Levity

I said to Matt yesterday that I have zero capacity to respond with humour to something I think is Deadly Serious. I am totally irreverent and flippant with my friends, and danny and I regularly fall apart laughing when we're doing work together -- but I'm missing some critical gene that allows me to laugh at myself when I'm Upset. I think cultivating a sense of frivolity in the face of Earnestness would be a very good thing to aim at, if I were to ever have a Resolution time.

So... today, feeling much better -- cleaned my entire flat, changed sheets, flipped futon, etc, felt orderly and managed to write a few good pages with some more pending after dinner. And, trying to be much less Serious about it all.

Ali sent me this link about a crazy bride who had a life-sized wedding cake version of herself. Pure excess. (For some reason I can't copy a shot of the photo). Reminded me of something I was reading a couple of years ago -- I think it was the book by Anne Kingston called The Meaning of Wife. She theorized that weddings have got bigger and bigger because we have a shared cultural story about the idea of "bride" but not so much about what a "wife" is -- so there is this blowout fantasy of the wedding to counterbalance the more contested idea of what comes after. Interesting angle.

(It might have been a different book -- have read a lot of social theory about marriage in the past few years -- maybe CInderella Dreams?>.