Saturday, August 31, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 244

It's time for some Anis Mojgani. My favorite spoken word poet.

For Those Who Can Still Ride an Airplane For the First Time



Friday, August 30, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 243

There are members of Congress in both parties who don't understand or accept basic science concepts. This hilarious video is dedicated to them.


Song of the Day - Friday Favorites

The first time I remember hearing this song was with Ryan. We were driving around Brookfield a couple of summers ago, right after we first met. He was showing me some CDs and music that he liked, and then he turned to this song. I was wearing a yellow dress that day.

Sufjan Stevens - That Dress Looks Nice On You


Thursday, August 29, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 242

I have to give a big shoutout to my boyfriend Ryan for introducing me to the wonderful world of Imgur. Imgur is probably the best waste of time out there. It's great! 
Check out these pictures and gifs I've favorited from it (and of course they're all of cats. What did you expect?).

Don't mind me, just stretching my toesies!

Cute smiling cat



Boop to turn off kitten

Reason #5342 why cats are evil

Song of the Day - TBT

Loggins & Messina - Danny's Song


Wednesday, August 28, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 241

I love this SO much. Words cannot describe. I think I am in love with his voice.
Also, if his voice sounds familiar to you, it might be because he also performed this spoken word piece.

Song of the Day

One of my favorite songs of the summer!

Bastille - Pompeii

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 240

Since I'm PR chair on Panhellenic Council, I made a huge wooden signboard to be placed outside the res halls and the UC during recruitment. I had a lot of fun designing the signboard, and even though it was a long process, I enjoyed it. I remembered to take a few pictures during it and here they are! 

I used the Go Greek letters from the recruitment counselor photoshoot a while back and it made the signboard really pop.



Song of the Day - Covers

I never really liked this song, until I joined Delta Zeta five years ago and learned that this song was our song. We even have a special dance to it! The Maine does a fantastic job covering it.

The Maine - Girls Just Want To Have Fun

Monday, August 26, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 239

Not gonna lie - I'm a bigger fan of the Beatles than I am of Jesus (if that doesn't give you a hint about what religion I follow then I don't know what will). 
Jesus was a cool dude, so I've heard. I like to think of him as very humble, handsome, well-spoken, and one of those people who you talk to and they really want to get to know you. You know, you get warm fuzzies around them and you suddenly want them to be your best friend.
No? Am I getting too deep? Okay fine just look at the chart. Credit to Lapham's Quartely.


Song of the Day - Music Video Mondays

One of my favorite Coldplay songs and one of the saddest music videos I've ever seen.

Coldplay - The Scientist


Sunday, August 25, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 238

This woman is BADASS. I wish this video could go viral instead of Robin Thicke's stupid Blurred Lines video...smh. I love the message, how you can tell she is not fearful, how she is so humble but so smart. It's amazing and definitely worth a watch!



Saturday, August 24, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 237

Simba likes to sleep on things. I like to take pictures of Simba sleeping on things.







Friday, August 23, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 236

I found this Coolness Graphed tumblr this morning, and it's pretty sweet. I like it a lot. These graphs remind me a lot of what comedian Demetri Martin does on stage. I strongly suggest checking out their website if you struggle with trying to be like the 'cool kids.'









Song of the Day - Friday Favorites

So simple, so beautiful.

The Perishers - Nothing Like You and I

Thursday, August 22, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 235

Another DailyGrace video! I first saw this one years and years ago. I think I discovered DailyGrace when I was studying in Dublin! I had a lot of free time. So, besides traveling, going to class (which, lets be honest, happened very seldom), and writing my blog, I watched a lot of YouTube videos, The Office, and Lost. I love Grace's facial expressions in this video.


Song of the Day - TBT

I'm pretty sure I hear this song about 5 times on the radio when I work at the restaurant. And I ain't even mad about it.

Five for Fighting - 100 Years


Wednesday, August 21, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 234

I don't always look at porn (ever), but when I do (I don't), I look at Bookshelf Porn.









Song of the Day

This song makes me so happy. Probably because I think of one of my favorite movies (500 Days of Summer) when I listen to it :)

Wolfmother - Vagabond

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 233

One of my favorite Thought Catalog articles, written by one of my favorite authors.

The 19 Best Moments of Being Young
By Ryan O'Connell

1. Sticking your feet out the car window and feeling the wind envelop your toes. Then, falling asleep and having your father carry you to bed. You'd wake up in the middle of the night, realizing you're safe and sound, and smile contently before drifting off to sleep again.

2. Class field trips that required a long bus ride. You'd sit in the back with your best friends and play games of telephone. It usually took only one round before things took a turn for the sexual.

3. Spending hours in your bedroom because there was nothing else to do and you couldn't drive or go anywhere on your own. You were forced to get creative to pass the time, which usually meant lots of collaging on your bedroom walls and talking on the phone for six hours.

4. Eating whatever you wanted without ever thinking it was possible to get fat. Not only did your metabolism work faster than the speed of light, it didn't even cross your mind that you could actually gain weight. 'Wait, SO I CAN'T DRINK A LARGE JAMBA JUICE WITH MY SANDWICH? SAYS WHO?" Um, says your aging body.

5. Wanting so desperately to be a teenager, and feeling so cool on your thirteenth birthday.

6. Kissing someone for the first time and how amazing it felt, even if it was, in fact, terrible. Trembling hands, thrashing tongues, bumping noses. The awkwardness was all worth it to know that you were wanted, that you had been chosen, that you had experienced a milestone other people hadn't.

7. Feeling like there is no way you could possibly die.

8. Sleepovers with your friends in middle school and talking about 'deep' things as the sun rose.

9. Every day seemed to last forever, which was annoying at the time, but now you miss it. Now you want it all to just slow down a little bit.

10. The first time you fell in love with someone and they loved you back and you couldn't believe it was actually happening, that you actually had the privilege of falling in love. That's what it feels like when you're young: a privilege. Because love is not guaranteed to a 17-year-old with acne.

11. When you first started going to parties and discovered that they look exactly like they do in the movies. Someone is always puking in the bushes or crying in the bathroom and you're just happy to be there. You'd go to any party because the novelty hadn't worn off yet. You still thought the right get together could change your life. (This changes as you get older. Eventually you'll feel like you've heard the same stories and met all the same annoying people. What once excited you now feels like an annoying obligation and a reminder that you're getting old.)

12. Meeting your best friend in high school and knowing that you'd survive, because now you had a partner in crime. You were protected; someone understood you.

13. Getting your heart broken into a million little pieces and acting like a psycho for the next 6-8 months. This may not seem like the best moment of your young adult life but it's important and important things are good. Once you break up with your first love, you'll never be the same again and that's okay. You don't WANT to be someone who's never had their heart broken. You'd be like an unfinished person.

14. The first time you fall asleep with someone in the middle of the day. It's better than sex, to be honest.

15. The beauty of not knowing anything and still having the luxury to figure out what feels right. Having an iron-clad excuse to act completely stupid.

16. Getting your first paycheck and feeling like you're a real person who could possibly do amazing things. Then promptly spending it all at Forever 21.

17. Your high school graduation and how that was your crowning achievement of the last 18 years. You thought this was when your life started, you were officially an adult now! Only to find out that the first year of college is like high school but with locker room showers and hard drugs.

18. Having terrible taste in everything but being convinced that it was THE BEST TASTE. You took pride in the awful clothes you wore and the bad music you listened to. Being young gives you the freedom to be as unchic as possible.

19. Landing a job you love. That's when being 'young' sort of ends: with a 401K and stock options. (If that's actually true, I guess I'll be young forever...)


To end this nostalgic-ridden article, I'd like to show you some pictures of my younger years.

My 8th grade class went on an outdoor weekend trip, I think during Christmas Break. I don't remember where it was, but there were a lot of bunk houses (separated into girls and boys, of course), a cafeteria, a huge slide that went down onto the frozen lake, and a bunch of other buildings.


Here I am petting a very scary bunny! And check out my cool disposable camera! I'm the one with white sleeves in the picture below. White sleeves were awesome.


Here I am at 13 doing a presentation. It looks that I liked cats, cheesecake, traveling, and flowers. And that I was born on December 24. Welp, nothing has changed.


365 Days of Happy - Day 232

I'm a quote junkie. It's really bad. Don't worry, I'm getting help.






Song of the Day - Covers

Ooooh how I love this. Can you guess who sings the original?

Jamie Cullum - Don't Stop The Music

Monday, August 19, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 231

I first downloaded Instagram about a year ago this time. At first, I was so against it. It makes it seem like everyone can be a photographer with just some cool cropping and vintage filters. NO. Just no.

But I jumped on the Instagram bandwagon and started documenting my life. Well, who are we kidding. Mostly Simba. I have a few favorite Instagrammers who I follow, and this is one of them.

Biddy the Hedgehog is a 2 year old pygmy hedgehog who lives in the pacific Northwest. I'm jealous of his life for a couple of reasons: he has traveled all over the northwest, he's cute as all get out, and he has poky spikes coming out of his back (good for stabbing people who invade your personal bubble). Here are some of my favorite pictures of this cutie.







Song of the Day - Music Video Mondays

I think this is such a cute and fun video. They're hopping all over like rabbits and I just love it.

Snow Patrol - Called Out In The Dark


Sunday, August 18, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 230

This list makes the world go 'round.


Mean Girls is nothing if not a fountain of knowledge, passed down from Tina Fey as a gift to girls, gays and all gentle humanfolk for the ages. Fey's magnum opus instructs us about how to live and in this crazy world, where you could get diarrhea in a Barnes & Noble or be mistaken for Danny DeVito. This list details but a few of the wisdom nuggets Tina Fey hath bequeathed to us. Learn from it, go forth, and make girl world a better place for all.

1. You can't wear a tang top two days in a row, and you can only wear your hair in a ponytail once a week. This teaches us to keep it fresh every day, in order to better shake that thang for Kevin Gnapoor.

2. You have your cousins, your first cousins, and your second cousins. Although I'm still not sure which one it's okay to make out with. (Answer: none of the above, really).

3. Someone had to invent Toaster Strudel.

4. Sears carries clothing for women of all sizes, which is great if you're unknowingly eating 5,000 calories a day.

5. You can be African and be white, but you cannot ask people why they are white. Also, never assume that the black girl in your class is the African exchange student. She could be from Michigan.

6. Also, if you're an exchange student from Africa, don't assume the black students speak Swahili. You might think that saying 'Jambo!' is a token of being down, but it just makes you look like a weirdo.

7. Joining Mathletes is social suicide, but you do get some sweet jackets out of the deal. If you need a last minute ensemble for the Spring Fling.

8. If you want to create a burn book but don't want people to think it was you, just call yourself a 'fugly slut.' No one will ever suspect.

9. There are two kinds of evil people in this world. Those who do evil stuff and those who see evil stuff being done and don't try to stop it. That's a Martin Luther King quote, right?

10. Everyone in Africa can read Swedish. Except for Charlize Theron: she reads minds.

11. If you don't want to get busted for having a party, don't leave your mother's fertility vase of the Ndebele tribe under the sink. Rookie mistake.

12. Just ask Andrea Dworkin: feminism has rules. Rule #1: Ex-boyfriends are off-limits to friends.

13. To attend a school rally, you don't even have to go to that school. All you need is a lot of feelings. (In other news, you can bake a cake out of rainbows and smiles, but what would that taste like?)

14. Sometimes word vomit is actual vomit.

15. If you cut off all your hair, you might look like a British man. (See also: Miley Cyrus).

16. You can be too gay to function.

17. 'Frenemies' are enemies that act like friends. You may also refer to them as 'enemends.' Friends who secretly hate you are called 'fraitors.'

18. If you're on an all-carb diet, you can't go to Taco Bell. You also probably shouldn't go to Taco Bell (like, ever) if your intention is to lose three pounds or any weight at all.

19. Forecasting whether it's already raining with your breasts is a marketable skill.

20. If you have sex, you will get pregnant. And die. This fact is backed up by science.

21. To fit in with the popular girls, all you need to do is talk about hair products and Ashton Kutcher. And no, Ashton Kutcher is not a band.


22. Being named after a bisexual folk singer doesn't make you a lesbian. You could just be Lebanese.

23. You can be half a virgin and still give something everything. I'm assuming 'everything' means anal.

24. Xylocarp is a real word that you now know how to spell. I think it's a fish?

25. If you want to break up someone's relationship, all you need to do is prank call their mother and pretend to be from Planned Parenthood. Haven't you always kind of wanted to do that?

26. If you have a heavy flow and a wide set vagina or are gap-toothed, it's not your fault. Baby, you were born this way.

27. Brutus is just as cute as Caesar. Brutus is just as popular as Caesar. People totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar. Because Rome is not about one person being the boss of everybody. This is the foundations of democracy, and I think it might be somewhere in our Constitution.

28. Butter is a carb. Also science.

29. Chase Visa only has one representative and his name is Randy.

30. You can be a high school student and still do car commercials in Japan. Allegedly.

31. It only counts if you saw a nipple.

32. Fetch is slang from England, but it will never happen in America.

33. If you make out with a hot dog, it's defensible if it's only one time. Call it the Oscar Meyer Defense.

34. When communicating with your superior, you should do so when your shirt isn't see-through.

35. If you break up with your gay BFF, he will want his pink shirt back.

36. Cady might look like it's pronounced, 'caddie,' but it's actually pronounced, 'Katie.' However, that doesn't mean that your best friends still won't call you 'caddie.' And if you have a nephew named 'Anfernee,' calling him 'Anthony' makes him almost as mad as you get when you think about the fact that your sister named him 'Anfernee.'

37. When you like a guy, 'grool' counts as a real word.

38. On the third day, God created the Remington Bolt Action Rifle so that man could fight the dinosaurs and the homosexuals. Luckily, the homosexuals had something to fight back with. We have Ellen.

39. Your hair can be full of secrets and insured for up to $10,000. Also, both your Nana and Tina Fey take their wigs off when they are drunk and a wig can be made out of your mom's chest hair. This makes you look at Tina Fey very differently.

40. In girl world, you cannot buy a shirt without asking your friends if it looks good on you first. However, if it's the 'ugliest effing skirt [she's] ever seen,' she might lie to you and say she likes it. Girl world is tricky like that.

41. If something is 120 calories with 48 grams of fat, that's 40 percent calories from fat, which you can figure out if you cross-multiply. Girls CAN do math, sexists.

42. How much can you quote and paraphrase Mean Girls in one article? The limit does not exist.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 229

Re-reading and re-writing this article from Thought Catalog makes my heart ache. I can literally feel it strain, and I can feel the tears in my eyes start to form, and I couldn't tell you why - maybe it's the music I'm listening to, maybe it's from all the memories I'm remembering, maybe it's how I long to be anywhere but here. Traveling changes you.
This article is exactly how I felt when I studied in Dublin but couldn't get down into words.

6 Lessons You Learn From Excessive Traveling
By Evelyn Cheung

I have stepped on five continents within the past year, visited eleven countries, and met people from all over the world. It is hard to say all of that without sounding like a fully pretentious asshole. But besides the obviously enriching experiences I've had driving down Great Ocean Road in Australia or drinking hot wine while walking through the Christmas markets in Paris, I've found that the most important things I've learned are incredibly mundane.

1. Good company is hard to find, but easier when you know you'll never see them again. We all know that finding friends is a painstakingly difficult process. But when traveling, your fellow travelers are your best friends. The barista at the cafe who serves you your cafe au lait can be your replacement sister, and the guy you met on the metro can turn into your lover for a night or two. The appeal of everyone as a human being increases when you know your time together is fleeting. Or maybe it's because everyone decides to be nicer because first impressions really matter when you only have so much time with someone. Yes, you will meet people you cannot stand, but you will meet people that you wish you could spend the rest of your life with. But you don't. Because that is entirely unrealistic, since you will never be in the same place at the same time again. Some things are better left short and unadulterated  it is what it is and what it was is perfect.

2. You learn to associated certain places with certain people. This gets dangerous, as you realize that you can never return to the places you love and have them be the same ever again. It goes something like this: Wait. That was the step of Sacre Coeur we sat on when we talked about your family, no? Isn't that the spot on Bondi Beach where we realized that we absolutely had to move to Australia? Haven't you been to Bondi? Hey, isn't that where your friend Jennifer vomited on the steps of Lan Kwai Fong? God,  miss her. Shit, you don't know her, do you? You get the point. Makes for some pretty profound nostalgia. I had three relatively serious flings while traveling, all in different countries - Spain, Singapore, and Hong Kong. And it sucks just because I know I will think of those people every time I think of the place. They're not just my cities or places. The construct of each place in my mind is based around that one person or group of people. But was it the person that made me fall in love with the place or the place that made me fall in love with the person?

3. Home is where you make it. Not just where your heart is. The definition of home tends to vary from person to person. But you learn to build and rebuild everywhere you go. You find new friends, new family, and places where you'll be a regular. It's all about relearning the things in new places that make your everyday life tick - like where the best latte is, the shortest walk to where you need to go, the longer scenic walk to where you need to go, where to buy groceries that have international imports that remind you of your actual home, and so on. This is an ongoing process. Some days you'll hate the place, and it will feel nothing like home. And other days, you know there's no place else that feels more like it.

4. Paradise is temporary; reality is there. So I went to the Thai island of Koh Phi Phi this past April. We were sitting at a bar on the beach when we heard that there was an 8.6 earthquake in Indonesia, which set off a tsunami warning. The siren went off across the entire island. Everyone was evacuated to higher ground. We sat in the jungle on a mountain for five hours. Paradise shattered. Sent a couple of 'If anything happens, please know that I love you' texts (3G is awesome). Thankfully, no tsunami. But this realization that shit can happen even in places where you feel so far removed from reality was incredibly disconcerting.

5. You find the most important people in your life when you're the furthest away from them. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, but distance also makes the heart grow colder. It could be 'out of sight, out of mind.' You figure out who makes the effort to keep in touch with you and who doesn't. But more importantly, you figure out who YOU make the effort to keep in touch with and who you don't. You learn who you want to come back to.

6. If there is one thing that you could spend the rest of your money on for the rest of your life, it should be this. And by 'this' I mean traveling, new experiences, and new places. There are few things more valuable than that. Although traveling does not necessarily make you a better person per se, it does color your life in new ways. Yes, it is a luxury, and yes, it does cost heaps of money. But how many times do you wake up in the morning wishing you were somewhere else? How many times do you wish you had booked that trip to Southeast Asia but never got around to doing it? Think about it. And go.

Friday, August 16, 2013

365 Days of Happy - Day 228

Lets take a stroll through memory lane, shall we? 
Here is proof that I was destined to become a crazy cat lady.