It’s my ninth blogiversary! Or it will be in a few days.

It’s also 8:15 pm, and I totally forgot I needed to make this post by midnight or so. A little peek behind the curtain lol.

Anyway, nine years is longer than most things I’ve done in my life. (And that’s nine years since I started this blog. Abandoned blogs before this one don’t count.) I’ve said before that I was always someone who picked up interests here and there but didn’t stick with most of them very long. Gymnastics, drawing, writing, and reading were the few that really stuck throughout my life, and now blogging.

I thought for this year’s post, I’d celebrate things I love and just talk about some of my favorite things. But not the things I always talk about, like books and games. The weird things that never come up and that I never get to talk about. So… enjoy 🙂

(P.S. I was looking at some lists with questions about favorite things, and one of them was, “What’s your favorite noise to make?” which is just a very funny question to ask someone. I don’t know my answer though.)

Music Video

This video is just so beautiful and so unique and so masterfully choreographed and edited and performed. Also a great song. (Zedd – Stay The Night ft. Hayley Williams) It takes about 45 seconds to get to the good stuff though.

*WARNING for flashing lights*

Sculpture

“Il Disinganno” by Francesco Queirolo (1754). I’ve seen it translated as “Disillusion” and “The Release from Deception.” If there is any one piece of art I’d love to see in person, it’s this one. Because I cannot wrap my head around how anyone could’ve made this. It’s beyond incredible. Marble sculptures are already incredible, but to create that netting? To carve out behind it like that? And with all that detail and texture? That’s a whole ‘nother level of incredible. It’s not even about the meaning behind the piece to me, it’s the sheer skill and dedication it must’ve taken and how beautiful it is.

The photo is from Flickr, under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Smell

Cinnamon. Or vanilla. But I think cinnamon wins. I used to buy cinnamon brooms from the store in the fall, which is not real cinnamon, it’s just a decorative broom with cinnamon oil or something, but they make a room smell lovely.

Gymnastics Event

For both doing and watching, the answer is uneven bars. I loved the feeling of just not being on the ground. Swinging, floating, flying. And it’s so fun to watch too because of how fluid it is, how everything flows together.

Fish

Longhorn cowfish! FOR LOOKING AT, NOT FOR EATING. They’re like little aliens. When I first saw them, my thought was, “These are so weird, I hate them.” Then I watched this video, saw how they hover instead of swim and how they slurp up food with their little mouths, and I immediately flipped into, “These are so weird that it circles back to adorable, I love them, they are now my favorite fish.”

Actor

I’m not big into celebrity culture, so I don’t actually think about actors much, and I don’t know much about any of them. Viggo Mortensen was my first, I guess you could say, celebrity crush. And that was a good choice! Young me had good taste. Even after all these years, I’ve only ever heard good things about him. But high school me and older would say Cillian Murphy. He is hot, I’m not above enjoying that 😅 But if you watch his performance in different roles one right after the other, it’s also so apparent how good he is as an actor. I had just rewatched Sunshine, and then I saw some clips from Peaky Blinders (which I’ve also watched), and it hit me just how different even his mannerisms and facial expressions and whole demeanor were, and not every actor really nails it down to the details like that.

Commercial

It’s Nannerpus! No one remembers this commercial, but it has lived rent-free in my head since 2009.

He knocks his own eye off almost immediately lol.

While I’m talking about commercials, here are two more I remember that no one else does.

Carnival Ride

I’m gonna cheat and give a runner up first. I always loved the Gravitron at the local fair. The one that spins really fast, causing your body to be sucked against the wall. The ride workers did not give a shit what we did on that ride, especially if there were only a handful of people on it, so you could turn your body horizontal or pry yourself off the wall to try and grab the bar in the middle. Fun times lol.

But my real favorite was this one that looked like a giant claw, with everyone facing inward, and swung back and forth like a pendulum, almost but not quite upside down, while also spinning a bit. At night, it would swing up, and the people across from me would just be there, with the lights of the ride, and behind them was just black sky, the sounds of the fair in the background but sort of distant in that moment, combined with the feeling of swinging through the air… I don’t know how to explain it. There was something magical about that highly specific feeling.

YouTube Channel

Drawfee! It’s people drawing silly things (but they are wonderful, skilled artists, though you might not know it from the video I’m about to share lol) and making jokes, and it brings me joy. I know there are already too many videos in this post, but I’ll post one more, just in case anyone wants it. I remember this one making me laugh so hard I cried and had to pause the video.

Noise to Make

Ok fine lol. I guess my favorite noise to make is… Oh! I actually really love the sound of nails tapping, like pointer to pinky or the reverse. Also it’s fun to say “apocalypse” but making the C a G. Apogalypse.

🙂