20 New Year’s Resolutions For 20-Somethings

This is sucha great article from the blog Thought Catalog. Seriously, so amazing that every 20-something should read... so I'm sharing it. :-)

1. Before you status update, Tweet, Tumble or Instagram, pause and say to yourself, “is it entirely necessary that I share this morsel of thought with my entire social network?”and if the answer is not, “yes, I absolutely must,” then step away from the Internet.
2. Know which candidate you’re going to vote for in the upcoming presidential election, and know why.
3. Enough with the 14-day juice cleanses. If you want to lose a little weight quickly, eat less and exercise like crazy. If you want to lose a lot of weight slowly, do whatever Jennifer Hudson did.
4. If you really like the person you’re hooking up with and would like them to be your boyfriend/ girlfriend, find a way to tell them, and hope for the best. If you don’t and wouldn’t, stop.
5. Find a way to save approximately 300 dollars and spend it on a flight to see a friend or family member who lives far away.  
6. Please stop liking the Kardashians, all of them. It’s not helping anyone, least of all the Kardashians.
7. Spend less than or equal to the money you earn each month.
8. Wear clothes that fit you, especially to work.
9. Call someone on the phone at least once a week, and speak to him or her for at least ten minutes.
10. Start preparing now to get over the fact that Facebook is probably going to change again in six months. You’re not going to deactivate your account. You don’t know how.
11. Wait 30 seconds before you look up a fact you can’t remember on your phone, and try to remember it using your brain. This is what the olden days were like.
12. Replace one terrible reality show you’re currently watching with one wonderful scripted show currently available on television. Swap suggestion: Real Housewives of Anywhere for HBO’s Enlightened.
13. Try that food you think you don’t like but have never actually tried, unless it’s brussels sprouts. They really don’t need any more attention.
14. Cut one person out of your life who you truly do not like and add one person who you truly do. Note: not on Facebook, on Earth.
15. If you’re still blacking out regularly, you should stop.
16. Volunteer once over the next 90 days. You’ll feel really good about it, and probably end up volunteering again over the next 275.
17. Tell someone who you love that you love them on a more regular basis. To their face, not in a text.
18. Back up your entire online life onto an external hard drive, especially your photos.
19. Crap or get off the pot. This applies to whatever thing you’re not doing that you should just sack up and do already.
20. And in the eternal words of Tom Haverford, “TREAT YO SELF!”

 

Date A Girl Who Reads

A Girl You Should Date



Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.


Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she finds the book she wants. You see the weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.


She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.


Buy her another cup of coffee.


Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.


It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.


Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.


Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who understand that all things will come to end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.


Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.


If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.


You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.


You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.


Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.


Or better yet, date a girl who writes.


– Rosemarie Urquico, nonamerah.wordpress.com, October 2011

This is such a stunning essay, and I wanted to pass it along.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) by Stephen Chbosky

I was so excited to start my reading New Year’s resolution that I quickly picked a book and devoured the entire thing in a single day. I could not have picked a better book to read from my New Year’s Resolution book list. When I picked out my first book to read I had decided that I did not want to just go in the list order so I picked a random number out of hat and went with it. The result of this was The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) by Stephen Chbosky.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is narrated by a teenager who goes by the alias of "Charlie"; he describes various scenes in his life by writing a series of letters to an anonymous person, whom he does not know personally. The story explores topics such as introversion and the awkward times of adolescence. The book also touches briefly on drug use and Charlie's experiences with this. As the story progresses, various works of literature and film are referenced and their meanings discussed. At the very beginning of the book, Charlie is referred to as a wallflower for his ability to observe and understand things, but over the course of a year's worth of letters, Charlie explains the efforts of the people in his life to get him to "participate" or "do things" and the feelings and experiences he has as a result.

The author, Chbosky, names J.D. Salinger’s The Cather in the Rye as an inspiration, and he pays homage to Salinger’s work by naming it as one of the books that Charlie’s English teacher, Bill, gives him to read.

This was a great read for the New Year since it references quite a few books that are on my list such as Cather in the Rye (Salinger), The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), and On the Road (Kerouac). It also mentioned a few books I might add to my list once I finish the initial 15: This Side of Paradise (Fitzgerald), Walden (Thoreau), The Fountainhead (Rand), Naked Lunch (Burroughs), and A Separate Peace (Knowles).

Just a few of my favorite lines:

• "Charlie, we accept the love we think we deserve."
• "And in that moment, I swear we were infinite."
• "My sister spent that next 10 minutes denouncing the Greek system of sororities and fraternities. She kept telling stories of 'hazing' and how kids have died before. She then told this one story about how she heard there was a sorority that made the new girls stand in their underwear while they circled their 'fat' in red magic marker." (my commentary on this... funny because these are still the same "rumors" that go around Greek life - I still joined a sorority).
• "Mark said that the amazing white stars were really only holes in the black glass of the dome, and when you went to heaven, the glass broke away, and there was nothing but a whole sheet of star white, which is brighter than anything but doesn't hurt your eyes. It was vast and open and thinly quiet, and I felt so small."
• "There's nothing like the deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons. It was that great."

Moving on to my next book… Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (for obvious reasons).

1. “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald "Pygmalion" by George Bernard Shaw

2. “A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean

3. “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

4. “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac

5. “The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephan Crane

6. “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger

7. “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky

8. “1984” by George Orwell

9. “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand

10. “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell

11. “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho

12. “The Last of the Mohicans” by James Fenimore Cooper

13. “Antigone” by Sophocles
14. “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck
15.

A year in review - a photo montage

2011

Wordless Wednesday