How I became obsessed with Celtic music:

It all started with Enya. Mom and I would listen to her in the car on long drives to my aunt's or my grandma's. or maybe it was the random Celtic music radio station we found between Coldwater and Muskegon, Michigan before it faded out to static. We'd listen to it while driving north on highway 69 to highway 96. The sun was always setting, fading into darkness as wove through the rolling hills covered in pine. It was narrated by a woman named Fiona. I loved how she said her name: "Fee-yoohh-nah." Her accent in general was lovely. Celtic music makes me feel in touch with my roots. My family has been in America since the 1600s or 1700s. Meaning We were about 5 types of European ancestry and about as American as it comes. But my last name was Irish. And I'd been to Ireland. So I felt more connected to that than any other white Europeans nations my ancestors tramped through. I liked to imagine them, living in the green hills of Ireland, tending sheep and being caught up in other romantic stories. In reality, they might have been drunks, or pious, certainly racist at one point in history or another. my ancestors certainly wouldn't like me the way Mulan's ghost-like ones did. Other than my name, my love of potatoes in all shapes and forms, and maybe my alight abundance of knowledge on Celtic history I've done through school and on my own, I'm not very Irish. Some people know second languages, or still perform customs their great grandparents did. Maybe they still carry a name from their ancestor or have family back in the country they're from. I think there's still something tying us all to our roots which had woven through history to bring us to where we are today. I also think it's important not to lose that. So I have Celtic music, two trips to Ireland, and my family crest. And that's good enough for now.

Read more

Day 6ish: Wonderful films and Quarter-Life Crises.

So my boyfriend and I just finished watching "Beginners" a film starring Melanie Laurent (excuse the non-accent over the E in her name), Ewan McGregor, and Christopher Plummer. It was heartbreaking, lovely, funny, bittersweet, realistic, uplifting, and just wholly wonderful. I basically just teared up for the last half of the film. the score and soundtrack were wonderful as well. I haven't watched a film so uniquely filmed/created in awhile--lately with the BF and I, it's action, comedy, and TV shows. Which is why I insisted on watching it. I've been wanting to see it since it came out and the opportunity presented itself on HBOGO. So I highly recommend!

It got me thinking of course--actually lately, I've been thinking a lot about aging, life, death, and everything in between. I think we call is a quarter-life crisis. I'm 25. I graduated from undergrad last spring and have my first full-time, yet-still-unsalaried position. I have been dating my boyfriend for 3 1/2+ years. I'm at the point in my life where a lot of my friends are getting married, having kids, my parents are getting older, my younger siblings are becoming adults, and my grandparents are getting much older. I know I've been thinking too much about it--about how it will be when I'm old and dealing with young people. I'm a writer and I think my strong suit is character and understanding where people have been and what's happened to them to make them who they are. So I'm constantly dissecting my parents and my grandparents and my friend's kids and trying to figure out what not to do and what to do and how to do it all gracefully.

Seriously, at 25 I should be worrying about other things.

But in all honesty, I think, and as I believe many might think, I just want to fix or improve upon what my parents did. So I think up plans of how I'd introduce electronics into my kids' lives. When they get a flip phone, when they get a smart phone. How much TV and computer in a day. How I'll get them outdoors.

And it all comes down to that I'm afraid to mess up as a parent. And I tell my boyfriend this not ten minutes ago and he looks at me with those big blue eyes and he says, "you are going to be a fucking good mother." and he repeated it. And something funny happened in my chest, or maybe it was my heart. I felt like the Grinch in the scene where his heart grows. My boyfriend of 3+ years thinks I'll be a good mother and it's such a little thing to say, just a few words strung together in the English language, but it really did mean something.

And then I was tearing up again, or maybe I never really stopped because Ewan, Melanie, and Christopher had just mad me cry for like and hour. Just like the film teaches, I will always be beginning something. And it will never be too late to begin, just like it will never be too late to believe that love can last forever. I haven't lost that, surprisingly, after seeing my parents and my aunts and my cousins and my friends. And I don't plan to.

Read more

How I would rank pain, everything from Legos to stitches to heartbreak.

Seriously though. I'm the master of small injury. My friends are amazed I haven't broken anything before--well, not officially.

1. Getting numbing shots inside the gash on my lower front calf for stitches, a gash I received while hammering tile out of a bathroom for hurricane relief and wouldn't close when I tried to press it together.
2. Cramps. You know the ones I'm talking about.
3. Your biggest heartbreak when you think back on it 5 years later.
4. Stubbing/slamming/mangling a bare toe extremely hard on furniture when you are happy--specifically because it hurts just that much worse.
5. That time I rolled my ankle while drunk and then proceeded to walk on it all night. It was probably broken because I couldn't bend it to the side for 3 months. I definitely couldn't walk on it the next day. Probably should've gotten it X-Rayed. Oh well!
6. Burns, whether they're from baking dishes, straighters, curling irons, real irons, or a fiery My Little Pony because you were playing Chardee MacDennis and lost.
7. Hangovers that last all day.
8. Motherfucking bee stings.
9. Pain Poker with enemies.
10. Stepping on an errant Lego, especially the pointy end.
11. Getting cut on the tongue by a Dum-Dum sucker you are thoroughly enjoying.
12. Scraping your hands when you fall. Ow.
13. Shaving cuts on your downstairs.
14. Wearing heels for more than an hour.
15. Your first heartbreak when you think about it 10 years later.
16. Pain Poker with friends.
17. Getting the gash from the flying tile missile while doing hurricane relief. 
18. Spilling an expensive drink or coffee I was really, really looking forward too.
19. My cat's attempted vendettas. Shut up bitch, I'm still going to pick you up because you're soft and I want to love you.
20. Pillow fights

Read more

Day 4: Lost, found, weddings, and taking back sunday

I didn't have much to write yesterday, so nothing got written. I went to work, came home, did some laundry while watching the first three episodes of Girls season 1 which I can do now that our friends have invited us to the wonderful family that is HBO-GO, and then ate out with the BF because today, I'm leaving for Vegas until Sunday night. My best friend is getting married. I feel the need to say that they live in Vegas, it's not a destination wedding. And that they live there because he's in the air force. I think people, or maybe it's just me, get a certain idea about a place like Vegas when you say you're going there for a wedding. Last time I went, it wasn't for casinos and frivolity either, but for the birth of their son, my "nephew" (WHO GOOD GOD I AM SO EXCITED TO SEE I AM GOING TO CUDDLE THE SHIT OUT OF HIM).

Anyway, Usually your best friend's wedding is a big to-do, but this is a fairly informal event. Just her sister and I are walking the aisle in different colored, but slightly matched dresses my BFF picked and she's going barefoot and he'd wearing chucks. I texted her the other day asking if I was "on deck" as in am I supposed to give a speech and she said if I wanted to. well, I wrote one. It's short, simple, to the point, and will make me cry. Maybe no one else. Now that would be funny... and embarrassing. Sounds like a TV show scene.

So I'm excited. My best friend has had some shitty times in her life, and some shitty people. We met in 9th grade in our honors biology/English block. the sentence that usually follows that line, is "we were inseparable" after that. That's not true. We had our ups and downs. But the important thing is, she is still in my life and I'm still in hers. We might've not been besties every year following 9th grade, but she is the only person I care to know from high school. My friends in high school weren't very good friends. But Amanda, she stuck through it all. So what I want to say, at her wedding, is that I'm proud to not only call her a best friend, but I'm proud she has built for herself such a beautiful and loving family, and I'm so happy to be a part of it.

When I started, I titled this post "Lost" because I started it up again last night. I was going to talk about how awesome the show is, even thought I'm late to the bandwagon--later because I was watching it like wildfire last summer and then halfway through season 3 got frustrated and quit because I have like a thousand other shows to watch and many were returning in the fall. But the episode I revisited last night actually answered some of my questions. and makes me excited to continue.

But then I started talking about the wedding and maybe it should be called something else. To be cliche, I'd say back in high school, that was my lost period, and now, I couldn't feel more strongly about the fact that I've been found.

Yay cliches!

Time to puzzle, listen to one of my favorite Pandora stations--Taking Back Sunday, my first station I ever created actually and it's loaded with music from high school that I used to listen to with said BFF. Getting into the swing of things :)

Read more