I do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

At one point or another, every little girl, teenager, and adult woman probably has fantasized about her wedding. With Datin immersed in wedding fever and bemoaning how expensive the entire shindig is gonna be, I can't help musing about what my own fantasy wedding would be like. She wants a short dusty-grey wedding dress, budget guest list, skip the dinner, lots of pictures, some sort of video by all her friends. I want a long white wedding dress, two celebrations (a simple one in the U.S with our family and close friends, and a conventional hotel-ballroom one in Malaysia!), and some pictures - but then if I want pictures I'd better lose lots of weight before the big day, hur hur. :(

Actually, I'm not sure why I want that conventional hotel-ballroom, invite-all-the-relatives-you-only-see-once-a-decade, 10-course-meal wedding dinner... it seems like an expensive and unnecessary tradition. What about the Chinese tea-serving ceremony, and the loud Chinese lady telling the bride and groom to bow three times before this god, that god, and another god? Does it matter if I believe in the gods, or do I just need to respect the tradition? I do, however, want my two remaining grandparents - my two grandmothers - to get to witness me getting married. Well... actually, I wish my grandfather could have seen it. :( I miss him a lot, it feels weird that tears spring to my eyes whenever I think about how I'll never see him again, he won't see me get married or meet his great grand-children, or even get to meet wonderful Willi. T.T

One of my friends has been having relationship problems with her boyfriend of three years, and was asking me if she should break up with him:

"If we're gonna break up," she said, "Better to do it now than waste my time any longer. I wanna have 2 kids, so only a few years left before I need to have the first kid at 27 and the second kid at 29. I don't wanna have kids after 30, that's so risky for older pregnancies. But before I have kids, I need to meet a guy and then date him for a few years, before getting married. There's no time left to waste!"

As aggressively paranoid as it sounds, I think her timeline resonates strongly with a lot of young women in their twenties. Case in point: I'm turning 24 in less than three weeks. I want to have two kids as well... but with grad school starting next year and no career as yet, it's going to be highly unlikely that I'll be breeding at age 27. I do, however, want to get married at 27, in a pretty white dress and bridesmaids decked in yellow frocks. :D