my careless contagion

It's that time again. It's time for my semi-annual rewatching of Can't Hardly Wait , the 1998 film featuring music of the same ungrammatical name (yes, I briefly wrote about it nearly two years ago in my "That girl" post). What is my fascination with this movie? Perhaps that's too complex to start with. It's a fun, campy movie (that, apparently, still means a lot to many people ). And the main character gets the girl in the end. It's safe to say a lot has changed in the last 22 years. The movie, though, is a time capsule. We've changed. Our world has changed. Things that were okay or even funny in 1998 are no longer okay and funny, as this dumb article points out (leave it to Buzzfeed to miss the point). You can't take things out of the context in which they were created and examine them under the harsh light of today. Things were different then. This movie was never intended to be scrutinized or taken seriously. It was mindless entertain...

I've had to do a thousand hard things in my life. By far, the hardest has been letting you go. Something ancient and new and lovely and perfect in me found something ancient and new and lovely and perfect in you. Letting you go meant leaving those things behind because they got lost in you somewhere, and I couldn't go back to find them. So today, walking away, I'm far less new, far less lovely, and so far from perfect. Tomorrow will surely find me the same. Trying to trace the steps of our last dance, our last time together, and our last conversations yields no clues. I'll never know what happened. All I know is I got so desperate and so scared because you knew what you knew and then I was no longer in the know. I was on the outside looking in like I've always been. While I spent time with you, looked as deeply as I could into your eyes, and almost made my home in you, I still didn't know you. I saw a sliver of your beauty, and I was awestruck. Then you we...