The year of The Wedding

I know 2007 is supposed to be the Year of the Pig, but for me this is definitely The Year of the Wedding. Not mine, thankfully (I'll never get married in an uneven year...), but it seems everybody I know has decided to tie the knot before the end of April.

It's only the third week of January, and already I've travelled far and wide to spend two beautiful Saturday afternoons hearing people say "I do". (As a matter of fact, I've never been to a wedding where they said "I do". It's always the unromantic "yes".) As if two isn't enough, I have another four coming up in the next 2 months, and I'm already praying there'll be enough liquor available to deal with the five lovesick couples who will most likely be seated with me and my imaginary date.

Because of my extensive database of attended wedding receptions (one of the legacies of a small town upbringing), I've decided to indulge you in my version of How to get Married without Losing Friends and Alienating the In-laws.

In my opinion, the most important thing to get right is the dress. If the bride looks stunning, and I mean really breathtakingly beautiful, you can get away with almost anything. Nobody cares too much then about the shit food, the too loud so last decade music or the fact that they really think the groom is an assbag. All they'll say afterwards is: The bride looked soooooo beautiful.

Of course, it also helps if the bridespair like each other. I've been to a wedding once where the groom couldn't stand the sight of his wife. Seriously. He couldn't get himself to look at her, never mind smile at her. She, of course, was MADLY in love with him. So even though I prefer bridespairs to be like peas in a pod, I can deal with it if they at least look at each other while declaring their everlasting love.

Make sure the wedding gifts are safely guarded throughout the night. You won't believe it, but some of your guests will be very tempted to take some of the gift registry home. In fact, a friend of mine has been to a wedding where the groom stole R1000 cash (meant for the DJ) out of his new father-in-law's jacket. I kid you not, he was caught red-handed on the wedding tape.

(In the light of the above, I guess it's also a good idea to make sure you know a good divorce lawyer before you even think about setting foot in that church. And the prenups better be in your favour.)

Invite kids. They're the ones who'll have the most fun - that is, until a fistfight breaks out on the dancefloor (my cousin, aged 4 at the time, once gave a crybaby boy an opstopper and bloody nose. the guy now plays tighthead for the cheetahs.) Kids won't have any forced, polite conversations starting with "so how do you know the bride?" and as long as you feed them hot dogs, chips and chocolate cake, they won't gossip about the dress, the food, the venue or the assbag groom.

Talking about those forced, polite conversations - think carefully about the seating arrangements. To be honest, I don't give a shit if you put your two uncles who haven't spoken a word in years next to each other. Or if you seat the family flirt next to the dominee. Just make sure I'm not the only single person at a table with five lovesick couples ever again!

Pick an upbeat song to open the dancefloor with. No, Steve Hofmeyr's Pampoen is not appropriate (yes, I've been to one of those too...). Neither is anything by Celine Dion or Shania Twain. If you really insist, you can play a tranetrekker, but only if you can dance and are wearing a stunning dress that will divert the attention.

Now, the liquor arrangements can be a tricky thing, especially if the bride is a recovering alcoholic (yes, I've also been to one of those. The bride was falling drunk at 9h30 pm). You don't have to spend a fortune on the bar tab, but you really have to remember the following:

* Choose a venue where the cash bar won't charge your guests R34 for a double of anything. And the cheaper the tequila, the better.
* The more friends you invite, the better for the party (and the family politics).
* Forget about the bride, the DJ is the most important person in the room.
* You can never have enough champagne.

Lastly, while you and your loved one are taking pictures for hours, your guests are (still) having forced, polite conversations while staring at their drab-looking appetisers. Make sure the party is well underway by the time you're back. One tiny glass of sherry is not going to do the trick. You need an open bar and huge cocktails at the door.

Want your wedding to be roaring success? Then take my dad's advice and remember: the best weddings are those where the guests start wondering at 7pm what the hell the dressed-up fools at the main table are doing there.

Dealing with the quarterlife crisis

It was a hot January morning. I was driving through the Kalahari on my way back to Jozi, willing to do pretty much anything if I just didn't have to come back to my increasingly uncomfortable comfort zone.

I had just spent the previous two weeks trying to dream up ways to get unstuck in love, work and life. I had the music (to be more specific, a bunch of my sister's high school compilation tapes) blasting away at top volume, while trying to think of some practical strategies to deal with my quarterlife crisis. Or to put it this way, I was (and still is!) in desperate need of a way to kill that crippling realisation that there are so many opportunities out there that it is impossible to make any regrets-free decisions.

Wear sunscreen, the radio suddenly tells me. I hadn't heard the Sunscreen Song, an old favourite, in ages. And unexpectedly I got some advice on dealing with the QLC - what to do, where to go, when to do it, who to do it with, how much money to do it for - from Mary Schmich's now famous Chicago Tribune column:

"Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't."

Point is, you don't have to have it all figured out. Who does anyway?

Like Mary says: Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

So relax, have fun, and keep walking. New opportunities will come your way if you're moving forward; not if you're stuck in limbo. So just make sure you keep going.

There's also no point in comparing yourself to people who (seems to) have the wind at their backs. I'm extremely competitive - hence my feeling of failure when thinking of a, who is on her way to Ethiopia to cover the AU Summit, or f, who can convert a looooooooong distance relationship into a marriage, or j, who is pocketing the big bucks on a tropical island in the middle of the Atlantic.

Thankfully, Mary's got some advice for us closet competitors too:

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself.

So yes, I'm feeling a little left behind at the moment. But just give me a minute...

PS Some getting-on-top-of-the-world-tips from Mary:
* Sing.
* Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
* Do one thing every day that scares you.
* Floss.
* Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.
* Stretch.
* Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.
* Travel.
* Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.
And best of all:
* You are not as fat as you imagine.

Hot and bothered

I'm bitter. And cynical. And the more I know about what's going on in this cool, crazy, beautiful place, the more hot&bothered I get. So I'm trying to enforce a news embargo for three weeks, which, I know, is a crazy idea for a journalist. But I can't handle one more news story on Tony "Cheap 4x4" Yengeni, who mos really shouldn't have been prison. And I simply cannot read another article on some or other government department who can't do the job, but are brilliant at shifting the blame (think the poor farm manager who got beaten to death last week because a land claim has been caught up in red tape for years and years).

So I prepared myself for what I thought would be three weeks of blissful business reading. Just imagine the disgust when I couldn't miss Beeld's lead story this morning. SA's nr 1 man said it: crime is not so bad. The perception must be rectified. I think I'll invite him over for tea to my grandfather's, where I had to please explain my anti-death penalty sentiments over Christmas. Not so easy if you're debating with grandpa (78), who got attacked in his bed a month ago, or my cousin (31), who was raped three years ago (police unfortunately misplaced the docket), or my uncle (49), whose best friends got murdered on their farm a while back.

Seeing that a news embargo won't help if you spend most of your waking hours in a newsroom, I need a new escape route. And I think I've had enough first-hand experience in dealing with pathetic government officials to be pissed off enough to justify fleeing the country. So the question is not if (definitely) or when (asap) to go, but where to go.

My mind's pretty much made up - when the rest of the country will be celebrating the day women marched to the Union Buildings to toyi-toyi against the pass laws, I'll hopefully be marching to some far-off land - my lonesome toyi-toyi against the EC government stealing R100 million out of the mouths of poor, hungry kids.

So now it's just to decide on where to go. Don't know about you guys, but to me New York, New York always had a special ring to it.

NS All you optimists out there who believe SA definitely won't go the same route as Zimbabwe, please read Peter Godwin's excellent new book When a crocodile eats the sun. Be in touch - I have a good contact at Flightcentre.

Decisions decisions

I found a list with my new year's resolutions for 1998 the other day. What a depressing reality check.

For instance, 9 years (!) later I'm still struggling with self-discipline and impulsivity. I'm still hoping to get fit, save money and spend more time with friends. And I'm definitely still postponing things to the last minute.

So this year I'm trying a new approach. I'm making peace with the fact that I'm extremely deadline-driven. Things like Stephen Covey's 5th habit - doing the important things before they become urgent things - will never work for me. I love urgent things.

The end of regrets over spur of the moment-decisions has also arrived. The archived fuck-ups always make the current ones feel a lot less embarrassing.

Climbing a mountain at 6 am on Christmas day made my worries about my absolute lack of self-discipline disappear. The thing is, if it involves something I don't love, it's going to take some dynamite (or a pressing deadline) under my ass to get it done. And that's fine by me.

Therefore my only resolution for 2007 is to start making decisions. The things that demand attention kinda stay the same over time: family, friends, career, location, money, health, love.

By not specifying anything, the pressure is off. I can be as impulsive as I want, postpone things as much as I like and change my mind whenever I feel like it. 2007 is going to be a splendid year.