Living a Life I Don't Know How to Live

I accidentally deleted my entire inbox here instead of just the messages I had selected, so if you left me a comment or sent me a message, I have not yet responded, and it is important, please let me know again! (All my notifications about who has followed me are gone too, but I think I was up to date on those. I'll keep an eye out, though.)

Elsewhere, I did a December blogging meme, where people left prompts (and sometimes days on which to talk about said prompts) and I blogged about them, sometimes in just a paragraph, sometimes at great length. And inspired by das_hydra, who is doing this in January, I thought I'd open up this blog for prompts, too. I'm not sure if I'll limit it to just January, though blogging a lot leading into my birthday could be fun, but if there are things you'd like me to blog about in 2015, feel free to leave a comment and I'll write something about that topic.

Jake and I watched an episode of "City Homicide" the other day, which is an Australian drama series about a homicide floor of a metropolitan police headquarters.

At one point, one of the detectives said, "You can bet your fine cotton socks" that we'll catch the killer.

I am intrigued and would like more information on this slang. We compared it to things like "you can bet your bottom dollar" and "you can bet your mama's life," which are phrases we can better break down, but not so much this.

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No, no, I am not planning a wedding. You haven't missed any big announcement. I was talking to cabell about her wedding planning and during the course of the conversation, I was struck by the idea that people seem to be very willing to (negatively) critique other people's wedding plans, more so than a lot of things(1), and I'd like to figure out why.

Cabell and I mused on this for awhile, and I like the theory (or theories) we ended up with, but I'd like your thoughts, too, since a lot of you have more experience with these things than I do.

I will share an excerpt from our discussion:

Cabell: I think the problem is I keep telling people things I plan to do. Clearly that is a mistake.
Carla: Yes, I am starting to think so. Though understandable! I mean, you're excited! You want to share! That's a good thing. It seems a lot of times, people are more willing to negatively critique wedding plans than other things, too.
Cabell: Yeah, I think you're right. The problem is when I say I'm going to do anything that has a traditional history. Like, when I say "I'm getting married in the desert in a red dress," THAT'S fine and no one can argue with me because there's no precedent. But as soon as I do anything that anyone ever did before, everyone has an extremely strong opinion.
Carla: While normally I support people sharing opinions with their friends, etc., I do think that for something so personal as a wedding, there should be some filters in place. Though maybe that's part of the problem; I don't know that weddings are actually seen as a personal thing anymore.
More of a public space.

So what do you guys think? Are weddings treated more as a public space than a personal event? As in, they're less for the couple getting married and more for everyone else? I'm intrigued by this, but would like to hear other thoughts.

(1) Raising children is a similar exception, I think, though I can't speak about it from experience, either.