F-Word Friday: A Dollar and a Dream (Wedding)

I have two rules when it comes to buying lottery tickets:

1) The grand prize must be over $100 million

2) I never make a trip to the store with the express intent of buying a ticket

I'm a numbers guy, and the numbers aren't good. 1 in 175,711,536. Give or take. Having Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz burst into our ceremony like something out of a latin soap opera and ask Maggie to be their real-life Vicky Christina Barcelona, is hundreds of times more likely than winning the lottery. (If it happens, and Maggie decides to go, I'd be crushed but I would understand. I really would). Safe to say it's money you'll never see again. And sure the money goes to help fund public school improvements, but it's not even tax deductable. But there I was this morning, paying $2.75 for my ham, egg, and cheese sandwich, and suddenly staring me dead in the face: $109 million. So i took the change from my $5 bill and plunked down 2 bucks on a couple of quick picks.

So (because I'm a numbers guy), I immediately go through the thoroughly ridiculous exercise of figuring out what that payout would be (lump sum, after taxes, obvs) and decide roughly how much we'd spend and how much we'd give away and how much we'd invest and how much that would net us annually. It's an entirely subconcious exercise that just sort of tumbles through my brain.

And because I'm not much of a daydreamer, I don't often think about how we'd spend/give away/invest the money, but today I did, sort of. Because the closer we get to this little shindig we're throwing, the more the cost starts to come into focus. Budgets become bills, deposits become withdrawls, and the best laid plans of your life (finally) come to life. It can be scary, but it's also very, very cool. So I allowed myself a fanciful thought: if we won the lottery, what would we change about the wedding?

The answer is probably not much. Better alcohol. Maybe a more exotic tent lining. I'd push to hire a real coordinator so Maggie's mom is sure to get plastered. The guest bags would improve. Maggie would probably pay someone to proofread my F-Word Fridays to keep them from drowning in colons and other improperly used exotic punctuation. We still wouldn't pay $500 for lemonade out of principle. But it was a nice moment for me to realize that our reality is actually this good....that the stresses and frustrations that come with the planning process have been worth it, since we're really happy with almost every decision we've made so far. We're not there yet, but we're in the final stretch (five weeks from tomorrow?!), and it's going to be fantastic. For a couple of people who never had "dream wedding" fantasies, this one is still going to feel like just that.

But if no one wins tonight, I'll probably buy more next week. After all, there's always the honeymoon to think about...