Reading at the Seaside - PART 2

In the past 3 weeks, I’ve been to the beach more times than in the past 3 years before that. At first the beach trips sought to provide a milieu for my reading expeditions but it very quickly turned into a midday meeting of lovers and included compact lunches, reclined seats which sank into mini naps, and deep rejuvenating swigs of fresh sea air. I had to find an alternative time to complete reading the book and it took a smidgen too long to finish.

Eat, Pray Love was nice. Not exceptional, but nice. However it’s easy to see how those who identify most with it, and I daresay there are millions of woman who do, would have found it exceptional. And you can’t blame me, I am after all a millennial. What’s those general terms used in a cavalier fashion to describe millennial me and my fellow millennial comrades? Ah yes, “Self-Entitled”, “Willfully Ignorant”, “The Trophy Generation”, “Comatose” , “The generation born expecting entitlement by default to everything Elizabeth Gilbert had to work so hard for”.

No pain certainly doesn’t mean no gain. If more people could believe that, the struggle would melt into the icy distance behind you, dissolved down by the comforting warmth ahead. Stepping into the sun. That said, it’s easy to see how post-Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth can captivate me...she’s charismatic and her idea’s are undeniably absorbing.

And so, Reading at the Seaside has happily evolved into Relaxing at the Seaside and has become a charming ritual, one that is not mine alone.

Easter Eggs

I love easter eggs, a little too much I think.
Do you know what an easter egg is? I don’t mean the painted or candied or chocolate kind. I mean the well concealed exciting kind, placed in movies and games and pictures and books. Like the blue tennis courts which appear instead of grass when you hold down “2” before the match screen loads in Wii Sports. Or the pink bear in the little girl’s bedroom in UP who is later revealed as a major Toy Story 3 character. Or those puzzling pictures which have 50 movies cryptically hidden in a large busy scene that you can somehow happily waste hours of your life solving.

I don’t quite know why, but there is this real excitement attached to unearthing an easter egg. A sense of accomplishment even though you probably would’ve been just as well off if you hadn’t found it. They serve no genuine purpose but somehow add quality to an experience. I think this is mostly to do with the fact that YOU are in some way made to feel like a CHAMPION for discovering them.

So hats off to the clever selfless artists who have taken the time to place easter eggs in the landscape of our lives for us to uncover. They’ve essentially bundled joy in tiny unobvious packages, thrown it out and very quietly said “Fetch”. And I am a happier puppy for it ^_^