Saturday, July 7, 2012

First Post: On Weddings, Inspiration, and The End of the World

I have finally done the thing I said I would never do: blog.

The reasons ranged from, "I don't have anything to say," to "If I'm going to write, I'm gonna get PAID to do it!" Well, several months ago, I got engaged, and have since been perusing wedding websites like it's my job.  In the process, I have run across so many amazingly real, committed blogs dedicated to helping women see through the massive load of bullsh*t that IS the wedding industry.  I still have a great deal of time until my wedding, so I haven't been too stressed yet. I have been calmly adding up the costs and doing my homework, and it had been so relieving to find out that weddings don't need to cost billions.  or even very many thousands.  I'm not one of those girls who has been planning her wedding since she was three.  Beyond white dress and lots of friends and family, I honestly hadn't thought much about it until these past couple of months.  Now that I am though, and I have had the benefit of finding The Offbeat Bride and A Practical Wedding, both of which have made me clap, giggle, and cry (happy and sad tears). But this blog is not about weddings. These blogs, however, have also made me realize a lot about my own life journey, which is really just getting started.

Let's back track a bit, and talk about my life besides wedding. I am a musician in the Twin Cities area, and I have just graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in Percussion Performance (I hit things in the most artistic way possible, or at least that's the goal).  I have graduated however, into a world that has no room for me, or any other twenty something millennial.  We are not getting jobs, we're living with our parents, we're getting married later, we're having babies later... WE ARE NOT OKAY.  We are living in a baby-boomer created world and are being blamed, bashed, overeducated, and generally beaten up.  That's why most of us are still at home and applying for jobs ANYWHERE.  A Master's degree is the new Bachelor's degree.  A Bachelor's degree is the new high school diploma, and in terms of the job market, if you don't have a high school diploma, you're basically non-existent.  For more on this, please see this excellent post by fellow blogger sierra. We are the millennials, we are the next generation, and boy are we in trouble.

I am determined, however, to live out my life the way I want.  I wanted to study music and make a living from it, so that's what I have decided to do, incapacitating recession or not. Six college years and $40,000 dollars in debt later (yes, I realize that's not too bad comparatively), here I am, a baby grow-up: ready to burst into the world, skills ablaze. This has been how I imagined my life, though I did not imagine this to be the ideal socio-economic state of things.  So I am making the best of it, and determined to do whatever I have to do (as long as it's fun and I want it) to make a decent living.

So coming back to the wedding blogs... they inspired me.  Here are these women who had a problem, began writing about it, and now have their own special niche in the world, where they can share and help other people and spread all of this LOVE!  It's so totally awesome.  Seriously, if you have not checked out APW yet, please do.  Doesn't matter if you are single, married, divorced, dating, in love, in hate, whatever.  They are such lovely people with such a great thing going. So anyways, after reading all these blogs and hearing all these lovely people with things to say, I though to myself, "Hey... I have things to say!"  And then my blog was born. In the course of blogging, I'll touch on a lot of topics, from feminism to relationships to family to careers (lots about that) to houses to basically anything and everything.  I want to report on my little life slices to prove that I am going to live out my life better than  I ever imagined.  I don't care about the economy or the state of this wretched, wretched world with all it's horrifying statistics that seem to point ever closer to the end of the world. I am determined to have the tenacity, the insistence, and the fight to succeed in a male-dominated patriarchal society in the financial crapper.  So please, if you like what I have to say, support my tiny newborn baby blog, and spread the word.

The very last thing I'll leave you with is this amazing slice of life, a poem by Mary Oliver:


The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?





3 comments:

  1. Welcome to the blog world Krissy! Congrats on your engagement! I can't wait to keep on reading.

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  2. Thanks Stacy! Congrats to you, too!

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