Welcome to Pure Bright Fire! It’s taken me a bit longer than I anticipated to make some of the changes I wanted to, but if you got here by trying to visit Struggling Single Twenty-Something or if this showed up in your reader’s feeds, then yea! You are now on my new blog, Pure Bright Fire!

I’m still trying to get everything settled here and make it look prettier and what not, but for now, join me as I blog through my thirties!

Despite me not posting until the last day of the month, a lot happened in the month of May. Much of it was good, and I’ll get to that later, but one really terrible thing happened right before Memorial Day. I haven’t written about it yet because I didn’t quite know how, but I don’t want to gloss over it, either.

My Uncle Vinnie, who was my dad’s older brother, died suddenly the Thursday before Memorial Day. He was sixty-six, and it was completely unexpected. He’d been married to my aunt for thirty-two years, and my cousins who just lost their dad are thirty and twenty-seven.

It’s horrible that someone can just be gone so suddenly- someone who had so much life left and so much left to do. It scares me that people from my parents’ generation are dying. He was a really great guy, and it hasn’t quite hit me yet that he’s gone.

We will miss you, Uncle Vinnie.

I’ll have a post with actual content coming soon, but for now- thank you for comments on the last post, and I just wanted to say that since I posted that, I am actually feeling much better. Monday was, apparently, a darkest-moment-just-before-dawn kind of day. It seems fitting, somehow, that after numerous little things added up and brought me down, different numerous little things brought me back up. So- right now I feel much better and much saner, and if anyone is worried about me after what I wrote on Monday, you do not need to be.

The Christmas season is upon us, which means…the Christmas movie season is upon us!

I love Christmas movies. The one upside of the little independent video store up the street from my parents’ house closing last year was that I got to buy It’s A Wonderful Life, which is the best movie ever made, on video. I also have The Muppet Christmas Carol (awesome) and Home Alone (why don’t they show this on TV on Thanksgiving anymore?). Then of course, there’s A Charlie Brown Christmas and the many versions of A Christmas Carol, and of course, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer with those little Claymation figures. I have scarcely missed it every year since I was six (I think one year I had sports awards night at my high school), and this year won’t be an exception.

Speaking of when I was six, last night my roommate Christina and I had a little movie night, and along with A Series of Unfortunate Events (excellent non-Christmas movie she hadn’t seen) and The Polar Express (Christmas movie neither of us had seen), we saw Muppet Family Christmas, which I don’t think I’d seen since I was in first grade. I remembered a lot of it– although I could have sworn there was one part where they sang, “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” but there isn’t. But it’s funny, the things you don’t notice when you’re little. Like at one point, Ernie and Bert are talking to the only human in the movie, and they’re talking about how “yes” begins with “y” and “true” begins with “t.” Then they say, “Where we come from, this is small talk.” Awesome.

Then I started thinking about Sesame Street when I was little, and I remembered this segment that creeped me out where a letter U carried a guy away. I decided to see if I was remembering right, and then I found it on YouTube. Turns out the guy was Smokey Robinson, which I didn’t know when I was little. And then I decided to watch it.

Holy God, it’s even creepier than I remember. The letter U is, like, molesting him. Watch for yourself:

There are all kinds of Sesame Street clips on YouTube, actually. Luckily, most of them aren’t quite that creepy.

Sorry for the long delay between posts. I didn’t get the Internet working until today.

Now I’m going to catch up with everything I would have posted earlier.