woman hobby to a money making enterprise that requires several people to produce. While the readership has soared, my enjoyment of the blog has waned. The number of posts have gone up; the number of posts I enjoy reading has gone down. What used to be a diary style blog, is now…something else entirely, with lots of new types of content having been added over time, and none of it being as interesting as the original story I got invested in. This is what APW has on offer today: Wedding Grad posts, advertorials, Wordless Weddings, a Q & A advice column, intern diaries, “Lazy girl’s guide” DIY how-to posts, Reclaiming Wife posts, the occasional diary style posts from Meg, and more sporadically, posts about specific weddings that happened in a different era.

I think I’ve already made my feelings about the advertorials clear, and the Grad posts,  already filler-like in their nature from the beginning, have essentially become the backbone of the blog’s content. I suppose it’s a good model – an ever replenishing pool of readers eagerly submit their wedding for its day in the sun before they get bored with APW. And probably that is a very satisfying arrangement for readers who don’t stay on board for too long and who move on after their weddings. Like how pregnancy magazines have a constantly revolving group of readers joining and then leaving.

The Wordless Weddings are some of the most filler-like filler material I have come across. Consisting of nothing but pictures, I’m not sure what we are supposed to get out of them, because if I am online to look at pictures then that is definitely not the place I go to do it. They’re like Grad posts but easier. Maybe to encourage people who are not up for writing a whole story to still send a submission? The occasional vintage wedding post strikes me as a desperate grasping for content too, when an intern gets her parents to write about their wedding.

The Ask Team Practical advice column and the Reclaiming Wife posts are as good at it get’s on APW if you’re looking for something meaty. But as Ariella commented yesterday, I like  them much more in theory than I do in practice. The advice column has a tendency to be overwrought, and like most things on APW, too wordy. The Reclaiming Wife posts also have this way of somehow promising more substance than they contain, and can irritatingly be reliant on using a semantic argument disguised as taking  a controversial position on married relationships. Witness: “My spouse is not my best friend“, and “I keep secrets from my husband“. Some of the Reclaiming Wife posts are not about the spousal relationship itself, but about life things that happened to the couple after they got married. Again, I’ve got better places to look if I want to read one-off stories of people’s lives. Similarly, when they are actually about specifics of relationship dynamics, there’s no reason to believe writers at APW are especially qualified at this part, and I’d rather take advice from someone else.

Then there’s the intern’s planning diaries. I enjoy a good wedding planning story, and that’s what got me into APW in the first place. Unfortunately I don’t find the interns’ efforts that good a read for this. If you want entertaining, check out The Bitchy Bride and The Knotty Bride (the funniest wedding related thing on the internet), or my girls on the sidebar.

So what’s left that’s still good about APW? The message they promote. Updates about Meg’s life. The useful DIY stuff. And maybe for those living in the relevant areas, the directories. I just don’t know that all these things make for good long term blog fodder. Here is what I wish APW was really like:

• Everything pertaining to promoting vendors to be on a separate page/site where I only see it if I have specifically chosen to see it.
• A self-governing online community founded on the APW ethos, that is allowed to grow organically into whatever it wants to be. This would be the place for sharing stories with each other, and asking for and giving advice.
• A personal blog by Meg about her life.

At this point, everything that is valuable about what APW promotes is distilled in the book, and a blog based on constantly rehashing the same ideas for years is always uninteresting. And of course the foundational ideas of APW are at odds with the need to have copious adverts and sponsored posts featuring services that tend to be flagrantly unaffordable. The “F*ck ‘em if they don’t like chairs” catchphrase used to promote the book is cute until until APW gets sponsored by a furniture rental company (it happens).

So, ultimately, I would like APW not to be a blog. I would like it to be a community around a facebook page, or some other forum platform. I would like readers to be able to initiate conversations with each other with out relying on comments to posts. The community around APW has already shown promising hints of its potential to be great (the dress giveaways, the book club meet-ups), but the thing is, online communities don’t work when an institution is trying to maintain control of them*, and I think the way APW is run has kind stifled most the growth.

So those are my thoughts. Now, the making peace part (beware, mushiness ahead): becoming a fan of something and then watching it evolve into something you don’t like, creates a sense of resentment and yes, betrayal. The whole reason I couldn’t let this go, and wrote this, is that I was quite a big fan in the first place. I genuinely wish Meg well, and will continue to be interested in her life adventures, but I want to let APW  go now. I want to stop caring when APW does something that bothers me, and I want to stop being disappointed when I check it every day and find nothing stimulating. It is what it is. A gazillion readers love it. But it’s not for me any more. I want it out of my head space.

I still haven’t read the book, so I do plan on writing a book review on that. But in the mean time, I’m saying good bye to APW, and issuing myself a challenge to go a week without checking it.

*Dammit I had a really good link for that and now I can’t find it. I’ll keep on looking and update when I do, ok?