In which the Gym Class Heroes do it again.

Holy smokes.  In addition to the still-overwhelming schoolwork, the last twenty days have featured dancing! and ocean! and food! oh my!  Richmond.  Love.  I took the advanced track for classes for the first time ever and I am like, so happy.  Thennn I drove by myself to Ocean City for the MSEA Convention, which did not provide me with nearly as many post-its as I thought it would.  It did, however, provide me with ocean views and docks, lonely hours, strategies which are at turns invigorating or saddeningly unrealistic, several apples, and an absolutely infuriating documentary where I walked out after the first 40 minutes.  My time was better spent pacing the dock just outside the exhibit halls.  Maybe if I feel like getting super angry some time, I'll write a real post just about this alone.  THENNN I've been making food!  We do this thing where our fridge is almost completely bare, and then we'll make lots of food AND have a dinner out and bring home leftovers AND have more ingredients for food in the works.  Man.  I made quinoa!  With cranberries and cinnamon and apples and toasted walnuts!  Who even am I!  In fact, it was my SECOND TIME making quinoa!  I repeat, WHO EVEN AM I.  Another butternut squash and radish leaf soup is coming up, but this time I felt bad about the radishes, so I braised them (?!)!  They were pretty good! 

 

But.  When I haven't been attempting to teach the children or dance or cook, I've been singing this song.  I can't stop listening to this song.  Not since Up have I heard such professions of love and friendship that ring so true in my heart.  I want to live such that this song defines my life.

There's so much I want to point out about it, but I'll leave it at the two lines, "Appreciate every mix tape your friends make/you never know, we come and go like on the interstate."  So sad! beautiful! true!  People, guys.  Connections.  Good friends.  I'm not even going to try to form sentences about how special and important these ideas are.  Every six or eight months or so I get crazy into the idea that I have zero friends and no one but Justin would ever hang out with me.  But then.  But then!  Some way or other I settle back into reality and find and cherish all my people again.  This line epitomizes that simultaneous joy and sadness.

PS.  Gosh.  Embarrassingly enough, when I listen to a song, basically any top 40, a secret part of me listens, like, undercover to see if it has great examples of literary devices and imagines myself playing them to my awesome high school English classes and they think I'm the coolest and they TOTALLY get personification and simile AND metaphor and the difference between the two.  Then I remember where and who I teach and more often than not, something else in the song nixes it for itself anyway.  ANYWAY, this would totally be one of those songs.

PPS.  Simile and metaphor is totally coming up in sixth grade.  Oh snap.