In case you missed it on Home, I got back in the kitchen with my buddy Jessica and made another cooking video!
Please to enjoy a recipe that I didn’t make at all, only messed up buying the ingredients…
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I found this post in my drafts folder. I wrote it this very day a year ago about a fun weekend I had. It made me smile to find photos of what is now cute memories of a fun weekend.
This is not a big thinking-type post. It’s mostly a brain/photo dump, in honor of the fantastic weekend I am having.
It all started with the awesome birthday flowers my sister-in-law had sent to me. It totally reminds me of the Ayla flowers that my housekeeper/tiny Oaxacan mom, Elsa, made.
This flower puppy face just kills me!
Kathleen and I switched glasses for this pic. Because we’re CRAZY like that.
So far my 2013 resolution to hang out with friends more has been going really well. Except for my month in Maui (which I even managed to get in some friend hanging time!) I have made plans with at least one friend once a week.
Last night was one of those friend hangs that took on a life of it’s own. It started out as just dinner at Malo with Drew (for the third time). Then it turned out that a bunch of USC friends were playing a gig down the street, so the night ended with an impromptu USC music nerd hang.
It was a weird experience. I saw friends whom I see all the time, like my best friend Erik, and Kimmy, and Kathleen. And then the friends who I see at every party and important social event. But there were people there I haven’t seen since right after college. Perhaps right around this time? In fact, there were a lot of people in attendance last night from those photos.
Looking at those pics now I feel like we looked like babies! And I felt like such an adult back them. College graduate, in my early-to-mid twenties, as you can see at the end of the post I had already met the man I would marry, and I was pursuing my dream of being a photographer. I was OLD.
But last night I really felt old. We stood around talking about things like our dogs, our marriages, and where we got our glasses, and the best place in which to purchase said glasses. (LA Eyeworks won that debate.) It hit me that we were all SO much older.
Of course, amongst conversations of glasses and relationships, there was also talk of boobs, dog penises, and jokes about horrible diseases (“It’s okay, I think it’s like [chicken pox/herpes/AIDS] if you get it once, you can’t get it again”). So you know, we all may be older, our eyesight may be failing, and talks of dogs may soon turn into talks of babies, but we’re still the ridiculous kids that went through college together. And it’s nice to see that we’re all just continuing to get older and older together.
And hey! We totally closed down the bar last night. Not a ONE of us was drunk. But you know… we stayed up late!
Today I went searching through some VERY old emails (like, when I first got myself a brand new gmail account in ’06), looking for photos of my old apartment. Of course I got caught up in blowing the virtual dust off of old correspondences, and unearthing pixelated cell photo photos emailed to my inbox via Verizon’s PIX-FLIX Messaging service! (Over zealous punctuation courtesy of Verizon.) Then I stumbled upon this one single email from a guy I was dating right around the time I met Aaron. From what I remember he was a scientist turned writer (and now maybe turned actor?) and he was a great dude. Only I had a few hangups because he was divorced, he smoked, and lived in Las Vegas. I ended up sticking with Aaron, who had never been married, quit smoking for me, and lived in Burbank.
SO not the point of this post though! The thing is, I found the last interaction between myself and Dave — an email that he wrote that it seems I never responded to (no idea why). And it made me smile. Here’s the last part of the email that inspired this post. It showed me how far I have come from that confused-but-still-happy Megan of 2007, and yet, I don’t think I’m that much different in 2012:
Yeah, it was a very short while we hung out, but that’s still the most fun I’ve ever had perusing a bookstore with someone. What up with you? I remember your photophilia and fun-veiled wisdom. I remember reading on your blog a long time ago how you entered a time of being self-destructive and exited not with a sense of terror or victimhood, but simply knowing you hadn’t yet learned enough about how to live, how to step up and be an adult. That’s brave genius, and I still think about it all the time. You’re still thinking that way, right? I am. All the cool people are thinking that way in 2007. Happy New Year, lil’ Megan!
I love that. Thanks Dave, wherever you are.
And for those of you who are curious, I think he was talking about this post.
I’ve been DYING to get out of town. I usually travel a lot more than I have been recently, so I’m growing restless. That, combined with the fact that Aaron and I haven’t been spending much time together lately, lead to us agreeing to take a mini “staycation.”
We thought about going to San Diego, in fact, we decided to go to San Diego and I was excited about it. When I realized that you could stay on a boat in San Diego through Airbnb, I got even MORE excited. Once I mentioned the boat option to Aaron, we were sold on an ocean-bobbing San Diego overnighter.
Of course, I found a way to mess it up…
The best part about being real life, as well as Facebook, friends with my favorite author is that I get to enjoy amazing status updates like this:
Now THAT is the way Faceboook status’ should be. WOW. I loved that little glimpse of New York so much I just have to save it here.
In other Hirshberg news, I got Ariel to read my favorite of his novels, The Snowman’s Children since it just became available on Kindle. I’ve read it now three times, and if you haven’t read it at least once, you should start reading it now.
I woke up the other day to find that my Japanese Maple has also woken up! When you live in LA, you don’t really get to see Spring happen, but this was a small and beautiful sign in my own little balcony garden.
Since then I’ve been seized with the desire to spend more time in the outside worldz. I’ve been going on hikes and stuff. You might have noticed this Earth Day tweet:
On Earth Day we went on a hike & the Earth totally kicked my ass. You win TODAY Earth, but tomorrow isn’t your f-ing day anymore. Watch out!
— megan finley (@meganfinley) April 23, 2012
Yes, physical activities and I have not always been friends, but it HAS been rewarding. I’ve gotten to spend more time with friends I barely see anymore, meet llamas on Bainbridge, and explore parts of LA that I’ve never seen before with Aaron.
Here’s an Instagram-y photo dump of my adventures in nature:
Now, I must go, I’m off to another Runyon Canyon death march hike with Erik and Kimmy.
I recently came home from a therapy session — oh yeah! I started therapy guys, well, couple’s therapy — that left me sweating through every layer of clothing I had on. It dealt with the two things that I struggle with the most: emotions and the expressing of them.
See, there’s a reason why Aaron calls me “Spock.” We both believe that I’m part Vulcan. (For my non-geek readers, from Wikipedia:
“Vulcans are an extraterrestrial humanoid species in the Star Trek universe who evolved on the planet Vulcan, and are noted for their attempt to live by reason and logic with no interference from emotion.”
Yup, that’s me — I see emotions as something to be squelched, something to be avoided, nothing but trouble. And logic, ah, logic is my happy place. It’s safe and it’s easy to understand. I have been known to end friendships, and avoid family members that don’t display enough logical thinking. And you know what, I credit that with the fact that I have ended up surrounding myself with some of the greatest people on Earth.
Rejecting most of my emotions as useless crazy-making bullshit has generally helped me out in life with almost every relationship, but the one…
“I just found out that I can’t dance like James Brown due to being bitten by a shark. However, had I not been bitten by a shark, I still wouldn’t be able to dance like James brown.” -Aaron
Aaron said this as we were preparing to go to a friend’s wedding. (Congrats Robin and John!) He had just watched an old video of James Brown going over some dance moves. He could do one if he lead with his good leg, but when attempting the same move on his shark leg … it wasn’t pretty. In fact, it was pretty sad to see Aaron’s face completely fall when he realized that his shark leg had destroyed all of his James Brown dancing dreams. Poor baby!
Made only worse/more awesome when the groom executed the move FLAWLESSLY on the dance floor at the reception. (Go John!)
Now here’s a pretty cute picture of us at the wedding:
Does MTV have a partnership with MySpace? I keep noticing that they’re young reality stars reference MySpace and it seems so wrong. I mean, what kid uses MySpace anymore? Hell, what anyone uses MySpace anymore? So when I saw this scene that just played out on 16 and Pregnant and I had an A HA moment. If you notice, the girl cleary starts to say “Facebook” and then corrects it to MySpace.
Watch:
Her quick correction, plus the eye movement (up and to the left) made it clear to me that it was an obvious lie.
I’m assuming that MySpace struck up a deal with MTV so that these kids will say that they’re using their social networking site. A quick Google search didn’t give me much to go on. Does anyone know if that’s the case? I don’t know why I even care, but I was pretty tickled to catch that goof up. Just call me Megan Lightman. 😉
