Weddingbee Blog

A Bee’s Life: Taco

How a girl who loves San Francisco, eating out, and photo booths became a taco (tee hee).

It’s a bag that holds my makeup. Well-considered birthday present from my friend Sonia. I also got a new hat recently, which has nothing to do with tacos.

How did I find Weddingbee?

I had cursory knowledge of Weddingbee in mid-2009, around when I got engaged. But once I could start planning a wedding in earnest, I visited wedding blogs, including this one, more regularly for tips. I loved seeing people’s inspirations unfold, and I enjoyed the spunk these buzzing blogger bees had about their weddings. People have weddings every day, BFD, right? But there was something different about these ladies, and I appreciated their thought, planning, and sense of ownership over something this personal. And the ratio of supportive/productive comments to trolls is astounding.

My Application Story

Mrs. Chick and her sister started things off for me. MOH Chick is a good friend and we Tacos run a site with her. She sent me the link to her sister’s posts soon after she was unveiled, and it looked like so much fun. The web, writing, and weddings are among my top-three Ws. So, I fired off an application in early-2010 and blogged for several more weeks on my little website.

Oops: I stopped blogging regularly after I applied. Peng then said she liked my application and my blog, but that I wasn’t writing enough. So, keep writing, blogger-bee hopefuls. And write in your own voice. Readers don’t respond to you sounding like other bloggers, they respond to you sounding like yourself. It may take a bit to find your groove, but be confident that it’ll come.

So, I wrote a bit more and Peng got back to me with the thumbs-up before I knew it. Slightly more than five months before our wedding, I had a username, a delicious icon, and some of the nicest people on the Internet.

Being a Bee

One of the things I enjoy most is my icon, and I’m dead serious. Even though it’s slang for lady parts, I suppose I like that, too. (My own, anyway. I’m sure yours is lovely, also.)

But, I love tacos - the nootrishus and tasty kind you can actually consume. I live very near some of the best tacos outside of Mexico. I love Mexico! When I told a couple local folks my Weddingbee handle, they asked if I made it up on my own. Just my luck it was still available in the junk-food generation, though the lady-parts thing might have something to do with that. But Mexican food, city pride, and lady parts are not the only reasons I heart being a bee.

I always felt better putting pen to paper - and, then, fingers to keyboard - in stressful or confusing times. I said in my intro post that, as a questioner of my own sanity when this happens, reading other people’s stories and writing my own has been cathartic, reassuring, and inspiring. So, that’s what the site has offered me most. Amid the normal planning woes and worries about how our actual day was received, there was unfaltering support from people I’ve mostly never met, looking at it from the outside. Maybe I can be brave enough to think this through, put it in words, put it on the internet, and then be held accountable for it, come what may. Our DIY projects are one thing, but once we start ping into personal issues, things can get sticky. The support encourages me to stay honest, no matter what I’m writing about.

Building a community on a website is one of the most challenging, rewarding parts of the online world, and, to me, that’s what being a bee is above all else. Being a part of this community, in whatever role, I always remember why successful sites are only as good as the people who read them.

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Ed. note: Check out the entire Bee’s Life series here! And if you’d like to apply to be a bee and are getting married through December 2011, check out our latest generation of bee icons, and share your application with us here!