TresSugar

Do Tell: How Long Do You Wait Between Dates?

DearSugar — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 08:00:00 -0800

When you first meet someone you like it's easy to want to spend every waking second together, but sometimes diving in headfirst isn't the best way. We've all heard that too much too soon could be the demise of a relationship, so ladies, even if you're willing to rearrange your entire social schedule to accommodate your new crush, how long do you typically wait between dates?

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The How-To Lounge: Wedding Time Line

DearSugar — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:30:00 -0700

As much as you would love to fast forward to your wedding day immediately after your fiancé pops the question, weddings take time and careful consideration to plan. There are many caveats to making your day everything you always dreamt it would be, so it is imperative to create a time line leading up to your wedding day.

Whether you have hired a wedding planner or are orchestrating the big day yourself, you will need to keep track of important tasks, vendors, participants, and most importantly, deadlines. Having every detail accounted for and mapped out will help alleviate any unnecessary stress. Since most engagements last a year, I am here to give you some tips on mapping out your wedding time line.

Click here to read more
One year before your wedding

Since you have already chosen your wedding party, it's now time to decide the formality of and style of the big day
Create your budget. Consider everything from the dress to the wedding officiator, including everything in between
Start interviewing and booking wedding professionals: ceremony site, receptions sites, caterers, waiters, bartenders, photographer, videographer, florists, etc.
Finding your wedding dress is extremely important to most brides, so get shopping ASAP. Most gowns take at least 5-8 months to make, and don't forget to account extra time for multiple fittings once your dress is ready. Bridal gowns are nonrefundable, so be certain you pick the right one
Once you choose your dress, decide on colors and attire for your bridal party
Start mapping out your guest list and compiling addresses. Start big and after you lock down your budget, you will have a better grasp on how many people you can invite and then you will be able to thin out your list
Start a gift registry. A year before your wedding is when engagement parties and showers will be thrown in your honor, so make sure your guests know where to shop and what to purchase
Start planning your honeymoon and book your travel as soon as you can. The longer you wait, the more expensive your flight and hotel accommodations will be

6 months before your wedding

Finalize your guest list and send your save your dates
Reserve accommodations for out of town guests. Research hotel blocks and rental car deals
Order your wedding invitations, thank you cards, place cards, programs and any additional personalized stationery you desire. It is important they are all ordered at the same time in case there is a difference in the paper run
Choose and book a location for your rehearsal dinner. It might be difficult to find a venue that can cater to a large party, so if you have a place in mind, sign a contract ASAP
Start tasting wedding cakes. If your wedding is during high season, you need to make sure to place an order sooner than later

4 Months before your wedding

Shop or rent formal wear for the groomsmen and purchase their ties
Shop and purchase wedding bands. Account for any time needed for engraving and additional sizing if need be

3 months before your wedding

Book appointments for hair and make up for your wedding day and make sure to sign a contract with your stylist
Look into wedding day transportation
Finalize your menu

2 months before your wedding

Send your wedding and rehearsal dinner invitations
Decide on music set lists including your first dance and any specific processional music

1 month before your wedding

Pick up your marriage license
Go in for your final dress fitting, and remember to break in your shoes
Make sure your bridal party has received their dresses, tuxedos and suits
Create and print your wedding program

Review final RSVP list and create your seating chart
Conform all reservations and vendor contracts
Determine wedding party precession

The week of your wedding

Get your final beauty treatments: haircut, hair color, wax, facial and a much needed massage
Purchase and wrap bridesmaids' gifts
Purchase and wrap a gift for your husband if applicable
Plan out the morning of your wedding. If you choose to get ready with your bridal party, organize the venue, food, photographer, transportation, etc.
Touch up your manicure/pedicure
Designate a dress handler. The last thing you want to be worried about the day of your wedding is leaving your dress at home
Remember to load up on water the week before your wedding> Nerves can do strange things to your body, so make sure you stay hydrated

I know this seems extremely cumbersome, but it's everything you will need to remember and plan for your perfect wedding day. Although all these steps are critical for your planning, the most important thing to remember is to have fun and really enjoy this experience. Your wedding is meant to happen only once! Good luck.

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Spoken by a Man, Written by Women: Don Draper's Wisdom

TresSugar — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:00:25 -0800

Mad Men's Don Draper spends a lot of time not talking, which does the rare double duty of adding to his appeal while reducing him to a total ass. But when he does talk, his words are elegant, philosophical, and - if you think about - really great advice! Even so, when they're all put together in this montage above, Don sounds more like a narcissist with a God complex than a wise man with a gift for language, reminding us where his words came from: women writers. With women filling the pool of writers on Mad Men, we'd be remiss to give Don all, or any, of the credit. So what's your favorite line?

Some Adult Children Divorce Their Toxic Parents

TresSugar — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:00:00 -0700

You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family. This fact of life means that many of us put up with people we might not otherwise get along with.

Yesterday's New York Times examined what happens when certain family members, namely parents, cross the line from imperfect to completely intolerable. Critical, demanding, non-accepting, or verbally abusive parents sometimes prove too toxic to tolerate, leading adults to "divorce" the people who brought them into the world.

While many mental health professionals typically emphasize salvaging relationships, Dr. Richard A. Friedman wrote in the Times column that in certain circumstances, it might be healthier to end the relationship altogether. Dr. Friedman compares cutting off contact with a parent to cutting off a limb in order to save the adult child's life. Painful, but sometimes necessary.

What is the best way to handle toxic parents? Would you avoid them, cut them out completely, or try your best to deal with them?

New York Times Traces First Lady's Slave Roots

TresSugar — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:00:00 -0700

The New York Times ran a captivating historical piece today about a six-year-old slave named Melvinia. The paper traces her family's five-generation journey from slavery to modern success.

It's a fascinating American story that just so happens to be part of first lady Michelle Obama's story, too. Using old public records, fading photos, and recollections of older family members, the New York Times, along with genealogist Megan Smolenyak, have uncovered Melvinia's story, which fully connects the first lady to the history of slavery for the first time.

To see an excerpt from the piece, read more.

In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475. In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of nearly two centuries.

In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, marked the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady.

To many, Michelle's family story powerfully represents African-American advancement. But her mixed background is also representative of Americans in general, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explored in his definitive documentary on genealogy called African American Lives. A historian who discovered that he had black relatives when he researched his memoir tells the New York Times: "We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations."

Caster Semenya Now in Hiding, Tests Reveal She's Intersexed

TresSugar — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:00:00 -0700

It's easy to forget that in the middle of this battle to figure out South African runner Caster Semenya's sex, there's an 18-year-old, raised as a girl, who trained hard to win the gold medal at the World Championships in Berlin last month.

Now that the IAAF's (International Association of Athletics Federations) sex test results have come back and reveal that Semenya is intersexed, she's in hiding.

The test results indicate that Semenya doesn’t have a womb or ovaries, she has internal testes and three times the amount of testosterone that an average woman would have. It is still unclear whether the IAAF will strip Semenya of her medal or bar her from future races - but her case has caused outrage all over the world. The National Assembly sports committee chairman Butana Komphela made an official complaint to the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights saying that the IAAF has been racist and sexist toward Semenya. (Remember also, that she was tricked into allowing these sex tests, thinking they were testing for drugs.)

The general population knows so little about intersexed people, and we are so conditioned to believe that there are two sexes and two sexes only. The fact of the matter is, one's sex is actually determined by a complicated set of factors, including variations in chromosomes and hormones and their interaction. Gender, on the other hand, is a social construct, how we "perform" our sex. (This renders the repeated use of the term "gender testing" in news reports on Semenya's case nonsensical.)

If there's a silver lining in this sad tale, it's that more light will be shed on what some call the myth of two sexes. Stay tuned for more posts on this fascinating topic. How do you feel about how Semenya's been treated?

Front Page: Missing Girl Found 18 Years Later

TresSugar — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:00:01 -0700

Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was abducted in 1991 at the age of 11, has been found. Her alleged kidnapper, who fathered two children with her, is in custody along with his wife. - BBC News
Seventeen-year-old Brit Mike Perham has become the youngest person to sail solo around the world. - AP
Thousands waited in line through the early morning to pay their respects to Sen. Ted Kennedy, who lay in state at Boston's JFK library Thursday. - Boston Globe
Both Democrat and Republican state lawmakers have introduced bills to impeach South Carolina governor Mark Sanford. - Washington Times

Do You Act Younger or Older Than Your Age?

TresSugar — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:00:00 -0700

This Sunday Mad Men was filled with people not acting their age. The show opens with a clip of "Bye Bye Birdie" being sung by, according to one of Peggy's best lines, "a 25-year-old woman acting like a 14-year-old girl." Is this a harbinger of things to come? Of course. It's Mad Men! It's also 1963 and the Beatles are about to invade, ushering in an era of youth culture.

Until the early 20th century adolescence as a category didn't exist. Children dressed like adults, talked like adults, and wanted to be adults. There was no in-between. Interest in adolescence and youth culture really took off in the 1960s, a time when teens and young adults developed their own style. Their clothes, music, slang, and even ideals were drastically different than their parents', and they were identified as their own group.

Now the Internet has changed everything yet again. It's given us access to any subculture we want to join, so we can be in the know long after college comes to a close. Ask one 28-year-old about her favorite music and it may sound like she stopped tuning in five years ago; ask another and she'll tell you what came out last week.

Of course, age is defined differently for everyone. Do you act younger or older than your age?

Source: AMC

In a Dream: a Memoir Told Through Mural

TresSugar — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 15:00:00 -0700

When Isaiah Zagar moved to Philadelphia in the 1960s, he started creating a massive mural made of shards of glass and tile on the side of an abandoned building. The ongoing art chronicled the highs and lows of his marriage and the life of his two sons, one of whom has now made a documentary about the memoir in mosaic, called In a Dream. Check out the trailer below.

IN A DREAM: Extended Trailer from Herzliya Films on Vimeo.

In a recent interview, filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar talks about his parents' hippie existence and the impetus for the project: "My mother decided I should film my family, sort of in the same way she decided my father should make art about our family." The documentary, which airs on HBO 2 tonight and comes out on DVD in September, records his father's nervous breakdown and his brother's time in rehab. I love the line in the trailer when Isaiah says, "You know a lot when you lose something. When you got it, you don't know." Now I really want to see this mural.

Ask an Accountant: Should I Let My Boyfriend Smoke Pot?

TresSugar — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 06:00:46 -0700

Conventional Wisdom is a different kind of advice column. Your questions will be answered by people from all walks of life rather than by advice experts. This week, an accountant advises a woman who's having a tough time with her boyfriend's pot smoking. Want to throw your hat into the ring? You can submit questions here.

Today's Question:
My boyfriend of over three years has been smoking pot since he was a teenager. I knew this before we started dating, but really thought he would quit by now. He is now 32 years old and still smokes multiple times a day. I've already talked to him about how I don't like it at all and wish he would quit. He then argues that it is better to smoke pot than to drink alcohol or do other heavier drugs. I see his friends that have families and they smoke around their babies and toddlers, but I do not want our kids (if we ever have any) to be exposed to it. Should I put my foot down harder or just let him have his "hobby"?

Signed,
Feeling Low

To see the accountant's answer, read more.

Dear Feeling Low,

It may be true that someone who smokes a lot of pot is no worse than someone who drinks a lot of alcohol, but you are wise to consider your future.

Now unless you are really warped, having kids usually makes you grow up and become responsible to some extent. But since you and he hang around others that haven't changed, my guess is that you can't count on a baby to stop the drug habit.

Now consider some really hard facts. Having kids will cost a lot, and smoking pot will really cut into your diaper budget. Since weed doesn't come with a filter, he is wrecking his health. Not to mention, lung cancer kills! So do you really want your boyfriend to increase his chances of contracting this nasty disease in the future? And don't forget about paying for all that extra medical attention. I don't know about you, but I think that insurance companies take our medical premiums and then tell us it isn't covered when we get sick. Besides, when was the last time you paid less when you went to the doctors? Cut out the weed and you can plow that money into a 401K so that when you retire you won't have to work a part-time job as a Wal-Mart greeter!

The bottom line, as we accountants like to put it, is that you need to find a new boyfriend and hang around with folks that get high on life. Ask yourself the question: how much do I love myself? Take it from a CPA, if you value yourself, the choice to move on with a new guy should add up and pay you many dividends in the future. Good luck!

Signed,
The CPA (Certified Pot Adviser)