How to bag your man

Everyone is getting engaged at the moment (ok, not 'everyone' but enough people alright!) and it's typical of people in their late 20's, they're at that stage in life, in a nut shell this means:

• They are generally stable in their job
• They have bought their first home
• They are financially ok
• They are bored
• Everyone else has and they are feeling left out

Yeah the last couple of remarks are a bit cynical! But if I'm analysing the last few couples I know who have got engaged they all fall into that category! My lovely cousin got married in May and I just got the impression from talking to her friends at the wedding (the type of people I do not usually mingle with- but that's for another blog!) that this whole marriage thing is just a big competition, it harks back to the competitiveness there was at school.

Anyway yes I DO want to get married BUT I'm not doing it now because everyone else is, even though I get those little thoughts creeping into my head sometimes. I made a marker in my future life timeline (everyone has those, right?) that I won't get married before 30 because I honestly feel that I'm not emotionally ready yet, I don't even class myself as an adult half the time! My boyfriend agrees! He's a year younger than me anyway.

Have you ever been unconvinced that people don't actually love each other? Then you hear that they got engaged and you're like 'what the hell?' I'm sure they don't hate one another, they seem to tolerate one another but they don't convince you that they are really IN love.

Anyway I keep coming across couples like that at the moment. It brings me back to people thinking that the whole marriage thing is a competition. They panic when others are doing it before them and they decide to 'settle' for what they've got or if they're unattached then they'll find someone hastily who is just 'ok' and settle for them because searching/waiting for 'the one' is just too much hassle and way too time-consuming.

There was a very interesting article about this in a Sunday supplement recently about 'settling' for someone. Basically imagine you have a boyfriend, he's reliable, has a comfortable amount of money, he gets on with your family, he's not amazingly good looking BUT he will 'do' so to speak. So what if there's no huge spark or lots of fun and giggles, he'll be ok financially, he will get on with everyone round your parents at Christmas and you think he'll make a nice Dad some day. But I could never do that. There has to be a bit of 'je ne sais quoi' about a person in order to commit to spend the rest of your days with them. Thankfully in my heart I believe I've found that.

A massive generalisation I am now going to make: once people get married, they get boring! There are certain marrieds who I've given up on inviting out with us because they always say no, maybe they just don't want to hang out with people who aren't married? They're in a new exclusive club, I shouldn't forget that.

So do you really want to know how to bag your man? Well this interesting (did I say interesting, no I meant RIDICULOUS!!!!) article I found tells you how to get your man to propse to you? If you try this and it works, please contact me. I like to have a laugh. I honestly question whether the person who wrote that article was on glue.

Oh and if you ever thought weddings were a silly waste of money, take a look at this site to see how much you can spend on a cake. Shock. Horror.

To satisfy your visual appetite I've included a couple of my favorite celebrity wedding dresses: Gwen Stefani at the top the page and Dita Von Teese (what a vamp) at the bottom.

Right, now I'm off to plan my wedding. Just kidding.

Life is all about laughter and forgetting

It's strange to start over again whilst not really having a reason for stopping the first time round or a reason to re-commence my meaningless ramblings this time; well they mean something to me, I'm just not sure what exactly! Meanwhile, in the greater scale of things, I'm desperately trying to find a purpose for what I'm doing (here?).

I recently spoke to a really naive girl who approached me at a 'gathering' (I won't say anymore about said gathering), she was just finishing uni, she asked me what I did, I told her and then quickly added that I hated it, she then replied 'oh well I'll know not to do that then'. She was really flighty* and didn't seem to be taking anything with a pinch of salt, which I always think works best with most things in life.

I could have told her that I was going to join Girls Aloud and she would have believed me. Come to think of it people do seem to believe a lot of the twoddle that seaps out of my wicked mouth. I remember on holiday once I told everyone one night that I was a presenter on a show on MTV and they were convinced, the hideous amounts of alcohol probably helped.

Anyway back to this girl, we'll call her Maisey, I can't remember her name. She spoke as if she thought her dream job was going to fall out of the sky and into her lap, I agree it's great to even have an idea of your dream job but simultaneously it's equally good to acknowledge that getting one of these is probably one of the hardest missions in life and takes a huge amount of motivation, focus and tenacity and a sprinkling of luck. Needless to say I took an instant dislike to Maisey as she was long overdue a reality check.

I think I can safely say that Maisey falls into the 'generation Y' that the press seem to love talking about at the moment. So basically generation Y are what we can could also call 'digital natives' (thanks to Wikipedia for teaching me another new term) because they've grown up on computers, online, playing games, chatting to others online, researching for their studies online and so they expect everything now now now because they are so used to instant satisfaction from their digital world.

This mixture of an increase in the use of technology and over-reliance on said technology has meant that generation Y are FLIGHTY. The picture above of the beautiful fairy thing is what appeared amongst the other pictures (containing a lot of ponies or horses for some reason, maybe its their temperament?) on google when I did a random image search. Well I like that picture because it's (a) pretty and (b) represents the fantasy world of people like Maisey.

I have to hold my hands up and admit I'm probably borderline generation Y, the internet wasn't mainstream when I was little, we didn't get it at home until I was 16 and even then back in 1997 it wasn't very common at all for a household to have the internet, but it was dial-up and slow and didn't hold a fraction of the information that it holds now. Anyway back to my similarities with generation Y, I'm also unsatisfied at work, jobs which I know will satisfy me and reward me emotionally are mostly lower paid than my current job so in a way I do feel trapped. I've been hopping from one role to another in the hope of finding some element in my work that is at all rewarding but alas the search continues. Sometimes I think why don't I just become a plumber or a carpenter, an actual trade where people will forever need your services, you're well paid and could work anywhere in the world.

Anyway enough of the whimsical chit-chat. I've just realised I wrote the title to this blog months ago when it has nothing much to do with what I've actually written. Well it brings me to my conclusion (this is turning into an essay now!): despite not being happy about work (like a zillion and one other people) I am really happy in other areas of my life because life is all about laughter and forgetting (things that aren't so great). The End.

* I just happened to look up the meaning of this word to see if it was really the one I wanted and was amused by its meaning:

1. 1. Given to capricious or unstable behavior.
   2. Characterized by irresponsible or silly behavior.
2. Easily excited; skittish.

I think number 2 fits the context of who I was describing!