This Just In – 7 Reasons You Might Not Want to Be Ready For Dancing With the Stars to Get Married
We’ve all seen them: youtube recordings of wedding dances with more moving parts than a power plant. We’ve seen the congregations (uh, audiences?) wowed and laughing. We’ve seen wedding parties boogaloo down the aisle, while the celebrant shifts nervously from foot to foot with a pained, panicked look that says he’s lost control of the ceremony. What talent! What poise. What do you mean it’s a wedding? It looks like a talent show! Prize to the couple with the tux and the fluffy dress! Or the two tuxes! Or the two fluffy dresses.
While these elaborate choreographies can provide an interesting note, they actually might not do much to keep you or your community focused on what’s really happening on your wedding day: which is that you and your beloved are making wedding vows that you plan on keeping for the rest of your life. Let’s keep that in mind. Maybe I’m a fuddy-duddy or a killjoy, but I think there are good reasons to save your dancing prowess for another day.
- You actually don’t need any extra stress on your wedding day or during your wedding planning. Let’s see: you’re getting married; entering into a relationship you want to last forever. You’re pulling off a larger and more elaborate party than you may give for the rest of your life. And now you want to add, choreographing, learning and performing a 5-minute dance routine? Trust me, there are already plenty of details to struggle over! Save your struggling for something that matters!
- You may actually not be tremendous dancers. So why would you choose this particular time in your life to learn an absolutely new skill (that might not be all that fun) simply because other people are doing it? Answer: I don’t know!
- Dancing may not be the skill you will need most at your wedding. What you need most at your wedding is to be present to the momentous steps you are taking and to the incredible community that is supporting you.
- Dancing may not be the skill you will need most in your marriage. While it’s not as much fun, you’re going to want to spend some time on developing your skills in problem resolution and financial management. (Maybe we need to award prizes for weddings coming in under budget and with closer family ties.)
- Your community wants to support you in marriage. They want to witness your promises and see/feel/understand how much you love one another and how you’re going to make this whole thing work.
- The focus of your wedding is actually your relationship. You can argue that dancing is a metaphor, but then you wander onto shaky ground – do you really always want to work that hard and worry about whether your foot is perfectly placed in your marriage? Marriage is hard work, but it can also be sweet and simple and easy. That might be an easier metaphor to pull off and might not distract folks from what’s at the heart of the work of your wedding.
- A wedding isn’t a talent show. It’s the unrehearsed moments and the un-programmed interactions that come from the careful planning of the wedding ceremony and wedding that will be the sweetest and, perhaps, the most meaningful. You want to find ways to help your community participate in your lives, not watch you perform.
So give yourselves a break. Work on your wedding ceremony, simplify your party, have a wonderful wedding and a sweet, long life together! Dancing is a blast, but sometimes it’s optional!
Tips For Enjoying Your Apple iPod Touch
The iPod Touch Apple is one of the greatest portable entertainment devices that has been released. Personally I would liken it to having a similar impact to that of the Sony Walkman of yesteryear. My own iPod Touch gets a great deal of use every day, and not just as a music player. I also use it for enjoying podcasts, TV shows, films, games, books, and of course as a web browser and GPS device. Once you’ve purchased an iPod Touch is very important that you know how to get the absolute most out of your device. There are easy ways to do this.
Music
Make sure you have a good selection of music on your iPod, from a range of genres and to fit a range of moods. To save space on your iPod Touch for other things, you could select favourite songs from various albums instead of the entire album.
Podcasts
When syncing podcasts to your iPod, it may well be a good idea to set iTunes so that only the most recent unplayed episode of each podcast is synced to your device. This stops your iPod Touch becoming clogged with unplayed podcasts, leaving little room for anything else.
Apps
It’s very tempting to download loads and loads of apps for your device (I have a fair few myself), but again these can be a drain on resources. If they are out to you aren’t using much any more if at all, you can easily delete them, either via the touch screen itself or via iTunes.
Photos
It’s very easy to let your iPod be filled with photographs you’ve saved from the Internet or from your own computer. It’s cool to have a good selection of them there, just be aware of how much memory those photos take up.
Web browsing
Bear in mind that if you surf the web with your iPod Touch, you may very well open up several Safari windows. This can slow down the performance of your iPod Touch. If you have unnecessary windows open, close them down. If those pages are important, you can of course bookmark them before you do so.
Syncing
When syncing your iPod Touch via iTunes, be sure to check how much space you have left free on your device. Make sure you leave some space free for downloading things on the go, such as photographs, new episodes of podcasts, or apps from the app store. Personally I try to leave half a gigabyte free.
These are just some of the ways that you can further enjoy using your Apple iPod Touch and get better performance. Basically, be mindful of what you’ve got on there, and remove anything you don’t really use, and above all have fun with it!