Love and Loathe: W#7

This week I loved:

the movie Stuck in Love

A lovely story about a writing father, Bill, who passed his passion for stories on to his two children, Samantha (19) and Rusty (17-ish). Bill and the children's mother, Erica, who left him for a younger man, are divorced and Samantha is blaming Erica , so she hasn't talked to her in over a year. Next to being a college student, Samantha casually wrote a couple of books, one of them being published by a big publishing company. Quite a big life event, but she doesn't want to include her mother because she's still mad.

This movie is about forgiveness, young love, old love, fresh love, rusted love, and learning that there are a few people in your life, that will always be there for you, no matter how much you fight them off.

Reasons to watch this movie: 

- Gossip Girl (aka Kristen Bell)

- Lily Collins

- Logan Lerman

- Lily Collins and Logan Lerman

- directed by Josh Boone who is also directing The Fault in Our Stars (feat.  Nat Wolff, who's also in this movie)

- Greg Kinnear in a similar role than his performance in The Last Song

- the soundtrack (which is absolutely amazing), I mean, listen to this: 

the Tangle Teezer

I have heard a lot of great things about this tiny pink brush, so I decided getting one for solid 14,95€ at Mueller in Vienna and I do not regret it. I have very dry, sleek, un-shiny hair and ever since I have this brush I have dry, sleek, shiny hair and a pink brush. Love it. 

Ellen Page

The woman who made out with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the guy I will most likely marry in the more or less near or far future, officially came out on Valentine's Day '14 as part of a speech for the Human Rights Campaign which specialized in LGBT civil rights, because she no longer wanted to keep her lesbianism (what a weird word, does this even exist?) a secret because she felt like lying about it by doing so. When one of my country's newspaper's posted this as a headline for one of their Facebook posts, a lot of people started commenting: "Who cares? She can do whatever she wants." and all I could think of was that they are right: nobody should be interested in or even shocked about someones sexual decision, a very private decision made public. But on the other hand I was also happy, because when very famous people, the people teenagers look up to, come out publicly, those teenagers will see the brave person who made a decision that he or she is proud of, and those people are the best role models.

Ellen, I loved you ever since you were a pregnant teenager, knocked up by Michael Cera. I love you even more, now that you came to terms with yourself and your public life. You go girl! 

Asian noodles 

This needs no explanation.

The Neighborhood

I'm pulling off a classing Internet Explorer because I'm quite late at this, but I just recently discovered the song Sweater Weather which led me to buying The Neighborhood's whole album I Love You from iTunes.

Reasons to love this band:

- they are from California (which leads to the conclusion that they define Sweater Weather differently than 90% of the rest of Earth's population)

- Indie Rock!

- slow tunes

- amazing lyrics

- no cheap casting shows involved

This week I loathed:

True Detective

I love Woody Harrelson! His performance in Natural Born Killers still gives me chills, even when I'm only thinking about it, so I was ultra-excited to see him in the HBO mini-series True Detective, not only as an actor, next to Matthew McConaughey, but also as Executive Producer of the show,  next to Matthew McConaughey. The first couple of minutes of the show were quite good, nice Intro, great layout of the first corpse in the show (those antlers, man), but the dialogues are just waaaaay too long and I stopped listening after a couple of minutes. It was quite boring so I stopped halfway through the first episode. Maybe I'll give it another try in the near future.

24 hour days

I think people can relate when I say that 24 hours are way too short to get shit done in just one day. 

Hospitals

My brother recently found out that he had Diabetes (Type 1) so he spent about two weeks in the hospital around NYE (while I was partying in Dublin: bad conscious, ahoi). This toughened him up in terms of being in a hospital, which makes him a lot stronger than me. This week I had to drive him to one of his appointments in the hospital, so while he was the easy going guy, walking into the doctor's office, I was freaking out only by being in the waiting room.

Reasons to hate hospitals (from my own experience):

- unfriendly nurses

- bad food, that gives you food poisoning (I speak of experience, damn you sausage salad!)

- pain

- grieving

- needles (I'm not actually afraid of needles, but I don't really love them. Did I mention that my brother, the diabetic, has to give himself insuline injections e v e r y t i m e  he eats something? You are the strongest person I know, bro)

Should we move on?

While other people try to cope with things in their own way, I always turn on some great Chopin or Death Metal (whatever I feel like) and start writing about it. Sometimes my writing is just some scribble on a notepad or a Word-Document that ends up deleted after all. Once in a while I start something that ends up being some kind of short-story featuring a reflection of my life. If I like it, I'll save it for later, if not, it ends up in my Mac's trash basket. 

But why am I doing this? It's not like a billion amazing things happen to me day by day that I just HAVE TO include in a new short story? What is it that makes pieces of life, and it doesn't matter wether these are good memories or bad, so special that we just have to include it in our flashbacks when we are working on the process of coming to terms with our past? Shouldn't we just leave things in the past, forgive and forget and move on? 

Nope. 

I have always been a person with hot troubles with forgetting bad things that happened to me. I'm currently in my 20th year on this planet and I still remember when one guy in my elementary school called me a Crybaby, Sissy, Whimperer, Whiner, Sniveller (pick your own translation of the German word with the same semantic features) because I was always too emotional - I still am and I will always be. I also remember the one time when one of my best friends (male) replied to a question from one of our foreign students at that time (year 2009 and she was Dutch) about what my prettiest feature was - he said eyebrows and from that on I could not stop thinking about how they look and what on earth made them stand out in competition with every other part of my body. I mean, they are just eyebrows (note to self: blogpost about the importance and prominence of eyebrows in the near future). He later told me that it was a joke (which pointe I still do not understand) but the actual point is: I will never forget this and I still don't know why this exact event is so important in my life. But do I want to delete this memory from my mind? Nope. Because next to all the negativity this memory brings along, there is always the memory that I moved on from this event. I survived it (more or less, but did my eyebrows?) and I made progress in life and I came to terms with my eyebrows - I mean, as much as you ever can. After all, they are eyebrows. Memories are constant reminders that you had a bad experience (next to very good ones of course) once (and now I'm talking about much worse things than somebody saying the most beautiful thing about you is just a little nothingness for you, I'm talking about rejection, death and failure) and you were able to handle it. You still managed to live your life like a decent person, more or less.

Another thing I remember so clearly as if it happened to me yesterday: the day I confessed my innocent and young love (age 14, 15?), this event is filed under Most Stupidest Things My Body Has Ever Done. The exact same day, Derek Shepherd gave Meredith Grey a kidney in Grey's Anatomy. I can understand why I would remember this one thing, but that thing? That's just ridiculous and no, I will not try to explain why this side memory is glued to the big, bad memory in my mind. That's just the way it is and I can't ever change it because I can't change me (at least not to the extend of deleting memories from my brain, which I don't even want). And so I will always remember the exact sound of the laughter of the rest of class of the boy I fell in love with (age 11,12?) and instead of telling him I gave him one of the pictures that we shot when the photographer came to our school - covertly of course, as if he couldn't trace the picture, which was clearly showing my face, back to me. Just so you know, this is also filed under Most Stupidest Things My Body Has Ever Done. (another note to self: series of blogposts with this heading... this would be endless!)

To conclude this irrelevant blogpost: did you have a great day so far? Yeah, you did? Well, here's your memory of the most embarrassing thing that happened to you in the year of 2008. You're welcome.

PS: I've been using a lot of rhetorical questions in this post. I'm sorry.  

How to cope with Valentine's Day when you're a single girl.

Red hearts everywhere. Little hearts, big hearts, balloon hearts around every corner. Quite frustrating when you have yet another year where the 14th of February means nothing more to you as the evidence that you are halfway through the second month of the year.

For many people, especially those who have been single for a very long time (I'm slowly raising my hand while stuffing a chocolate candy - heart-shaped, a gift from my father -  in my mouth with the other hand) but there are a few ways to escape the one day of the year where people rub it in your face that they get to cuddle and kiss more often, than you do.

      1. Don't stay at home (to watch Breakfast at Tiffany's for the quadrillionth 
         time to cry your hearts out)

      2. Go (Window) Shopping: Grab your best girlfriend(s) or your mother and 
         go to the mall or stroll a along a beautiful shopping street and have fun while
         looking at shop windows or trying on ridiculous clothes. If you find a pair of 
         shoes that you like or a bag that you suddenly couldn't live without - buy it! 
         You don't need a man to get you the things you love!

      3. Don't listen to the Spotify Playlist for Disney's 
    Greatest Love Songs: Mainly because you will cry your eyes out
          when "Candle On The Water" comes on...

      4. Make it a Girl's Night (singles preferred - 
    to prevent you from listening to the only girl 
    with a boyfriend moaning about her boyfriend being 
    out of town- trust me, I have experience):

        Invite your best girlfriend(s) who bring wine and cheese to watch 
        Anti-Valentine's Day movies (anything NOT related to Nicholas Sparks 
        or movies produced by those who brought you Love Actually or Valentine's Day).
        Try action or thriller movies with guys worth drooling, like Drive with Ryan
        Gosling or (my personal favorite) Fight Club with Brad Pitt and
        Edward Norton.

      5. Take your power-playlist and go out for a jog!
   (okay, I'm sorry, this one sucks)

      6. Don't go on a date with a person you've only gone 
    out with just once or twice): The two of you will just 
          feel awkward while sitting between plenty of couples who have been 
          doing this for years. There will be this unnecessary inconvenience between 

          the two of you and you will feel obligated to do things that you are not 
          ready to do yet (like sharing a dessert...). If he asks you out, don't 
          come up with a weird excuse, he will just think that you're not interested, 
          even though you might are. Just tell him the truth and ask him how he feels 
          about going out on such a big day for couples. Why not go out the day 

          before or the day after (BONUS: it will also be easier to get a reservation 
          in your favorite restaurant)

      7. Don't get too drunk: No other day of the year asks more for drunk
          texting your ex than Valentine's Day.

      8. Wear your prettiest smile and sexiest outfit to work: 
          everybody will think: "Wow, she's sexy and single and she loves it!". 
          Envious looks of women with dinner reservations from their Valentine 
          will give you killer-confidence (I'm guilty, I think picked up this collocation 
          somewhere in Cosmopolitan)

      9. Pamper yourself: go to the hairdresser, get a mani-pedi, go to the 
          gym to do some relaxing yoga - this day is about you! 

     10. Flirt! The barista who made you your coffee is kind of cute and he 
           just gave you a tiny smile? Smile back and if you are wearing your 
           Cosmopolitan killer-confidence you can even blow a kiss or wink at him. 
           He will think it's cute (NOT desperate!) and the next time you order a 
           coffee he will give you extra cream - or whatever else you want!