A Briefer Than It Should Be Bulletin on the State of Me
So you know that thing where you don't update for a while, and the longer you don't update, the more intimidating updating seems? Yeah. In my defense, I have been around on Tumblr and Metafilter, and also I've been pretty busy. Anyway, obviously the solution is to update while you're at work, waiting to get something back from your boss.
First off, my brother got married on February 20th! The wedding was perfect, at a ludicrously gorgeous venue in Malibu, and just all around a delight. I felt weirdly at loose ends, like "shouldn't I be doing more?" but I guess that's the benefit of being on the groom's side when the bride's side throws the wedding. Also, let's be real, my brother and now sister-in-law are excessively organized and prepared people, and ran that wedding like an efficient military operation or something. Anyway, I managed not to burst into happy tears and ruin my makeup (GO ME), PLUS I didn't even get embarrassingly wasted because I make good choices.
The ceremony was brief, non-denominational, and perfect, and my cousin Ray gave an amazing best man speech. My other guy cousins did a lot of wide-eyed "oh my god Yasmin, do you realize how weird this is??!! Your brother is getting married!!!!" It was adorable and hilarious. We had assorted cousins and family over from Europe and the East Coast, and it was really nice to see all of them and share the experience with them. Ugh, I'm getting a little teary just writing about it, embarrassing.
The one thing about my brother being married that I, like, haven't fully come to grips with is that now we have a whole bunch of new family? It feels weirdly sudden! Not Samantha, I met her ages ago and I approve of my new sister in law, but all of her family, which is not that large at all compared to ours. It's just a weird thing to navigate, especially when you add the cultural difference. I figure that end of things is for my brother to negotiate, I guess, in terms of events we should/will do together or whatever, or if we even will and if that's weird or not or what have you.
Segueing from a wedding to funeral, because I guess sometimes life is just too on the nose, my dad's oldest sister passed away last week. I had never met her, and she was a lot older than my dad. She lived in Herat, so going to the funeral was a no go for all the family here. There's going to be a wake type thing here in California next weekend. My job in all this is just to help my aunt with the wake and support my dad and stuff. I feel awful for my dad and other uncle in Germany who hadn't seen her in decades. Apparently my uncle is taking that kind of hard.
There's no good segue from a funeral, I guess, so I'm just going to gush about my many assorted baby cousins. We've been seeing more of them lately thanks to all the family events, and they are all SO CUTE. SO SO CUTE. One of my cousins had twins late last year, and they are extremely cute and I definitely wanted to steal one of them. Also, just, twins??? Two babies at once? When she already has a toddler? I'm tired just thinking about it. She's here in California for a couple months so that she can tap in my aunt and her sister to help with the babies, which is the kind of thing that makes me wonder how in the world people without family/extended family to help with this kind of thing manage it.
And one more life update before I call this a wrap and move on to other things I've been meaning to post about for the rest of the week: I got a new car! My old car was, uh, pretty beat up. You should have seen the look on my parents' faces every time they saw the poor thing. They clearly thought it was mere moments from falling apart entirely. Which it WASN'T. But I admit it was looking pretty rough. Because, FUNNY STORY, but on the way to my brother's wedding, I rear-ended a truck that cut me off in heavy traffic. The truck escaped entirely unscathed. My hood and front bumper got rather banged up. And that's in addition to the assorted other dings and scrapes my car already had, the kind of thing you acquire from poor parking decisions in LA and never bother to fix because it's not worth it. Anyway, given it's a 2004 Sentra pushing on 100k miles, a new car was a financially better choice than bothering to sink any more money into the old one. I'd been hoping to wait until the second half of this year to get a new car, but the fender bender pushed me into moving my time table up. And my car was looking real rough, gotta admit. It was getting kind of embarrassing.
I had a blessedly hassle free new car experience, thanks to my uncle. He knows a guy at a dealership, and since I knew what kind of car I wanted and on what terms (new Honda Civic, lease according to the dealership's advertised deal, no particular fussy preferences for color or extra features), he could just call ahead and give the guy my information so all the paperwork was waiting for us when we got there. Also I guess I have a great credit score, so that helped. Not counting the drive to and from the dealership and the waiting for the guy at the dealership to call him back, it took about two hours. It would have probably taken even less time than that if my uncle hadn't gotten to talking to the guy. Anyway, A+++ car purchasing experience, would recommend. I hate car negotiating WITH A PASSION so this was ideal for me.
The new car is like LIVING IN THE FUTURE, given that my old car's most technologically advanced feature was an AUX port. The new car connects to my phone with Bluetooth, and I can plug my iPod into it via USB so the song information shows up on the nifty display, and also thrillingly it has automatic lights. Yes, I know that's a really small, standard feature in new cars, but it's one I've longed for because I occasionally forget to manually turn mine on. And it has a rear camera! Which I straight up did not even notice at first because the idea of such a thing is so new to me. I told my dad "oh, I don't think it has one, I didn't see any buttons or anything to turn it on!" to which he said, "it goes on automatically when you put the car in reverse. Look at your display." Whoops. Well now I've read my way through the manual, so hopefully that should cover the rest of my general car ignorance.
Anyway, the new Civics are just really nice. Like, they look way more expensive than they are and they're a lot roomier than I remember older model Civics being. On the downside, I kind of hate strong new car smell. It's thrilling at first and then it's just headache-inducing toxic offgassing fumes. Also I hate having to adjust to a whole new mirror/car seat set up, it's probably going to take me a week before I have it settled to my satisfaction.
This entry was originally posted at http://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/470487.html, with
comments there.
First off, my brother got married on February 20th! The wedding was perfect, at a ludicrously gorgeous venue in Malibu, and just all around a delight. I felt weirdly at loose ends, like "shouldn't I be doing more?" but I guess that's the benefit of being on the groom's side when the bride's side throws the wedding. Also, let's be real, my brother and now sister-in-law are excessively organized and prepared people, and ran that wedding like an efficient military operation or something. Anyway, I managed not to burst into happy tears and ruin my makeup (GO ME), PLUS I didn't even get embarrassingly wasted because I make good choices.
The ceremony was brief, non-denominational, and perfect, and my cousin Ray gave an amazing best man speech. My other guy cousins did a lot of wide-eyed "oh my god Yasmin, do you realize how weird this is??!! Your brother is getting married!!!!" It was adorable and hilarious. We had assorted cousins and family over from Europe and the East Coast, and it was really nice to see all of them and share the experience with them. Ugh, I'm getting a little teary just writing about it, embarrassing.
The one thing about my brother being married that I, like, haven't fully come to grips with is that now we have a whole bunch of new family? It feels weirdly sudden! Not Samantha, I met her ages ago and I approve of my new sister in law, but all of her family, which is not that large at all compared to ours. It's just a weird thing to navigate, especially when you add the cultural difference. I figure that end of things is for my brother to negotiate, I guess, in terms of events we should/will do together or whatever, or if we even will and if that's weird or not or what have you.
Segueing from a wedding to funeral, because I guess sometimes life is just too on the nose, my dad's oldest sister passed away last week. I had never met her, and she was a lot older than my dad. She lived in Herat, so going to the funeral was a no go for all the family here. There's going to be a wake type thing here in California next weekend. My job in all this is just to help my aunt with the wake and support my dad and stuff. I feel awful for my dad and other uncle in Germany who hadn't seen her in decades. Apparently my uncle is taking that kind of hard.
There's no good segue from a funeral, I guess, so I'm just going to gush about my many assorted baby cousins. We've been seeing more of them lately thanks to all the family events, and they are all SO CUTE. SO SO CUTE. One of my cousins had twins late last year, and they are extremely cute and I definitely wanted to steal one of them. Also, just, twins??? Two babies at once? When she already has a toddler? I'm tired just thinking about it. She's here in California for a couple months so that she can tap in my aunt and her sister to help with the babies, which is the kind of thing that makes me wonder how in the world people without family/extended family to help with this kind of thing manage it.
And one more life update before I call this a wrap and move on to other things I've been meaning to post about for the rest of the week: I got a new car! My old car was, uh, pretty beat up. You should have seen the look on my parents' faces every time they saw the poor thing. They clearly thought it was mere moments from falling apart entirely. Which it WASN'T. But I admit it was looking pretty rough. Because, FUNNY STORY, but on the way to my brother's wedding, I rear-ended a truck that cut me off in heavy traffic. The truck escaped entirely unscathed. My hood and front bumper got rather banged up. And that's in addition to the assorted other dings and scrapes my car already had, the kind of thing you acquire from poor parking decisions in LA and never bother to fix because it's not worth it. Anyway, given it's a 2004 Sentra pushing on 100k miles, a new car was a financially better choice than bothering to sink any more money into the old one. I'd been hoping to wait until the second half of this year to get a new car, but the fender bender pushed me into moving my time table up. And my car was looking real rough, gotta admit. It was getting kind of embarrassing.
I had a blessedly hassle free new car experience, thanks to my uncle. He knows a guy at a dealership, and since I knew what kind of car I wanted and on what terms (new Honda Civic, lease according to the dealership's advertised deal, no particular fussy preferences for color or extra features), he could just call ahead and give the guy my information so all the paperwork was waiting for us when we got there. Also I guess I have a great credit score, so that helped. Not counting the drive to and from the dealership and the waiting for the guy at the dealership to call him back, it took about two hours. It would have probably taken even less time than that if my uncle hadn't gotten to talking to the guy. Anyway, A+++ car purchasing experience, would recommend. I hate car negotiating WITH A PASSION so this was ideal for me.
The new car is like LIVING IN THE FUTURE, given that my old car's most technologically advanced feature was an AUX port. The new car connects to my phone with Bluetooth, and I can plug my iPod into it via USB so the song information shows up on the nifty display, and also thrillingly it has automatic lights. Yes, I know that's a really small, standard feature in new cars, but it's one I've longed for because I occasionally forget to manually turn mine on. And it has a rear camera! Which I straight up did not even notice at first because the idea of such a thing is so new to me. I told my dad "oh, I don't think it has one, I didn't see any buttons or anything to turn it on!" to which he said, "it goes on automatically when you put the car in reverse. Look at your display." Whoops. Well now I've read my way through the manual, so hopefully that should cover the rest of my general car ignorance.
Anyway, the new Civics are just really nice. Like, they look way more expensive than they are and they're a lot roomier than I remember older model Civics being. On the downside, I kind of hate strong new car smell. It's thrilling at first and then it's just headache-inducing toxic offgassing fumes. Also I hate having to adjust to a whole new mirror/car seat set up, it's probably going to take me a week before I have it settled to my satisfaction.
This entry was originally posted at http://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/470487.html, with
comments there.