When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher called my mom after a series of results for some standardized tests came in. The teacher informed my mother that, unfortunately, I had filled in the bubbles incorrectly on my Spacial Relations test, and as a result of what she deemed “aberrant bubbling” I had scored in the tenth percentile. That’s bad. That’s 90% worse than the people who did the best. So evidently, I could score a higher percentile in elementary math. SLIGHTLY higher.
You know the test: you’re shown drawings of folded pieces of paper, and you have to guess (or, in the case of some people, actually know) what the piece of paper will look like when it’s open, when it’s closed, when it has holes punched in it, and so on. My mother listened patiently to my teacher’s theory that I had filled in the circles incorrectly, and when Mrs. Karpen was finished, my mom responded chipperly, “Actually, he did a great job…if he got in the tenth percentile, he scored ten percentage points higher than I did!”
I cheated at Pictionary in junior high and got caught. I cannot draw a straight line after a day at the ruler factory. Thus, I have to describe the final design of our invitations in words, rather than in pictures. Sorry.
Originally, we had planned on making up a big packet to mail out, with the invitation and response card only two of the elements of said packet. We wanted to include a full letter explaining exactly why we decided to hold our wedding in Iceland, a several-page itinerary, a separate page of booking tips for flights and hotels, the music and lyrics to Iceland’s national anthem in English, Icelandic, and the original Norse on which the Icelandic language is derived, and the entire map of the human genome so our guests could determine what made Eric and me so damn gay we had to have our wedding all those countries away to begin with.
Some of that is a lie.
But driving back from Massapequa on Sunday night, we started to realize we could convey that much information without doing it in a package that looked like it was trying to sell a cruise ship or a timeshare. It’s still a wedding, after all, and we want the invitations to look, well, wedding-y. And when we talked it through, we thought, why did we need to send a letter rationalizing (and, if we weren’t careful, maybe even apologizing for) having the wedding in Iceland to begin with? Savvy observers of American social mores would figure out that we couldn’t have the wedding here anyway, and we suddenly felt it would be presumptuous and heavy-handed to include a letter the message of which was, “WE ARE TEH GEIGHS HOORAY HOORAY HOORAY WEDDING US!”
So, in text form (with text-y bullets!), here is what the invitations will include:
*An invitation
*An envelope to contain the invitation (emblazoned with the graphic Eric so lovingly designed), which will measure approximately eight and a half by six inches, so that it may include…
*A single-page of information containing the itinerary for the weekend and any other relevant information to help our guests get from here to there, folded in half and stuck in the envelope
*A response card
*An envelope for the response card, containing a stamp which also has the two-grooms graphic I am loving so hard. Thus the neurotic email from Zazzle
No letter with a bunch of excuses. We can keep in touch via email over the months leading up to the wedding if and when we have more information for our guests. Everyone relax. It’s just a wedding.
And, just in case your interest got piqued along the way: http://www.musik.is/lof/e/lofe.html
Huh. Their god lets us get married.
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