Princess Me!

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Two weeks ago, I was here:

If you couldn’t tell from the picture, “here” was Disney World. Specifically, for the Princess Half-Marathon!

Last year, my sister ran the Boston Marathon. I am not quite that crazy, but I thought a half-marathon might be something I could manage. When Caroline mentioned that the Princess race would take place during her spring break from law school, I hesitated at first. “I don’t know if I have time to train.” “It’s in Florida- it will be hot.” But then I looked at the half marathon training schedule and realized that it was completely do-able. So I was in.

I am amazed that I actually managed to stick to the training schedule, which involved four days of running per week, including one long run over the weekends. While I do like to run, and like other forms of exercise as well, I have a tendency to be lazy. I have a whole gamut of excuses for skipping the gym—everything from “It’s raining” to “I don’t want to miss The Office.”

Furthermore, if you haven’t been paying attention to the weather in Boston, we’ve gotten snow up to Shaq’s earlobes this winter. This meant running on the sidewalks involved getting my feet soaked in frozen puddles, trying not to slip on ice, climbing over snowbanks to avoid stepping on puddles or ice, trying to squeeze around people when the sidewalks were too narrow from the snow, being stopped dead in my tracks when I realized that a sidewalk hadn’t been shoveled and having to figure out how to get off the sidewalk without stepping in knee-deep snow…you get the picture. After awhile, I started longing for Florida just so I could run a long distance without being interrupted by the elements.

We had to get up at 3 in the morning for the half-marathon to be on the bus by 4 and start the race by 6:30. And so my sister and I, along with 13,000 other runners (mostly women, and many of whom were wearing tutus, tiaras, or princess costumes) ran 13.1 miles.

Along the way, we saw all kinds of Disney characters and entertainment:

And when it was over, we spent the rest of the day in Disney World!
I love Disney World. I had been twice before, once when I was eight and once when I was thirteen, and I think I was just as excited this time. We covered a lot of ground in one day- we got to the Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios (formerly MGM), and World Showcase in EPCOT on a one-day pass.

The day after that, we headed to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which was awesome. We went on all the rides (Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey is maybe the best ride I’ve ever been on ANYWHERE), hung out in the wand shop and Honeydukes, and had ourselves some butterbeer.

And what’s next? Well, I think I’ve caught the running bug. I still don’t want to run a marathon (I don’t like running that much), but I think I’m going to sign up for some 5ks and possibly another half marathon.

I don’t think any other race will give me a number like this, though:

Pushing My Buttons

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I’ve wanted to write this post for a long time now because I want to get it out there in hopes that someone out there agrees with me. I have literally not met one person around my age who does.

I hate texting. Almost as much as I hate Arrested Development.

Texting is fine if you have something quick to say (“I just got here. Where are you?” or “What time do you want to meet?”) but it baffles me how people can have extended conversations through text messaging. It’s just so slow—it could take five minutes to say something through texting when it would take thirty seconds on the phone. I thought that once I got my new phone I’d like texting more, but no such luck.

But I’m not so sure I want to like it, anyway. I just want the rest of the world not to like it so much, for many reasons.

First of all, I hate the way there’s no clear way to end the conversation. When you’re on the phone, you say, “Well, I have to go take a shower/do laundry/go to bed,” say goodbye, and hang up. When you text, sometimes one person thinks the conversation is over when the other doesn’t. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people freak out because someone (usually a romantic interest) didn’t text them back. Um, maybe they thought the conversation was over? Or maybe they just got sick of texting and didn’t feel like responding? Also, like with instant messaging, it’s really hard to communicate tone of voice, so you might end up misunderstanding something someone texts. There are no clear rules on texting etiquette, so it’s easy to misinterpret someone’s texts, or lack of texts.

And speaking of etiquette, why do people think it’s okay to sit there and text while talking to you? I get so annoyed when I’m at dinner with friends or at a party and someone is texting while trying to have a conversation with me. Seriously? I’m not worth your full attention because you have something to say to someone else that can’t wait until you’re done talking to me to my face? Just because I can’t hear what you’re saying doesn’t make it any less rude. I know that we’ve become a generation of multitaskers who have to do everything at the same time, which is part of the appeal of texting, but just because you can text while doing something else doesn’t always mean you should.

I find it profoundly depressing that teenagers today (look at me—twenty-six and already talking about “kids today”) text more often than they make calls. What’s going to happen when they get out into the business world? At work, I know that there are some conversations you have through email and some you have on the phone, and a lot of times it’s easier to get things done via phone. You just need to hear people’s voices sometimes. How will today’s teenagers know how to interact with people on the phone for work if they can’t even call their friends now?

I know that a lot of people feel awkward on the phone sometimes—I do sometimes, too—but do they really feel awkward talking to their friends? Don’t they ever miss the sound of their friends’ voices, especially friends who live far away? I know I do. Are people today really so busy that they can’t set aside the time to talk to people?

Is there really not anyone else who feels this way? I don’t like sounding like a cranky old person, but this is one thing that just gets on my nerves like nothing else.

My So-Called Valentine’s Day

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I used to hate Valentine’s Day, which is such a cliché. Every year, you hear people bitch about how it’s just an excuse to sell greeting cards and chocolate and how it’s “Singles Awareness Day” for people without significant others. All that is true, but in spite of that, I’ve found myself enjoying Valentine’s Day more and more in recent years.

Why? For the simplest reason ever—there are worse things than being single. Being in a good relationship > being single >being in a bad relationship. I’d much rather spend Valentine’s Day unattached than with someone I just started dating, or someone I’ve been dating for awhile but no longer want to be, or someone who likes me a lot more than I like him or vice versa. I know people who are spending V-Day with people it would be better for them not to be with, and I don’t envy them a bit.

Also, a lack of a relationship doesn’t mean a lack of love. At this point, I see Valentine’s Day as a time to celebrate the loving relationships I do have—with my friends and with myself.

Last night I went out with some of my favorite single ladies for our own Valentine’s Day celebration. We ate some fabulous unhealthy food at Coolidge Corner Clubhouse and then headed over to My So-Called 90s Night at Common Ground in Allston. For those of you who have never experienced this particular event, it is possibly the best time you will have at a bar in Boston—hours of Backstreet Boys, Third Eye Blind, Coolio, Ace of Base, Britney Spears, Chumbawumba, etc. We danced, yelled out the lyrics, did shots, and drank a lot of beer. When I’m finally not single, I’m going to miss this built-in excuse to go out with my girlfriends. Maybe then, Flag Day will become my new hang-out-with-the-girls holiday.

Tonight I ordered sushi, poured myself some wine, took a hot bubble bath, and watched my DVR’ed TV shows and some of my favorite chick flicks. I also bought myself a heart-shaped box of candy and a single red rose. Why not? While there are certainly things in my life that could be improved, for the most part, I am very, very happy. (My whole house is great! I can do anything good!) And if that’s not something to celebrate, what is?

In Which I Put My Jesuit Education to Use

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There are a lot of things I plan to do in the coming year- run a half-marathon, take a vacation, attend my first friend wedding (Jon and Steph’s), attend my cousin Ryan’s wedding, lose weight, donate more platelets, date more, cook more, do more of the writing that I’ve neglected, try some new restaurants. But before the new year even started, I knocked one thing off my list: I got rid of my dinosaur phone.

I’d had my old phone since my 22nd birthday- the day before, my old flip phone had inexplicably snapped at the hinges when I’d just ended a call. I replaced it with another flip phone that had basically no features- it could call and text, and that’s it. I’m kind of amazed it lasted me four and a half years, and I probably would have gotten more use out of it if I hadn’t decided to get to join the modern age and get…a phone with a camera and a QWERTY keypad.

No, I opted not to get a smartphone. Aside from the facts that they’re expensive, don’t hold enough mp3s to justify getting one when I just got a new iPod, and would probably cause me to spend my entire day on the Internet, I have another reason for not wanting an iPod, Droid, Blackberry, or Nexus One, and that reason is…Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In its infinite wisdom, my Jesuit university required us to take a core curriculum that included English, history, math, science, social sciences, foreign languages, cultural diversity, and…philosophy and theology. To fulfill those last two, I took an awesome year-long class called Perspectives with the amazing Professor Kerry Cronin. It was a class that examined the question, “What is the best way to live?” from the perspective of different philosophers, theologians, and the Bible. And while philosophy wasn’t something I’d previously thought I’d have any interest in (I remember in college, when a guy told someone he was majoring in philosophy, she responded, “So you can sit on your ass and think all day?”), Perspectives turned out to be one of the best classes I took in college.

And it turns out I can use it to illustrate a point. Rousseau believed that in a state of nature, humans possess two distinct qualities: sympathy and the desire for perfectability. The latter is what leads to the downfall of people—they don’t just want to preserve themselves, but to preserve themselves as well as possible, and thus develop tools to help themselves do so. They then become dependent on those tools rather than on their innate ability for self-preservation. And this is what makes people weak.

On the off chance that you are still with me, this is what smartphones make me think of. I just imagine people becoming dependent on them and unable to trust themselves to do things the way they used to do. I bet that already, somewhere, someone has counted on the Internet being available on a smartphone to give them information, only to find that it didn’t get reception or wouldn’t work as planned. What’s going to happen when people get so used to looking up information on their cell phones that they don’t know how to do it any other way?

Okay, so maybe I didn’t have to reference a philosopher to say so. But that’s my main point. I just see a smartphone as something that would become a security blanket, and it makes me uncomfortable. Right now I’ll stick with a phone that was all the rage…about six years ago.

And To All A Good Night

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Apology in advance- this is going to be a really earnest, non-cynical post, so you can skip it if you’re not into that kind of thing.

I have been in the best mood lately. I’ve been feeling a lot like this little girl:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR3rK0kZFkg&w=420&h=315]

I’m at the parents’ house right now, and tonight, all my relatives on my mom’s side are coming over. There will be tenderloin and my sister’s Martha Stewart cookies and pierogies (we’re kind of obsessed with being Irish, but Christmas Eve is the one time of year we remember that we’re Polish, too) and, because it involves my mom and her siblings, lots of gossip about people from Lowell.

I feel like this year I’ve gotten more into Christmas than I have in previous years. I’ve been busy, but not too busy to be excited about Christmas. What have I been doing over the past month? Well, listening to my Christmas playlist, which has grown to over 400 songs. Watching all my favorite Christmas movies and marveling at how “To my big brother George, the richest man in town” makes me tear up every single time. Having an early Christmas celebration with my dad’s side of the family. Going to a fun office holiday party on a boat. Having two smaller work parties, one at a bowling alley and one at a restaurant in the North End. Making buche de noel, which turned out better than I expected. Going to a fun party at Erin, Lindsey, and Jackie’s. Doing my Christmas shopping. Seeing the wonderful Christmas Revels show, of which Julie is a cast member, the other night. And a lot of singing!

I haven’t talked much about the chorus that I’m in, but now seems like a good time to start. I really love to sing, and I’ve had so much fun singing with this chorus. We had our concert a couple of weeks ago and sang some great pieces- the Bach motet “Lobet Den Hernn,” Purcell’s “Come Ye Sons of Art,” and a very fun Christmas cantata. Also, I can look around the room at a chorus rehearsal and think, Everyone here is nice. I could have a great conversation with anyone in this room.

This is something that has consistently amazed me since I graduated from college. When I was growing up, and even in college, I always wondered when drama and cliquiness ended and whether people ever got nicer. But now I’ve worked at two different companies where almost everyone I met was genuinely nice. And reading a horrible story in the Globe like this is followed the next day with a wonderful one like this. Sometimes I feel like all we ever hear about are the terrible people of the world—they’re the ones who make the news. But the older I get, the more convinced I am of what Atticus tells Scout at the end of To Kill a Mockingbird: that most people are nice, when you finally see them.

Merry Christmas, all!

In Celebration of Playlists

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How do you listen to music? I don’t mean where you are or whether you listen to CDs, an iPod, or Pandora. What I mean is, how do you choose which music to listen to? Do you scroll through your iPod until you find an artist you want to listen to? Do you wake up with a craving to hear a particular album? Do you use Genius playlists on iTunes? Do you want to hear music by different artists, but all in the same genre?

We all, it seems, listen to music differently. And it’s funny, because while there are certain things I’m relentlessly old-fashioned about—I won’t join Netflix because I like video stores too much and I’m extremely anti-Kindle—I have no problem with the fact that CDs are almost obsolete. I haven’t bought a physical CD in years, and it doesn’t bother me that little kids have no idea what a “music store” is because they only know iTunes.

There are probably a lot of people who feel that way, but another way that the iPod has changed my listening habits is by eliminating albums for me. I know some people who will only listen to albums, and only in order, feeling that music isn’t meant to be listened to any other way. And it is true that some artists make albums intending for it to be listened to all together, but there are many others who just put a bunch of songs together on the same CD. So I don’t feel I’m missing anything by listening to songs out of order.

What I love, though, are playlists.

I remember back when I first got my college laptop, the first computer that was exclusively mine, the thing that excited me the most about it was its CD burner. I’d never had one before, and I was excited to be able to create mix CDs. I used Windows Media Player back then and made a couple of CDs that took one song off each of the CDs I owned. I still listen to those playlists sometimes (now in iTunes).

Gradually, I started getting more creative with my playlists. I made a playlist of pump-up songs for running. I made one composed of songs that reflected my junior-year-of-college mood, many of which comprised my melodramatic away messages. I made an 80s playlist for an 80s Halloween party we had in college. On Valentine’s Day, I made a playlist of love songs (because, apparently, I like depressing myself). Songs with lyrics I like, songs appropriate enough for young kids to play at the pool club where I lifeguarded in the summers, graduation songs…I couldn’t get enough of playlists.

I also started making larger playlists for every year. On New Year’s Eve every year, I go through my music and find music I like but don’t listen to enough and organize it into a playlist. I now have playlists for 2007-2010, and no song can appear on more than one yearly playlist.

Music I acquired from friends led me to create even more themed playlists. For a CD swap at work that a former coworker arranged (hi, Jill!), I did “The American Cities Mix,” where each song was about a different city. Other playlists I’ve been listening to with some frequency:

–Over the Rainbow (every song has a different color in the title, i.e. “Orange Sky” by Alexi Murdoch, “Yellow” by Coldplay, etc.)

–Months of the year (i.e. “Long December” by the Counting Crows, “June” by Pete Yorn, etc.)

–Eight Days a Week (i.e. “Sunday Morning” by Maroon 5, “Manic Monday” by the Bangles, etc.)

–Rock Around the Clock (i.e. “Breathe (2 AM)” by Anna Nalick, “4 A.M.” by Our Lady Peace, etc.)

–Rainy Day Playlist (every song has “Rain” in the title)

–Sunny Day Playlist (what do you think?)

–WTF? (songs with swears in either the title or unexpectedly in the song, i.e. “First of May” by Jonathan Coulton” or “Don’t Marry Her” by The Beautiful South)

–Holidays (every song represents a holiday, i.e. “River” by Joni Mitchell for Christmas and “The Green Fields of France” by the Dropkick Murphys for Veteran’s Day)

–Nerd Mix (songs like “Protons, Neutrons, Electrons” by The Cat Empire and “The Nitrogen Cycle Song” by Amy Bronson)

–Songs about California (there are about a million of those)

–Songs with “dance” in the title that aren’t necessarily dance songs (ditto)

–Slowed-down covers (many of which are very cool—think “Hey Ya” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”)

By now, you probably are backing away from your computer slowly, thinking I’m nuts. Or maybe you’re thinking about the playlists you’ve made yourself. If, by some weird chance, you’re someone I know and you’d like to hear one of my mixes, drop me a line and I’ll burn you a CD of the mix you want.

In any case, I need to listen to as much of this as I can in the next few days. From the day after Thanksgiving until December 26, I’ll only be listening to my 250+-song Christmas playlist.

To Whoever’s Out There Reading This

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I need some suggestions from you. It’s October. Halloween is coming. I’m in the mood for a scary movie. However, there are a few complicating factors. Despite being afraid of all kinds of weird things, I’m not afraid of movies. The only pieces of entertainment that have managed to scare me are a couple of X-Files episodes (“Irresistible” and “Roadrunners”). Aside from that, though, most horror movies are just bad, with lame writing and terrible acting.

I liked The Exorcist, but it didn’t scare me. Same with Carrie. I saw Rosemary’s Baby last year and found it interesting but a little hokey. I was really disappointed in The Blair Witch Project– I was amazed by how not-scary it was. I couldn’t get into 28 Days Later and turned it off, bored, halfway through. I do like the Scream movies, but mostly because they’re funny and self-aware. Halloween, on the other hand, I found hilarious because the characters are so flipping dumb. I hated Final Destination. The Birds wasn’t scary and was pretty anticlimactic. Psycho is only scary if you don’t know about the shower scene (and who doesn’t?).

Now for the getting-a-little-warmers. I liked Identity, mainly because of the twist in it, but didn’t find it scary. The Others caused me to jump in a few places and had a good ending. I feel the same way about The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Panic Room. The Shining was genuinely creepy, but didn’t keep me up at night. And I really liked The Ring.

I tend to find humans scarier than any kind of intangible force, so there’s one clue for you. I also like twist endings and genuine surprises. Do any of you know of any scary movies out there that fit the bill?

Gilmore Girls

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Apparently, writing about the ten-year anniversaries of things I like is becoming a pattern because here I am, documenting another such milestone. Today is the tenth anniversary of the premiere of Gilmore Girls.

If you’ve never seen this show, rent the DVDs ASAP. For those of you not lucky enough to be a fan of the show in its heyday, let me give you a little crash course. The show follows Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham), a bubbly, fast-talking hotel manager who is thirty-two in the first season, and her daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel), sixteen when the show starts. I think you can do the math. Lorelai and Rory are super-close and interact more as friends than as mother and daughter. They live in a picturesque town in Connecticut called Stars Hollow, full of quirky townies who find any excuse to celebrate something and, at town meetings, argue over things like whether they can have two “town troubadours.” In the pilot episode, Rory, a bookworm who dreams of attending Harvard, is accepted to a prestigious private school. Lorelai is thrilled, until she realizes that she can’t afford the tuition. So she swallows her pride and asks her snobby, upper-class parents, Emily and Richard, from whom she’s been semi-estranged, to help her out. They agree, but only on the condition that Lorelai and Rory join them for dinner every Friday night.

The show ran on the WB (and later the CW) for seven seasons, following Rory through three years of high school and four years of college. It had a very distinct style of dialogue—super-fast conversations sprinkled with pop culture references. When a character says one thing, then changes his mind quickly afterward, Lorelai’s quick with the Chinatown reference: “My daughter, my sister, my daughter.” In the pilot, Rory’s awkward reply upon learning that a cute boy has just moved to town from Chicago, is, “Windy. Oprah.” Michel, the snooty but lovable concierge at Lorelai’s inn, retorts, “To me, you are the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoon.” When Lorelai and Rory argue, this dialogue comes out in about fifteen seconds:

LORELAI: Are you mad?
RORY: Yes.
LORELAI: Right. Because I’m dating him?
RORY: Because you lied to me.
LORELAI: I kept information from you.
RORY: Information that I should’ve had.
LORELAI: Information that would’ve come out eventually, like the Iran-contra scandal.
RORY: So you’re Oliver North?
LORELAI: No, I’m Fawn Hall.
RORY: Mom!
LORELAI: Well, she was much prettier.

There were tons of romantic subplots, too—I’ve heard the show described as a “romantic comedy soap opera.” My favorite one involved Luke, the gruff diner owner with a heart of gold, whose friendship with Lorelai eventually develops into something more.

It was a really amazing show: moving without being too sappy, funny while still being relatable, romantic without making romance the singular focus of the show. While I didn’t like the way some plotlines developed in the later seasons, my memories of this show remain nothing but positive. I made a group of friends based on our mutual love of the show. In college, I bonded with the girls on my floor over this show. I converted at least three roommates into fans.

Like Sex and the City, it was a show that had elements of both fantasy and reality. Rory was in high school when I was, and I could relate to her anxiety about preparing for college. There are elements of small-town life that I found relatable, but I doubt that there’s anywhere on Earth quite like Stars Hollow, where people hold wakes for cats and time the town’s only stoplight to be red for as long as it takes for the town’s oldest resident to cross the street.

But more significantly, it shows us both the fantasy and the reality of mother-daughter relationships. Lorelai is the mother every teenager wishes she had. She wears Urban Outfitter T-shirts, gorges on junk food, refuses to learn to cook, and has never met a witty comeback she didn’t like. But she’s a friend to Rory as well as a mother. When Rory goes through a breakup, Lorelai is there helping her “wallow” in the sadness, and when she finds out from Rory’s teacher that Rory got a D on a paper, her reaction is to leave the school, saying, “It’s just that if Rory got a ‘D’, she’s not feeling too good right now and I’d really like to be there.” She knows her daughter well enough to know that Rory must have studied hard and is mad at herself for not doing better. In real life, how many parents would do that instead of yelling and screaming?

That’s why we see, through other characters, the reality of mother-daughter relationships. Rory’s best friend Lane plays the drums in a rock band and hides her CDs under her floorboards while playing the part of dutiful, religious daughter to her strict Korean mother. And one of the best parts of the show is watching Lorelai interact with her mother Emily. Played by the wonderful Kelly Bishop, Emily wants desperately to be closer to her daughter but doesn’t understand her and is unable to let go of her own views of the world in order to do so. No matter what strides they make, old hurts are still there, and Lorelai and Emily’s relationship will never be anything less than difficult.

It’s hard enough to be friends with your mother as an adult; as a teenager, it’s damn near impossible. I think that’s one big reason why this show stuck with so many of us: we saw in it the hard realities of family life as well as a fantastic glimpse of what we wish family life was.

Wicked Awesome

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I don’t go to many concerts. Haven’t paid for a concert ticket since 2006, in fact. I love music, but I tend not to get too obsessed with particular artists, so there aren’t that many concerts I would pay money for. Some, I think, are worth it; most aren’t. You often have to stand, if it’s at someplace like the Paradise, and have to suffer through one or two crappy opening acts. You fret over whether you should sing or dance along with the music, especially if you don’t know all the words by heart, and you glance around to see what other people are doing. You often can’t see very well, your ears are ringing when the concert is over, and half the time, you end up thinking that the artist sounds better on the CD. Or at least I do. It’s not the case for a lot of people, I know. Some people get an incredible natural high off of live music. They’re excited months in advance for a concert by an artist they love. They go to random concerts by artists they’re not familiar with just for the thrill of live music. They post on Facebook about how a certain (indie rock, of course) band opened their hearts and filled them, in those exact words. And while I kind of roll my eyes at that, I’m jealous of those people, too. I love listening to music, but I don’t get the huge spiritual boost from live music that some people seem to. I can’t accurately claim, either, that any music has ever changed my life or had a huge impact on me. It just doesn’t have the same effect on me.

It’s the same with religion. I’ve talked about my religious beliefs a bit here. While I do find religion comforting and benevolent, I’ve never had the kind of mind-blowing religious experience that some people talk about. I’ve read people’s writings about how religion—everything from Christianity to Buddhism to Islam to Orthodox Judaism to the Baha’i faith—changed their lives, gave them unspeakable joy, gave them whole new ways of looking at things. When people credit their faith for getting them through a tragedy or difficult life circumstance, or for giving them the strength to overcome addiction or some kind of self-destructive behavior, I marvel at the thought that religion could have that much power. While I respect religious beliefs and have my own, I’m not affected by religion to that degree.

Then there’s yoga, which I’ve gotten more into in the last year. I enjoy it, it’s shown me a better way to breathe, and I do feel a bit more relaxed after shavasana, at least more so than I would after any other form of exercise. (Some people say running gives them a great natural high, but although I run a lot myself, I can say with complete certainty that I have never felt that at all.) But my feelings on yoga are pretty similar to Sarah Bunting’s, who says “the taking of yoga so very, very seriously mystifies me.” When people say that yoga is life-changing, I have a hard time figuring out why. It’s not that relaxing. I was even at a party once where a girl said, completely seriously, “The world would be a better place if everyone did yoga.” That’s not just eye-rolling but seriously obnoxious—it’s like saying “The world would be a better place if everyone found Jesus.”

All of this does have a point, which I’m getting to. Last week, I went with a group of friends to see Wicked at the Opera House. I hadn’t seen a musical live in a long time, and I had almost forgotten what good musical theater does to me. I’ve seen Les Miserables twice, and both times, it put me in a good mood for the next week. But although I knew a couple of songs from Wicked and had read the (very different) Gregory Maguire book that it’s based on, I’d never seen Wicked before.

And holy shit. I started tearing up at least three times during the play. The storyline, which was a lot different from the book, was touching and surprising and occasionally funny. I’ve wanted to burst out singing all the songs since I saw them. I don’t often feel like music is “speaking” to me (and it would probably make me roll my eyes again if I heard someone said that), but there are a couple of songs in Wicked that I feel like I could sing about my own life. And this scene here? GOOSEBUMPS. Even more amazing in person.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAuWRE7FMf8]

I’m not a cynical person. I’m generally pretty positive and there’s a lot that I love. So I’m glad to know that even if I remain indifferent to live music, religion, yoga, etc., there is still something out there that I can find sublime, something can move me beyond the usual limits of my emotions.

Putting the Passport to Use

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Remember back in December of 2007 when I first got a passport?

It finally has a stamp on it.

Yep, a few weeks ago my family and I went to Aruba! It was the first time I’d ever left the country or been anywhere tropical. And what an awesome trip! I spent most of the week lying on a beach reading. And the beach there doesn’t have anything you hate about the beach in New England—no seagulls, no seaweed, no screaming little kids, no bottom you can’t see, no freezing cold water. It was just gorgeous. See for yourself:

Aside from the obvious reasons of enjoying my trip to Aruba, I’m really happy to have left the country, finally. Sometimes I just feel like so much of my life has been defined by what I haven’t done. I haven’t lived anywhere but the Boston area. I haven’t had a boyfriend. I haven’t been in love. It had always really bothered me that I’d never left the country.
But now I have. It might be just a stamp on a passport, but to me it’s what it symbolizes as well as the fun trip that put it there that means so much to me.