The Cost of Looking Forward

As I walked through Meijer's the other day, looking for milk, I ran across candy clearly marketed towards the Halloween crowd. This angered me greatly. Here it was, September 7th, and already the store suggested that we spend our time thinking about the last day of October. Of course, after Halloween, America turns it's attention toward Christmas (briefly glancing at the less marketable holiday Thanksgiving) before it gets ready for a quick stop at New Years and then on to Valentines Day. In this way, we don't ever notice today; instead, we spend our present trying to line up our ideal vision of the next holiday with the actual reality of how the holiday is shaping up. We buy candy in September, costumes in early October: time and effort is spend not on today, but on making the future tomorrow excellent. In this way, then, the present is lost.

I have been reading about how time is understood by mankind, and the theorist call this the presentification of the future, or protentions. We look forward to the future and anticipate what it will look like; then, this anticipation in hand, we try to make sure our lives line up with what we hope to remember in the future. We imagine the stories that we will tell about future events and occurrences, then spend our efforts to line up reality with these anticipations. In this way, our present is merely a speed bump on the way to the future which we imagine as having already happened.

This is all leading up to my engagement. In this event, I have cast a net far into the future, and will spend the next eleven months trying to make my imagined wedding come true. Of course, I have to consider what Erika wants, and incorporate those imaginings into mine, but nonetheless, very little of what I do in the now is going to be remembered. Essentially, my life will consist of trying to make the future happen. Which, of course, it will; but it might not happen in the right way. And that, readers, will lead to disappointment.

So I am stuck with a conundrum: do I imagine the best wedding I possibly can, which will, more than likely, lead to disappointment; or do I set my sights low so that later the reality of the situation is bound to exceed my expectations? No one wants to approach their wedding with a lackadaisical attitude, nor would I earn any special brownie points with the future-missus if I too a lackluster approach to the planning.

Already, though, I have had to renegotiate my anticipated future wedding memories. See, I have been to several hotel weddings, and in the end I generally leave satisfied. I can eat, party and hang out as late as I want, then stumble up to the room and fall asleep. Sometimes, even, the hotel will return the tux for me. Double bonus. The rooms are standard looking of course, but do what I want them to: hold people, a dance floor, and food.

This, however, is not what Erika wants. She imagines a unique space, one that people can buzz about: That wedding was so cool. Did you see where it was? It looked amazing! All those flowers and arches... and so on and so on. Consider the Chateau Bu Sche. Gorgeous. But small, and can't hold all that many people. Such a venue will also require outside caterers, which might cost more. Then our guests will have to get from the reception to the hotel, which could be dangerous, considering how much some of my friends like to drink.

Thus, the first issue arises: whose anticipated memory is going to be disappointed. In the end, it seems like mine. I can see Erika really wants to have this special location, and I want her to be happy. In order to keep my future memory on course, though, it will have to be a place that Erika and I can afford to bring all my friends. A wedding without my friends and family is like a wasted day, as far as I am concerned. I want the reception to be a good party where my friends can come, hangout, enjoy themselves and go home with some real memories to cherish.

This is just the first hiccup that we hit, and I am sure that there will be more. In fact, most days are going to be spent negotiating a compromise between what I want, and what she wants. It will remain to be seen who will be disappointed in the end, or if we can take our collected anticipations and make a wedding that exceeds all of them. Only time will tell, and my time is going to be spent obsessing over it.