East Hampton

DAYS REMAINING: 363

It’s averaged about 90 degrees as a high in New York since we arrived in April, creating a continuing feeling of perma-summer that started when I first moved to LA in 2004 and will probably end around the time the first snowfall hits New York this winter. LA weather is beautiful but tremendously dislocating, and during my years there I would find myself turning to people and asking unironically, “Wait, what month is it again?” And so, back in New York, we decided to escape the oppressive heat of our basement apartment (er, sorry, “garden apartment”) with a weekend in East Hampton at the house of my aunt and uncle. So, at this very moment, Eric and I are sitting out by the pool, drinking wine and staring at a Word document called “Wedding To Do” that may take up the remaining bandwidth of the internet. Sorry, Hulu users. The internet is full.

Here are some highlights of Wedding To Do:
*Book venue
*Finalize invite list
*Decide invite send date
*Compile contents of invite
*Collect mailing addresses
*Find out if we can have a group attend ceremony at Reykjavik courthouse
*Group rate from Icelandic Air?
*Make schedule for weekend

I’ll say this first: we want everyone invited to our wedding to come to our wedding. When you have a destination wedding, there seems to be a statistic floating in the ether that 50% of your guests will end up responding no. But as our friends David and Miranda (who had a beautiful hippie wedding on the banks of a river in Oregon three and a half hours from the nearest international airport at 9am on a Friday) cautioned us, “We invited 180 people, told the venue we would be having 100, and ended up with 150 guests. People. Are coming.” Pile onto that the political correctness of attending a gay wedding, and then sprinkle in what seems to be a latent desire on the part of EVERYONE ON THE PLANET to “one day go to Reykjavik,” and any expectation that we were going to have 15 family members standing on an iceberg while Iceland’s lesbian prime minister dips us in devalued kroner and pronounces us wed...pretty much flies out the window. In front of me right now is an Excel spreadsheet called "invite list" containing four color-coded columns.If you’ve ever planned a wedding, you can probably guess at what each of these columns is named. If not, I’m not telling you any more, because I want you to stay my friend.

And so, the guest list. In talking about this with our married friends, we have quickly come to realize that the guest list is by far the most explosive element of the wedding planning. My sister-in-law referred to the guest list as “The Biggest Fight We’ve Ever Had,” and I’ve anecdotally deduced that the old maxim “weddings cause fights” begins with this very first chore.

Oh, look. Wine.