Privilege Blog

Peonies and Polaroids

Clearly the blogosphere is a new form of identity construction – as well as a new form of identity revelation. What’s most fascinating to me is the different communities. As I said before, there seems to be a whole community of self-identified preppy girls. Even more prolific is the community of wedding bloggers and all their sub-types.

I LOVE weddings. I have loved weddings since I was in my 20’s. I love them unabashedly. I read wedding magazines in the break between sections when I took the GMATs before I was even engaged. And now I have discovered wedding bloggers.

There is a lot more to say about wedding bloggers, For now, however, there’s this. Amongst my favorites is a young woman (yeah well they are pretty much all young to me) in the UK. She goes by Peonies and Polaroids. (Cute name, huh?) If I break the wedding bloggers into sub-types, I’d put Peonies into the hip but traditional fairy category. (This is the irony part). There are also non-hip, traditional fairy brides (now that I think of it almost everyone in a veil looks a little fairylike, no?), hip but non-traditional fairy brides (prone to wearing wings at their weddings or at least having someone wear wings), and brides who aren’t the least bit fairylike.

Peonies’ wedding was just beautiful. As was her writing about her wedding. And, as a future mother of the bride following her story, you know, one becomes somewhat maternal listening in over the Internet. So I wanted to support her here. Maternal instincts always win over irony. In my particular existence.

One of the reasons her wedding blog was so beautiful was the photography. She has a real way with images – whether she creates them or requests them. Turns out she’s a photographer herself, and now willing to admit it. And, today she opens an Etsy store. Congrats, Peonies. And to all the young women collecting pictures that remind them of a dream they have somewhere in the back of their mind, congratulations in advance.

A key to dealing with the problem of eventual death is to find an ironic stance towards one’s identity, while still embracing all the acts and experiences that create that identity. Embracing them over and over and over again. While irony gives distance, embrace brings immediacy. In an immediate moment, who can worry so much about eventual death?

3 Responses

  1. Thank you so much for this lovely post, it may be the nicest I’ve ever read about my little blog/wedding/etsy (ad)venture.

    And congratulations on your daughter’s engagement. Maybe it’s a little odd to congratulate someone on someone else’s engagement but from my experience I think it means almost as much to most mothers as it does to their daughters.

  2. Oops, I just read your next post (I started at the bottom and was working my way back) and I realised that your daughter’s not actually engaged and now I feel like an idiot.

    Congratulations on your discovery of wedding blogs instead then, they’re so much fun and probably more fun without all the horrible bits of planning a wedding or being the mother of someone planning a wedding.

  3. Peonies you are just as cute in comments as you are in your blog. Sorry, just can’t help the maternal reaction. And I love that phrase “horrible bits”. So non-Californian.

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