I'm fine with you not taking showers, as long as you're ok with me telling you that you smell bad if you do.

Ok. I have to share this...because I've been laughing out loud in my office for about 5 minutes.

Last week, one of my friends called me to tell me a story about a conversation she had just had with a guy she recently started dating. They had plans to go get ice cream one night, so she called him on her way home from the gym to talk about what time worked. While talking to him, she mentioned that she had just worked out at the gym, but that she wasn't planning on taking a shower--she just needed a little time to freshen up--so she could meet up with him relatively soon. And the guy was like, "You're not going to take a shower?", and she said, "No, it's a lot of time and effort. I'm not all sweaty and gross. I can wash my face and freshen up and be fine...and it'll be way faster." The guy was NOT PLEASED. He couldn't believe she wasn't going to take a shower. And stated this like 5 times. Which obviously annoyed her...and she met up with him, still upset that he was so rude about. They talked about it briefly at the beginning of the date and he again stated that he couldn't believe she didn't take the time to shower and she was like, "WHY DOES IT MATTER? YOU CAN'T EVEN TELL!!"

So, this morning, they had an exchange on gchat, and the showering problem was again brought up. This is my fave part of their conversation:

him: i thought we had reached a point where we would do things for each other

not necessarily because it needed to be done or not but just to make the other person happy

I mean even friends do that for each other

her: hahahaha. taking a shower though?!

would that really have made you exceptionally happier?

him: this could be anything though

her: if i had not said anything, you wouldn't have even known the difference

him: thursday it was a shower but what about something else?

her: what about my happiness? that i didn't want to be bothered with it?

that it would have taken more time and energy than i felt like putting into it, with no cost or harm to anyone else

him: that's the thing tho -- you put it in terms of not wanting to take the time to do something that i wasn't commanding you to do but asking

i think if you had said "i would take a shower for you if i needed to, but i don't"

that would have been better

basically i was hurt by the whole thing

then later in the day he emailed her because he felt the need to say more....

I don't want to bore you with any more discussions of taking showers. It's obviously not something that you thought much of and were very offended when asked. I don't look at this however as one issue but as something that could present itself as a problem in the future. I'm fine with you not taking showers, as long as you're ok with me telling you that you smell bad if you do. Its more of a matter of your heart and how both of our hearts are at different places. I believe mine, weather to my detriment or not, is always ready to give and serve, and I can be taken advantage of in that way. Thus I think the condition of my heart was such that if asked to do something simple before meeting, I would want to do that and more! I wouldn't question how much time it would take, or what inconvenience it would be. Because doing it is an act of friendship and because whomever I am with, their comfort and joy is mine, if my friend(s) are having a good time, so am I, and anything I can do to contribute to that, I consider a benefit to me as well. That's why it took so long to decide on an activity for my birthday. I'm not thinking of myself. As it stands right now, I'm not sure our hearts are in the same place to the point where we would go out of our way to serve one another.

This whole thing is the most RIDICULOUS thing I have ever read. And it's making me laugh so hard. It almost feels like a joke. Or a senario about a crazy person from "Sex and the City."

The End.

The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune. - Italo Calvino

I like this photo. And I like this quote by Calvino. The photo reminded me of the quote, actually. Life gets complicated, the days go by quickly. We need to remind ourselves to slow down. Throw on some fun shoes, go for a walk, take some time for youself. Prune away the frivolities to find some clarity.

25 things.

this is the thing to do right now, i guess.

25 random things about me:

1. i'd rather it be 20 degrees outside than 90. i hate sweating more than anything.
2. i spend an embarrassingly large amount of time watching things you youtube. i am not proud of this.
3. i was born in l.a.
4. the end of "mr. holland's opus" always makes me cry. every.single.time.
5. my first car was a white '93 honda accord. sometimes i wish i still had it.
6. i love sending packages to people. you might say it's my love language.
7. right now, my hair is the longest it's ever been. this probably means i'll chop it all off soon.
8. i'm addicted to diet coke.
9. my 2nd grade teacher only had half a fingernail on her pointer finger and it scared the crap out of me.
10. i miss eating breakfast at wolfgangs with my friends every week.
11. forever and always george clooney will be my celebrity crush.
12. i hate running. every second of it. but i do it anyway.
13. i have gone to 3 backstreet boys concerts.
14. when we were little, my best friend and i made a time capsule-threw a bunch of stuff in a shoebox so that future generations could learn about us. i'm not sure we ever buried it.
15. i love choir.
16. i just bought a bag for $300. and it's beautiful and i feel fine about it.
17. i could live on bread and cheese. but then would be obese.
18. i like white wine better than red wine. this probably means i am not as classy as some people i know.
19. i love 'the west wing'.
20. the stone wall in a field behind a manor house in london is my happy place.
21. i am not a pleasant person before 9am. Don't talk to me.
22. sometimes i talk to myself outloud in my car. i have a long commute. stop laughing.
23. i miss sitting in college classes and learning things. i had no idea how good i had it.
24. i am most comfortable in a t-shirt and jeans.
25. daily make-up essential: mascara

thread, not wax.

i got my eyebrows shaped yesterday.
wax and my skin do not get along, so i get them threaded instead.
i go to this little indian lady named dipty. she is amazing.

this is what it looks like:

i just really like billy collins.

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

Singing: The Key to a Long Life

This week's essay from "this i believe' on NPR:

I believe in singing. I believe in singing together.

A few years ago a friend and I realized that we both loved singing but didn't do much of it. So we started a weekly a capella group with just four members. After a year we started inviting other people to join. We didn't insist on musical experience — in fact some of our members had never sung before. Now the group has ballooned to around 15 or 20 people.

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness and a better sense of humor. A recent long-term study conducted in Scandinavia sought to discover which activities related to a healthy and happy later life. Three stood out: camping, dancing and singing.

Well, there are physiological benefits, obviously: You use your lungs in a way that you probably don't for the rest of your day, breathing deeply and openly. And there are psychological benefits, too: Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call "civilizational benefits." When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

Well here's what we do in an evening: We get some drinks, some snacks, some sheets of lyrics and a strict starting time. We warm up a bit first.

The critical thing turns out to be the choice of songs. The songs that seem to work best are those based around the basic chords of blues and rock and country music. You want songs that are word-rich, but also vowel-rich because it's on the long vowels sounds of a song such as "Bring It On Home To Me" ("You know I'll alwaaaaays be your slaaaaave"), that's where your harmonies really express themselves. And when you get a lot of people singing harmony on a long note like that, it's beautiful.

But singing isn't only about harmonizing pitch like that. It has two other dimensions. The first one is rhythm. It's thrilling when you get the rhythm of something right and you all do a complicated rhythm together: "Oh, when them cotton balls get a-rotten, you can't pick very much cotton." So when 16 or 20 people get that dead right together at a fast tempo that's very impressive. But the other thing that you have to harmonize besides pitch and rhythm is tone. To be able to hit exactly the same vowel sound at a number of different pitches seems unsurprising in concept, but is beautiful when it happens.

So I believe in singing to such an extent that if I were asked to redesign the British educational system, I would start by insisting that group singing become a central part of the daily routine. I believe it builds character and, more than anything else, encourages a taste for co-operation with others. This seems to be about the most important thing a school could do for you.

-Brian Eno, British composer, artist, and activist

whoa. get excited.