black women center: Things I Love: November 09

Where did this semester go? I feel like it was only a week ago I set off the fire alarm trying to boil an egg on our electric stove. (That was in August.) I'm going to warn you right now this is a very picture-heavy Things I Love.

To me, November is a month for family, food, and gratitude, which is why I gave thanks for...

coming home to a cooked dinner
apologizing and being forgiven
my mother
paper snowflakes

Mine!

Minnie's!

Lincoln
Jeff, Eli, Stuart, Dominique, Catalina, Benjamin, Danielle, Lee, Jake, Rose, Bridget, Danica, Maddy, Matthew, Michelle
Chris
my bare magazine blog interview
Jocelyn and Erica and Jessie and Ching and Jessie's place and Jocelyn's place
that chickdowntown published my guest post
Running into Brittany from Work It, Berk. She's got a new camera, and things are looking go-o-orgeous!

Greatest use of brown ever.

So pretty!

late night grocery runs with Kim
Ben for offering me his water
the Love's Labour's Lost set, and us all stopping to admire it, and Ben's two-hand shoulder touch and "Wow" because I totally go crazy for that kind of thing
when the bus arrives
guacamole
Bryan's haircut. Seriously, once you take away that mane of hair, that boy has a Face.
epic pot pie with Kim

Pot pie filling, obviously not in the pie crust yet.

realizations about myself and how I love
cooking with my mum and preparing for Thanksgiving
our epic Thanksgiving menu
my mother's birthday earrings from etsy seller redheart13

My mom likes these because they're lightweight but pack a big visual punch.

Kevin, who is a fucking genius
Kim, Minnie, and Jessica, and eating at Jessica's sorority house
yellow and her utterly priceless blog

No, srsly, guys, can you even say no to her?

singing people in general, and UCSC's Cloud 9
waking up to no alarm
phone calls with Ling Ling
locking eyes from across the room
Brittany and Christina (who shall henceforth be mentioned as Xtina)
rehearsals with Lee
our apartment's public gratitude list

I definitely could not remember everyone's names when I wrote this.

"At least you're wearing something cute today"
Lincoln for bothering to lay out arguments about the protest for me
feeling like there is someone I can ask the big questions
Jennie, Erin, Christina, Xtina, Vai, Liz, Brittany, Diane, Helen, Katie, Ami, and blogger meetups
actually knowing what was going on during Muscle Orchestra, Part II
our GSIs for somehow being able to read a spectrogram and come up with what we said. ("Make the final easy. Go Bears.") Um, wow.

Okay, this is a recording of me and not the one they used, but still. This says something?! And I have to be able to do this on the final?!

whoever the guy on his bike checking me out all the way down College was
Benjamin for play-poke-tickling me during critiques. It reminds me an awful, awful lot of this guy I dubbed The Unicorn.
Doulos SIL, something you cannot understand until you've had to do linguistics homework

These are my really inaccurate Gujarati transcriptions. Quite a few of them have changed since I took this screencap. But I really am pretty bad at transcription. Thanks, Amman, for putting up with me recording you saying the same damn things over and over again.

Connie
Lee giving me a ride, the entire block and a half back to my apartment, while blasting Green Day
getting feedback on Burn This because (let's face it) I am proud of Lee
getting really, really positive feedback on my Search and Destroy monologue
LISA!
Glee... if for nothing but THE SCHUSTER

MRAWR. What would you do for an A?...

Allondra, Uncle Peter, and discussing the UC fee increase protests with Frank
old school songs, BSB, N*SYNC, and apple pie-making with my cousin
Genieve, N8, Sebastian, Anelissa, Uncle Francis, my brother
Taboo Extreme with the cousins, played with a Nerf gun held to your head. Every time you say a Taboo word you get shot. We take our Taboo very seriously.
UNCLE FRANCIS: (for the word "juvenile") It rhymes with John!
BENJI: I want this... SEBASTIAN: Intercourse?
SEBASTIAN: You put... currency into this... ceramic... animal
Tater and Coco (I didn't take these photos of Tater, and sadly enough I have no photos of Coco, but imagine a girl-dog who looks like an excitable old man and acts like an excitable little boy, and that's Coco.)

What's Beethoven's favorite fruit? BA-NA-NA-NA.

CONE OF SHAME!

that old feeling of picking through hand-me-downs like searching for treasure
realizing that even really attractive people aren't perfectly attractive
that there is a Mundari word that means "sound, sight, or motion of a fat person's buttocks rubbing together as they walk" (Evans & Levinson, 2009, thank you Professor Garrett)

And finally, I bring you November's Lookers. Prepare yourself for UNF!

The inimitable Ash Stymest. No seriously, his face. Is. Poetry.

Poetry.

POETRY.

Do I even need to say anything?

All right, this is not Ash Stymest, and I really should know who this is, but I don't. If anyone could enlighten me, that would be wonderful. Or you could just deeply appreciate his hair and eyes.

I always feel really inappropriate about Hugh Grant because how old is he? But still. So. Adorable. I cannot be stopped. Plus, it's winter, which means it's almost time for Love Actually marathons, which means Hugh Grant is adorable let's not argue here.