Spinning my wheels

This is not the easiest post for me to write. It means I need to be honest to you about myself - honest about my faults.

With less than two months before Mr. Bear Cub and I are back in Portland, I feel like I don't know what to do. Oh yes, I know there are tasks that need to be taken care of - check up on the finalization of the invites, write our ceremony, learn our dance, pick some more key songs, do something substantial about the tables, pin down the menu... It just doesn't feel like I'm getting anywhere with anything. As much as I try to fight it, I have one incredibly awful quality to my character. I crumble under stress.

It's worse when the list of to-dos is longer. I physically can't function with the thought of an insurmountable task list. And if I don't know how to do some of the things on the list? (um, hello, white vs ivory??) My motor skills begin to shut down. The only way I've found to "reboot" from this mess is to take a nap. Everything's always better when you have a new day to attack things, right? I'm well aware that this is not a productive way to deal with my stress. It's just a band-aid, and it's not helping me take care of wedding tasks.

The killer in this vicious cycle is I don't actually know what I can cross off the list at this point. The upshot to my counter-productive stress management is that when I break inertia - when I force myself to finish things on my to-do list - I turn into a steamroller of productivity.

So, believe me, I would love to screw inertia right now. Unfortunately, it feels like all my wedding plans are still theoretical. Even if I "decide" on something for the wedding, it's just an email drop in the bucket. All my "plans" feel like a nebulous cloud of dancing wedding-plum fairies. Mean wedding-plum fairies that are spitting stale fondant turds at me. Maybe this is a result of planning (what actually is) a destination wedding?

All of this theoretical planning is making the wedding planning process very tedious, and very unfun. I feel like I'm spinning my wheels here! Ninety percent of my wedding tasks involve sending emails, so I never see the fruit of my labor. And without actually seeing any progress, without the wedding plans being real and tactile, it feels like items on our to-do list are never going to disappear. That's my largest source of stress right now, and I don't like it. My afternoon "reboot" nap is a daily temptation.

Am I crazy to plan my US wedding from South America? Sometimes I daydream about putting the wedding off for a few years, and hosting it at our future home in Oregon. (A wedding at home! How wonderful! :) )

How are you dealing with the stress of planning your wedding? Was the planning process still fun a few months before the wedding? Destination brides, what's your technique for finishing your wedding tasks? What should I be doing at 2 months??