Now

I am occasionally stricken by the absolute "now-ness" of Now - the utterly fleeting nature of each passing moment, the fact that everything I see is just a memory by the time my brain has processed it. Like the light of the stars, what we see is not what Is, but what Was. A miniscule fraction of a second ago is still in the Past. Time is the essence of flux - or vice versa - and if I overthink it, I am overwhelmed by the rush of it, and the fundamentally ephemeral nature of Now.

Wedding Dresses

I think what I hate about modern wedding dresses is that they seem to have fallen so far from the real purpose of the wedding. I've been flipping through an issue of The Knot (I do love looking at dresses), knowing that I seldom see a wedding gown that I really like, when I started to realize what my problem is. It's not just that I dislike strapless dresses, super long trains, overuse of detail, underuse of detail, and unflattering shapes - including the terrible idea known as the "mermaid," in which the girl's dress is super slim down to below her knees, where the designer suddenly remembered he wanted a poofy skirt rather than a slim one and fanned it out at the last moment, resulting in something ridiculously similar to a fish's tail.

No, what I dislike most is the adjectives used to describe each praised dress: chic, modern, risque, dramatic, retro, flattering, fairy-tale, scene-stealing, statement-making. I'm not knocking a gown that's incidentally ethereal, or structured for the bride's body type. What bothers me is that we've quite turned the whole thing into an issue of fashion alone - Is it an "in" style? Is it sexy? Does it say what the bride thinks it should say about her? - and we have utterly lost the idea of preparing a bride for her groom, of making her beautiful to be received by him in a ceremony as a companion, lover, helper, and friend, as they will belong to each other afterwards for as long as they both shall live.