(#41) It's true that we love one another...

This just about sums up my relationship with my brother.

(#40) [A Few (More) of] My Favorite Things

Puppies.

Nicki Minaj. Don't judge me.

The Band.

Bangles.

The Who.

My Slanket. Yes, I am Liz Lemon.

White cheddar popcorn.

Cute boys/JGL.

Meteor showers.

Books.

Kate Nash and her ability to write songs about my life.

Smmertime (which means beaches).

Kelly Kapoor.

Disney World.

Best franns.

Boys with dark curly hair (no thanks on the cigarette, though).

Gerber daisies.

Bill Hader.

T-Fey/Liz Lemon.

Red lipstick and other fun makeup.

What makes you happy?

(#39) Things We Said Today

"Send me dead flowers to my wedding,

and I won't forget to put roses on your grave"

-The Rolling Stones

"Your debutante just knows what you need,

but I know what you want"

- Bob Dylan

"Somewhere around the fifth or seventh grade I figured out that I could ingratiate myself to people by making them laugh. Essentially, I was just trying to make them like me. But after a while it became part of my identity."

-Tina Fey

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

- Ferris Bueller's Day Off

"The sunshine bores the daylights out of me"

-The Rolling Stones

"Good times don't last long sometimes. " - Levon Helm "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make" -The Beatles "You don't really care about the trials of tomorrow, rather lay awake in your bed full of sorrows." -Kid Cudi

"When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books."

-Alaska Young via Looking For Alaska by John Green

"My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking."

-Amy Winehouse

(#38) All I want for Christmas...

www.wanelo.com

One of my new favorite websites. You can basically add anything from anywhere online to a nice, condensed, in-one-place wishlist.

This is mine:

http://www.wanelo.com/index.action?contentaction=listcollectiondetails&id=12524&userId=1907

Check it out, I promise you'll love it. Or at least like it.

(#37) Climb the fence, books and pens...

So I'm obviously not posting once a day...or week, even.

I love books. Love love love love love them. I literally cannot remember a time in my life before I could read, and I feel like books have really shaped who I am, especially these -

(#36) Feeding time with TV

I love television a bit too much. I tried to narrow my favorite shows down to three and couldn't quite make that.

1. Arrested Development

By far and away the cleverest show ever shown on television. Such a travesty that the wonderfully dysfunctional Bluth family only lasted three seasons. If you've never seen this show, do yourself a favor and rent it. I promise you will fall in love after three episodes.

2. 30 Rock

I love love love this show. Written from a backstage perspective of a weekly sketch comedy show a la SNL, it's magnificently fast-paced and hilarious. A worthy successor to AD's title of Funniest Show on Television.

3. Mad Men

Y'all know I love me some Mad Men.

4. Parks and Recreation

As The Office started declining in quality, Parks and Rec did the opposite. Such a funny mockumentary about the travails of life in small government - I realize that sentence sounds a bit ridiculous, but trust me.

(#35) Act Naturally

I have two favorite movies, and they're a bit disparate.

1) Jaws (1975)

I can't say anything about this film that hasn't been said by thousands of people for over thirty years, but I will say that I love that this movie is so much more than a big shark. There's so much human emotion - love and hate and humor - at the heart of it. My two favorite scenes are the one with Brody and his son at the dinner table and of course Quint's famous Indianapolis speech.

Masterful.

2) Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

So funny. So well-written. So quintessentially '80s. SO GOOD.

(#34) Three Marlenas

Day 1 of my blogging challenge is to discuss my favorite song. Picking a favorite song, singular, is kind of impossible for me, so I'll narrow it down to three, which is still pretty darn difficult.

I've done this before but here I'll add some to the list...

1. "Baba O'Riley" by The Who

This song is the end all be all for me. The synthesizer at the beginning, followed by the piano, then Moon on the drums then Entwistle with the bass and Daltrey coming in on the vocals...such a beautiful build-up. Even from the first twenty seconds of the swirling synth line, you can tell that something big is about to happen. And happen it does - my favorite five minutes of music on this planet. This song is so sweeping and epic to me and I feel like it says something when almost forty years after its creation, it still holds that power.

Don't forget the violin at the ending. Never forget the violin at the ending.

This is probably the most amazing cover I've ever heard of this song.

2. "Rocks Off" by The Rolling Stones

"Aw, yeah!"

This song just sums up the dirty blues of the Stones for me. The imperfections are what makes it great; the way individual bits of the music -even Jagger's lead vocals - fade in and out add to the dazed, spinning feeling of the piece as a whole and the rollicking piano and horns complete this song that is equal parts raw, confused, and quite honestly, just plain fun. To me, this is a summer driving song, to be played loud with the windows down.

3. "House by the Sea" by Iron & Wine

If you've never heard The Shepherd's Dog in its entirety, download/buy it right now and listen to it. I'll wait.

Back? Okay. Now, if your favorite track wasn't "House by the Sea," I...really don't mind, because there are so many great songs on this album I could see how it would be difficult to pick one. But still.

This is one of the strangest pieces of music I've heard and many adjectives could be used to describe it - wistful, haunting, beautiful, complex, mysterious, etc. The way the various sounds and strings flow together paint this gorgeous blurry sepia-toned picture in my head. I know I won't do justice to describe it so if I link to it here will you promise to listen to it? Thanks.

Whew. One down, twenty-nine to go.

(#33) Thinkin' Out Loud

File this under things I say way too often - I need to be a better blogger.

I got this list from Jessica's nifty blog and think it would be a good way to achieve this goal.

Day 1 - your favorite song

Day 2 - your favorite movie

Day 3 - your favorite television program

Day 4 - your favorite book

Day 5 - your favorite quote

Day 6 - 20 of your favorite things

Day 7 - a photo that makes you happy

Day 8 - a photo that makes you angry/sad

Day 9 - a photo you took

Day 10 - a photo taken over 10 years ago of you

Day 11 - a photo of you recently

Day 12 - something you are OCD about

Day 13 - a fictional book

Day 14 - a non-fictional book

Day 15 - your dream house

Day 16 - a song that makes you cry (or nearly)

Day 17 - an art piece (drawing, sculpture, painting, etc)

Day 18 - my wedding/future wedding/past wedding

Day 19 - a talent of yours

Day 20 - a hobby of yours

Day 21 - a recipe

Day 22 - a website

Day 23 - a youtube video

Day 24 - where you live

Day 25 - your day, in great detail

Day 26 - your week, in great detail

Day 27 - your worst habit

Day 28 - what's in your handbag/purse

Day 29 - hopes, dreams and plans for the next 365 days

Day 30 - a dream for the future

So watch this space, kids.

(#32) Rock of Ages

30 Rock is definitely one of my top 3 favorite shows, probably because sometimes I am Liz Lemon. I own a Slanket, I find the prospect of Night Cheese to be a wonderful thing, and one time a Whale cracker fell out of my jacket.

Obviously I need to be her for Halloween.

(#31) Mad as Rabbits

Mad Men season finale tonight! Well, technically, it's already happened, but I'm going to catch the re-airing at 1. There's been so much speculation that Roger's going to commit suicide, and I really hope the internet gods are wrong.

This is the first season I've watched as it's aired, and I have not been disappointed. My favorite episode by far was "The Suitcase," with all that Don-and-Peggy bonding. How about you?

(#30) Oh, you think I'm in control

On the search to discover good music made in the last two decades, I came across and have been subsequently obsessed with Ida Maria.

I love a girl who can write a funny song about cute boys.

The video for "Oh My God" isn't very interesting, but the song...sigh.

And...school is happening again. I should be studying for a statistics exam, but the way I see it, I'm going to do poorly anyway, so why waste my time being miserable and studying when nothing will come of it?

Awesome life philosophy, I know.

I finished The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy recently. It was a beautiful story about a set of twins from Kerala, India and how seemingly unrelated details in our lives add up to create something much more significant. I'm pretty sure I'm going to read it again soon, and I would recommend you to do the same thing!

Rambling over.

(#29) Hello Good Morning

I really really really really really really need to get back into blogging. I started a Tumblr, but I'm not so much of a fan. The system confuses me and I'm not hip enough to try to figure it out.

I think my problem with this blog was that I felt I always had to write witty interesting posts and I'm just not witty or interesting all the time.

I don't want to quit, though, and what better way to say hi again than with a big ol' picture of Jon Hamm?

It's good to be back.

(#28) Miss You

So it turns out I am still the worst at blogging. It's partially because I read all of the great ones out there and then realize that I have nothing nearly as interesting or witty to say, and partially because I am one lazy girl.

Things I Have Been Doing Lately:
- Finishing my freshman year of college!

I'm happy that the work part is over, not so happy that the living-away-from-home/friend part is over. For now, anyway.

I will miss my fabulous rock 'n' roll poster arrangement the most.

- Getting into the Rolling Stones.

I realize that this is not a groundbreaking thing, but let me explain. My dad is legitimately a Stones fanatic. Classic rock in general, he loves and he's a veritable encyclopedia of good music (a trait he's encouraged in me for my entire life), but the Stones come above all. Like, I'm fairly sure I thought the tongue logo was a family crest of sorts due to its presence in our house growing up. I've never done the whole rebellious teenager phase (except for a brief flirtation with Hot Topic and an awful boyfriend, but we won't discuss that...), but I felt like I had to resist something the old man liked. Dylan, I'd take. The Band? Yes please. Beatles and Zeppelin? Don't mind if I do. But I felt like not being a Stones fan was the biggest rebellion I could muster, until I realized that was idiotic. So here I am at eighteen, really paying attention to this forty-year-old music for the first time.

And it's awesome. Which, duh. It'd be kind of hard to be touring into your sixties if your music wasn't flat-out phenomenal. But eh, I'm a teenager, I get to be dumb, right?

More on them later for sure, but let me just say that Exile on Main St. = very yes. I want to refrain from saying even more trite things until I've done my homework, so to speak.

-This isn't something I've been doing lately, but have you ever noticed that the hits from forty years ago are still good today? It's like they were popular because they were quality music, not because a producer wanted to sell records (okay, I've read enough biographies to know that isn't the case, but still)...it seems as though there was soul to the pop music business then, and now it's just business. "Baba O'Riley" is my favorite song of all time, and also one of the most widely recognized songs in rock music. It was popular for a reason, and that reason is because it's great. There's this scope and power you just can't find in "Boom Boom Pow."

I'm not trying to say that music from after 1978 automatically sucks. Not at all. There is still a lot of great stuff out there. It just seems harder to find because it's not marketed like the latest Autotuned rapper's heartwarming saga about gettin' they money.

A little R-Dalts takes the burn out of any rant

- Just existing in a state of happiness for summer!

85+ degree weather? Beach/river/lake/pool? Cookouts? The return of tan lines? Green grass and flowers everywhere? Watermelon???

Can I just get a big amen to all of the above, please?

- Getting stung by a BEE on my FOOT.

I stepped on a bee today, which was my fault - I mean, it wasn't intentional or anything, but it's not like it was seeking me out - but I am still angry at the bee. Yes, I realize it's pretty dead now and won't live to pollinate another day, but...the bottom of my foot? Come on, man.

Side note: I was once stung 13 times (though these might have been wasps) within the same five to ten minute period. It was terrible. Moral of the story: don't have a get-together on a porch with an old rolled-up carpet infested by stinging bugs behind a porch swing. It will get bumped, and insects will get angry. Also don't have long hair because they will get stuck in that, and you will have just attended the worst birthday party of your life.

Kind of like this, but way less adorable.

(#27) I Want To Tell You...

...how awful I am at blogging. I have neglected this for so long, and I apologize to anyone who actually reads this. It's so easy to get out of a habit, and so hard to get into one. Ugh.

Some happy things:

- It's (almost) summer again! Florida was not going well these past few months, but today it was like 85 and perfect. Here comes the sun, indeed.

- I actually like a new-ish band! The album Wild Young Hearts by Noisettes is absolutely fabulous. I can't really explain it besides retro-flavored pop with soul and songwriting talent. So, yeah, not at all. Anyway, they're great and you should go listen to "Never Forget You" or "Wild Young Hearts." Or "Atticus." Or all of it. Also, Shingai Shoniwa's hair is always incredibly cool.

- Bill Bryson is one of my favorite writers. He's so good at being simultaneously hilarious and informative. Oh, and making me want to travel all over the place.

- "Rocks Off" by The Rolling Stones has been constantly on repeat for the past two weeks. To me, it kind of sums up everything about the Stones - the rough singing, dirty blues feel, and just plain good music. More please.

- It's Easter! Thank You, God.

- I want to go to there: