This song! It is perfect. It has tied with The Luckiest by Ben Folds as the most romantic song in the whole world (this is a huge feat....The Luckiest was uncontested for six years).
I am sometimes in the mood for schmaltzy gooey love songs. I am ALWAYS in the mood for life story love songs, about problems and pains and falling in love and children and getting old. It is hard to have all of that in one song, but Fun. manages to do it, with an awesome trippy happy beat as well.
Select lyrics from the falling in love beginning:
We were barely 18 when we'd crossed collective hearts.
It was cold, but it got warm when you'd barely crossed my eye.
and then you turned, put out your hand,
and you asked me to dance.
I knew nothing of romance, but it was love at second sight.
Select lyrics from the being in love much later ending:
You come home from work and you kiss me on the eye
You curse the dogs and say that I should never feed them what is ours
and the kids are coming home
I'll set the table
You can make the fire.
MY HEART IS SLAIN.
Gilmore Girls
I have a weird relationship with this show. When I'm watching it, I completely adore it. It's the best of the best! But a couple months later, I think of it with ambivalence. Then something will trigger my desire to watch a specific episode, and several hours later I am marathoning through the season. I don't know why its awesomeness doesn't stay in my brain, because it should.
Rory is my TV kindred spirit. She is probably the most like me of all TV characters (minus her ability to attract super hot guys who fall all over themselves trying to win her heart--how does she do it!?). She is a bit quiet, pretty smart, and mostly awkward. She can be witty, but she doesn't steal any spotlights. She's passionate about what she believes in, and she hates failing. Rory = me.
...Until this last time I was watching, and I noticed that I've picked up some of Lorelai's characteristics. When I'm feisty, I'm Lorelai, with her open-mouthed grin and teasing and dramatic hand gestures and flair for the weird. Have I grown up on my own, or have multiple rewatchs subconsciously morphed me into her? Weird.
Other than the fantastic two leads, there is witty banter, and a loving relationship between mother and dauther, and the only depiction of a small town that I've wanted to live in, and awesome best friends, and oh yeah, all those super hot boys.
Gift Cards
Present-exchanging events can be stressful! I've never mastered the smart habit of buying friend-related items whenever I see them, keeping them until their birthday or Christmas. Instead, a week before that special event, I run around trying to find anything that vaguely resembles something they might enjoy. I have a feeling most people can tell.
And you know what? Sometimes I can too! What is the answer for such thoughtless giving (besides the aforementioned smart pre-buying)? Gift cards!
Even if you don't know of a THING your friend might like, I bet you know a place they like to shop or eat or drink at. So why not give them a gift card, and let them spend the money themselves? Unless you're a total tool and you buy me a gift card to Menards, I'm going to be happy.
Personal gifts are always best. But if you can't think of something personal and awesome, go with a gift card, not some generic crap that will sit on a shelf for a month before being thrown away.
Green Grass
This might sound stupid, until I tell you that 1) I did double alliteration TWICE in this post, and 2) I lived in Senegal for five months. I had a lot of fun there, but it was one of the ugliest places in the world (everything was brown! the ground, the houses, the sky!). After a couple months, it wore on my soul. I'm not even exaggerating. Apparently beauty and aesthetics mean a whole lot to my psychological well-being. That is also why I like Apple products.
Once when we went to Dakar, I saw a patch of grass beside an ATM machine. I begged Kim to pull over, and I promptly took off my Chacos and blissfully sank my toes into sweet growing grass. Later, when my time in Senegal was up, I flew into Chicago's airport. I had the aisle seat, but I basically fell all over the woman by the window, drinking up the blue sky and green grass around the airport. She finally called me out on my invasion of her personal space, and I said, "I'm sorry, but it's just so beautiful!" She gave me a weird look and replied, "The strips of grass between runways? ....Okay."
This might be why Mongolia is one of my favorite, most beautiful places in the world.
Sure, Usukhbayar is adorable, but look at those rolling green hills!
I majored in sociology, but I'll be honest, the first few classes were not overwhelming awesome. I liked deciding that I was a symbolic interactionist, but a lot of social theory was only mildly interesting. Then I took my Gender and Sexuality class.
It blew my mind! I made posters on pornography, happily read extra essays, and gleefully learned about how gender effects everything! The scale of feminine to masculine is far more fluid than our vocabulary allows. One of my favorite quotes from one of our textbooks (which I read for fun) was that the difference between an average man and an average woman is far smaller than the difference between a masculine woman and a feminine woman.
Basically, gender and sex are two very different things. One is biological, the other is a social construct. FASCINATING oh my gosh, I'm wanting to find my textbook and reread it. Kids can be traumatized by parents enforcing gender boundaries too harshly. Adults can be shamed by not fitting into our tiny boxes of gender identity.
I love the idea of letting people be people. I am feminine. I like to get dressed up, I like to feel pretty, I like to support people and empathize, I like to feel emotions. But I am also masculine. I'm not particuarly attached to kids, I like getting dirty, I like to be independent.
And if you thought, "Hey, that's not femininity (or masculinity)!" then you're right. There's no hard and fast rules of what gender really means. It's fluid and social, and for that exact reason, forcing people into boxes is stupid.
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