The Most Beautiful Man In The World lives in my building. i don’t know his name. we met on a bus, when i smiled WAY too brightly at him for strangers because, honest to god, my whole heart lit up in a way that made me think, “oh, i must know that guy!!” no. i didn’t. he’s just The Most Beautiful Man In The World.
what does The Most Beautiful Man In The World look like? i will tell you:
like the way the sun spills over water at dusk
like the way food smells when you’re hungry
like the sound angels make when they’re doing folk covers of pop songs on their heavenly harps
and also kind of like the guy who played Chad in “high school musical,” if the guy who played Chad in “high school musical” was the most beautiful man in the world.
i tell you this not only to brag that i live in the same apartment complex as The Most Beautiful Man In The World but also because i want to know WHY, if there even IS A GOD, every single time i run into The Most Beautiful Man In The World i look like a LITERAL DUMPSTER TROLL that has just CRAWLED OUT OF ITS GARBAGE HOUSE in search of FREE WIFI AND A SLURPEE. i want to know why i can never just BE COOL with The Most Beautiful Man In The World when we ride the elevator together, which is!!!! kind of often!!!!!
DID YOU GUYS KNOW that sometimes i look nice?? sometimes i actually look like a FUNCTIONING ADULT!!! sometimes i would go so far as to say i am an ATTRACTIVE INDIVIDUAL!!!!!
you know who DOESN’T know any of that???
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MAN IN THE WORLD, WHO LIVES IN MY BUILDING!!!
here’s a quick rundown of the last few times i ran into The Most Beautiful Man In The World:
i was wearing a maxi dress i had very cleverly biked home in, without a helmet* (*don’t try that at home, kids), in the VERY HOT AFTERNOON SUN, so i was a GROSS SWEAT MONSTER but without any OBVIOUS INDICATOR that there was a normal reason for it, and i couldn’t stand to look at him so i just glared at my phone while he probably wondered, alarmed, whether i was fleeing the scene of a crime
i was wearing a white shirt that i had not SECONDS before spilled salsa ALL OVER in a big red stain right down the front like a KINDERGARTNER
i was carrying two armfuls of ENORMOUS bags of popcorn with a three musketeers bar literally in my mouth and he overheard me say through my stuffed candy cheeks to my doorman, “oh, no, i’m not having a party, this is literally all for me”
i dropped my backpack while opening my mail and said to it, defeatedly, “why? why did you do that when i explicitly told you not to? do you like being on the floor?”
i fell into and then off of the elevator
why??? why does this happen??? what vengeful god has orchestrated it so the ONLY TIMES i ever run into The Most Beautiful Man In The World are when i could easily be mistaken for a child’s doll that has been put through the wash by accident, or a dollar bill that has been stained by years of being in people’s sweaty palms, or a mop with eyes???
whatever. everything costs money and everyone you love disappoints you. Mop Eyes out.
I have no idea what’s going on in this post, but I desperately want The Most Beautiful Man In The World of this post’s fame to have secretly been in love with his neighbor Trash Monster the entire time.
seriously i want this guy to come across this post and slowly put it all together like “salsa stain… popcorn bags… talking to backpack… oh my god this is Awkward Cutie in 3B… OH MY GOD AWKWARD CUTIE LIKES ME” and then romance
I was six the first time I went to disney world. It was also the first time I met my step family in florida. See, my grandfather had three wives in his lifetime, and the third wife was the only one I ever met. She had five kids when they married, and moved to Hawaii from the Phillipines. Now jump forward, my dad’s step siblings have families of their own, including my uncle Jett, who married a native hawaiian woman, and had two beautiful daughters.
Back to that first trip to disney. I was six, my sister was ten, and our smack in the middle of that age difference was my cousin Malia at age eight. She, and her younger sister Bella, both took hula classes, because their mother wanted them to stay close to their roots, despite the distance of having moved to florida. We were all pretty young, but we knew enough that the princesses at disney world were actresses in costume.
“How cool would it be to play a princess at one of these parks?” I had said after a long day in the magic kingdom. “I wanna do that one day.”
“Who would you play?” Bella had asked.
“I don’t know. Belle maybe. She’s the only one with brown hair other than snow white, and mulan, and I could never play either of them.”
“Yeah, but you don’t really look like Belle either. Your noses are to different.” Malia had cut in, and I shrugged it off, knowing It’d never happen anyway.
“What about you guys? Who would you play?” I asked them, unaware that there was no answer to that.
“We don’t look like any of them either. There are no princesses from where we’re from.” So we all settled on the sad belief that none of us would ever get to be disney princesses.
Years pass, and I decide that one day I would help write a movie for a princess from either the phillipines, or the polynesian islands, so my cousins could become princesses. Because they held on to that dream. It might have been harder for them to let go of it, because they lived so close to disney.
Now it’s 2014, and Malia has just been hired as a dancer, at the polynesian resort at disney. She started as a swing, and in two years worked her way up to a featured dancer. It helped that she was of polynesian decent.
About a year ago it was announced that disney would be releasing a movie featuring their first polynesian princess, and my cousins & I were all excited, but none of us had high hopes. We all figured they’d make her look more like Rapunzel, the way Anna and Elsa had.
Fast forward a few months. They have just released the first look at moana.
I text my cousin as soon as I see it.
“Did you see Moana?”
“No, why?” I send her the picture above, and a minute later I get a call. “SHE LOOKS LIKE ME! I LOOK LIKE HER!” Malia is screaming into the phone with unabashed enthusiasm. She couldn’t believe that a disney princess bore such a resemblance to her.
Yesterday, 11/16/16, my cousin began her new job at disney world, and I couldn’t be happier that her dream of ten years had been realized.
This is why representation matters. This is one of many reasons why Moana is so important.
Congratulations Malia. I can’t wait to come down and say Mahalo
I am the ’70s child of a health nut. I wasn’t vaccinated. I was brought up on an incredibly healthy diet: no sugar till I was 1, breastfed for over a year, organic homegrown vegetables, raw milk, no MSG, no additives, no aspartame. My mother used homeopathy, aromatherapy, osteopathy; we took daily supplements of vitamin C, echinacea, cod liver oil.I had an outdoor lifestyle; I grew up next to a farm in England’s Lake District, walked everywhere, did sports and danced twice a week, drank plenty of water. I wasn’t even allowed pop; even my fresh juice was watered down to protect my teeth, and I would’ve killed for white, shop-bought bread in my lunchbox once in a while and biscuits instead of fruit, like all the other kids.We ate (organic local) meat maybe once or twice a week, and my mother and father cooked everything from scratch—I have yet to taste a Findus crispy pancake, and oven chips (“fries,” to Americans) were reserved for those nights when Mum and Dad had friends over and we got a “treat.”As healthy as my lifestyle seemed, I contracted measles, mumps, rubella, a type of viral meningitis, scarlatina, whooping cough, yearly tonsillitis, and chickenpox. In my 20s I got precancerous HPV and spent six months of my life wondering how I was going to tell my two children under the age of 7 that Mummy might have cancer before it was safely removed.So the anti-vaccine advocates’ fears of having the “natural immunity sterilized out of us” just doesn’t cut it for me. How could I, with my idyllic childhood and my amazing health food, get so freaking ill all the time? … My two vaccinated children, on the other hand, have rarely been ill, have had antibiotics maybe twice in their lives, if that. Not like their mum. I got many illnesses requiring treatment with antibiotics. I developed penicillin-resistant quinsy at age 21—you know, that old-fashioned disease that supposedly killed Queen Elizabeth I and that was almost wiped out through use of antibiotics.*
“If you think your child’s immune system is strong enough to fight off vaccine-preventable diseases, then it’s strong enough to fight off the tiny amounts of dead or weakened pathogens present in any of the vaccines.”
Steel Phoenix Studios 