Five Things Friday: Five Small Things

Towards the end of college I hung out in a sun room with a friend who I always thought was infinitely cooler than me.  She went to RIT in New York and I went to a college in VA that was smaller than my high school.  We would meet up over breaks and swap amazing stories.  She would tell me about skateboarding through a nearby campus, wondering why it was so quiet and then discovering afterwards it was a school for the deaf, and I would tell her about... well, I don't remember what I swapped for that story because I was so in awe thinking about A) an entire college campus that was silent and B) if deaf people feel what "noisy" feels like in a crowd afire with sign language.  We were watching Vanilla Sky, which quickly became my favorite movie despite starring the awful Tom Cruise.  This movie is littered with so many of my now favorite quotes and lines.   One of them is, "I'll see you in another life when we are both cats."  Another one is, "The little things... there's nothing bigger, is there?"  Here are my five favorite little things in life.

1.  Dove soap:  I inexplicably need this smell in my life.  When I shower, I don't fully rinse off parts of my body so that throughout the day I'll get a quick shot of it.  I put bars of Dove in my dresser drawers.  I wash my cheaper earrings with it so that when I move my head I smell it.  It sounds absolutely psycho, I know, but it makes me incredibly happy.

2.  Stranger babies:  Babies are pure souls protected by leg rolls and chubby cheeks.  One thing I've discovered about myself is that babies are drawn to my face- probably because of my dark eyes.  I remember reading an article when I had my oldest son that said babies can tell when another child is behaving badly by six months.  Naturally, this has morphed in my mind to mean that babies can sense evil.  When I see a stranger baby watching me and smiling, I can't help but think that I must not be all that evil of a person, or that maybe our souls were twin flames in another life.  

3.  Music: I would wither up and die from the inside out without music.  I wish with my entire being that I never go deaf.  I have the playlist for my funeral/memorial already created.  The greatest gift anyone could ever give me is a well thought out mixed tape or CD.  

4.  A well put together outfit:  I don't mean this in the materialistic sense- I really don't care about brands and prices.  I simply have a newfound appreciation for an outfit where the little pieces match and pull it together.  Shoes that match the slight coloring of flowers on a shirt, an overly dressy skirt dressed down with a denim jacket,  a bright scarf teamed with a grey dress, an outfit built on a pair of earrings.  I have recently started dressing up a little more for work because I love the small success of putting something cohesive together.

5.  People with tattoos: I know it's not good to generalize and stereotype, but I have discovered that despite themselves being heavily judged, the least judgemental and most interesting people  have tattoos.  When I see someone with a tattoo, I feel like I've found someone that "gets me" by default.  When I see someone with a tattoo, I automatically want to hear their story and to watch their face as they tell it.

Love,

A

Five Things Friday: The First

 I'm not drunk or delirious.  I know it's not Friday.  There's something relieving about failing at something before it even gets off the ground- how much worse could this attempt at blogging get by launching my Friday blog idea on a Saturday?  A lot worse- just to warn you, but let's maintain some hope.
I love to write.  I volunteer to research and crunch numbers with the end goal of typing up an essay just because I enjoy playing with words.  I assign myself research papers.  I'm currently working on: the benefits of teaching Algebra 1 with a pervasive use of graphing calculators.  It's ok- I have excitement enough for the both of us.  My point is I want to do something that forces me to write recreationally at least once a week.  So here is my proposal:
Every Friday I'm going to assign myself (and a brave blog partner? volunteers?) a topic- sometimes serious, sometimes frivolous, sometimes comedic, sometimes downright depressing- and will respond with a list of my top five things.  I'm not promising amazing writing.  I'm not even promising it will be remotely entertaining.  But I want to write, and if you're bored and want to read then, hi!
Five Things Friday: My Favorite Firsts
1.  Mrs. King told me in elementary school that she picked her books based on the first line.  When I would write my stories, I would try extremely hard to write the most amazing first line in the northern hemisphere.  I remember two of them:
It started with fire and broken glass.
There was blood everywhere. 
Apparently I was a fan of shock value.
The best first lines are ones that move like poetry but sprout a million questions.   My favorite first line of any book is from One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
[insert heart eyes and book addiction].  I think it's the nostalgia in the face of impending tragedy that captured me completely.
2.  The first and only time I was able to lift one eyebrow was when I bit into this gross pork my mom made.  I had always wanted to acquire this skill and was extremely jealous of everyone that could do it.  I put a disgusting piece of pork on my silver fork, bit into it gingerly with my front teeth, and looked over at my annoying sister.  I felt the skin between my brows do something that felt like a hypnotic swirl.  My sister started laughing.  I'm still upset that I did not pay close enough attention to how I did it and have yet to repeat it.  I'm still jealous and in awe when I see someone do it.
3.  The first morning I woke up at college I was in a hall of all freshman girls.  We all must have woken up with the same jarring realization that we weren't home, that we had forced ourselves into this new life phase, and that we were surrounded by people who weren't required to even tolerate us.  In an uncanny act of unspoken soul healing, every one of us put on Dixie Chick's Wide Open Spaces.  Every time I hear that song and album, I think back to that warm and shaky morning.
4.  The first day of my first year of teaching was the scariest day of my life.  I survived just as I imagine a prison inmate survives his/her first day behind bars: literally one minute at a time.  That, and telling myself it couldn't last forever.  Now, when I'm faced with what's sure to be an unpleasant experience, I tell myself it surely can't be as terrifying as that day.
5.  The first time I rode a bike without training wheels I ignored my dad, biked across the road into a church graveyard, and proceeded to go so fast I couldn't stop myself from crashing into a grave stone.  I got a blood blister the size of Texas but completely fell in love with riding bike.

Love,
A