Ernest Hemingway

Praia de Carcavelos, March 2013

Cool

Getting something with actual handwriting on it in the mail.

(…)

Of course, the biggest reason why getting something handwritten is fantastic is because it’s so darned rare. For most of us, we’re more likely to see Halley’s Comet crash into Bigfoot while he’s riding the Loch Ness Monster than to actually get a full-blown note from a friend.

So I say treasure those handwritten notes when you get’em, if you get’em. And if you don’t, there’s an easy way to start.

Man, just send a couple.

AWESOME!

in The Book of Awesome by Neil Pasricha

The smell of books

When I was a little kid my mom read to me before bed.

Actually, I suppose read with me would be more accurate. See, we had a deal. She read the left page and I struggled to slowly read the right, moving my finger over the words, letting her help me pronounce the big ones.

Over time we worked our way through many old collections from garage sales, bookstores, and libraries near our house. We learned about the lives of Mr. Men, Curious George, and The Berenstain Bears.

Sometimes we went to the bookstore on Saturday mornings for a treat.

I always loved walking on those creaky wooden floors, loitering at the big magazine rack, and chatting with the friendly staff covered in glasses, beards, and thick wool sweaters. I would sniff up that heady bookstore air full of fresh paper, cardboard boxes, binding glue, and lingering coffee fumes.

The smell of books reminds me of late nights cramming for biology exams between the library stacks at college. It reminds me of lying on my elbows on a warm beach towel by the ocean on summer vacation. It reminds me of the heavy set of encyclopedias in my living room when I was a kid, the ones I relied on to write last-minute reports on the praying mantis, Nigeria, or the 1972 Summer Olympics.

The smell of books reminds me of learning to read and learning to explore the world.

I love walking quietly through bookstores and thinking of how many stories lie hidden in the pages right beside us. Entire lives have been poured into mapping the Earth and conducting experiments, crafting mysteries and teaching languages, showing us how to cook and garden, and sending us on faraway trips to faraway worlds.

The smell of books is the smell of us all coming together to document, entertain, and explain things for ourselves now and forever. It's a big sniff of humanity, a big sniff os wisdom, and a great big sniff of

AWESOME!

in The Book of aAwesome by Neil Pasricha

The little things

Six pages and I was hooked

Old, dangerous playground equipment

(…) These days those classic playgrounds sure are hard to come by.
Everything is plastic now, unaffected by temperature, easy to disinfect, and bendable into all kinds of Safe-T-Shapes—the sharp, rusty nail heads of yesterday replaced with nontoxic washable adhesives poured from a cauldron of polymers and Purell. Now not only are our kids getting lame baby-approved fun, but just think what we’re doing to the tetanus shot industry.
Seriously though, new playgrounds sure are terrible. Some experts say that that playgrounds have become so ster­ile and boring that kids just walk away from them, prefer­ring instead to hang out in the weeds by the railroad tracks or throw bottles in the alley behind the pizza place. Children could actually be placed in more danger by these lame plas­tic netherworlds that encourage more video game time in­stead of fresh air and bruising. Another blow to childhood struck by overprotective parents and pesky lawsuits. (…) So please, when you find monkey bars taunting you from ten feet off the ground, extended seesaws that allow for max­imum elevation, and rickety, sagging rope bridges with planks missing, run around like crazy, bump your head a few times, and twist your ankle. Because tell me something—is there anything quite like it?
AWESOME!

Intergenerational dancing

(…) Yes, intergenerational dancing is a rare and wonderful thing. It’s a magical moment where boundaries are broken and the thumping power of music sort of sweeps us all to­gether into a tiny little place where everything’s just cast aside in favor of living for the moment.
AWESOME!

When you’re awkwardly standing by yourself with a full cafeteria tray of food and suddenly spot your friend waving at you

The dreaded Cafeteria Standalone.
(…) Maybe you quickly glance around the room while pretending to get ketchup. Maybe you walk in a couple of different directions so you aren’t clogging up the lanes or looking too obvious.
But just as you’re beginning to lose hope you eventually see them.
It’s your friend in the distance.
And they’re waving.
AWESOME!

When someone lands on the hotel you just built in Monopoly

(…) When someone lands on the hotel you just built, the first thing they do is get real quiet and quickly pass the dice to the next player, sort of hoping you don’t notice that they’re squatting on your joint.
But you notice all right.
And maybe you’re even all polite and nonchalant about it too.
“Oh, Marvin Gardens? Hold on a second, wait. Yeah sorry, uh, let’s see here. That’ll be $ 1.200, please.”

Bakery air

(…) It’s a powerful and intoxicating smell that rivals some of the best smells out there: late night summer barbecue, new car smell, gasoline, fresh baby, dare I say it, campfire in the woods. Yes, I went there.

from The Book of Awesome, by Neil Pasricha

obrigada Hugo

1000 Awesome Things . com 

Encountering me so often, she is perhaps expecting me to address her one day. The motives that constitute an obstacle to a possible meeting between the two of us are several. In the first place, Miss Zwida collects and draws seashells; I had a beautiful collections of shells, years ago, when I was a boy, but then I gave it up and have forgotten everything: classifications, morphology, geographical distribution of the various species. A conversation with Miss Zwida would lead me inevitably to talk about seashells, and I cannot decide what attitude to take, whether to pretend absolute ignorance or to call on a remote experience now vague; it is my relationship with my life, consisting of things never concluded and half erased, that the subject of seashells forces me to contemplate; hence the uneasiness that finally puts me to flight.

In addition there is the fact that this girl’s application in drawing seashells denotes in her a search for formal perfection which the world can and therefore must attain; I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration. If I were to approach Miss Zwida, I would have to express some appreciation of her drawings – which are of highly refined quality, for that matter, as far as I have been able to see – and therefore, at least at first, I would have to pretend to agree with an aesthetic and moral ideal that I reject, or else declare my feelings at the very start, with the risk of wounding her.

If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino

=)

original photo by Daniel Miranda

"I'll come see you again next summer if you want... if you don't mind. Next summer I'm going to be seven."
"And I'll be sixty-two. And I'm gonna hug your brains out your ears. But let's finish one summer before we get on to the next."

The Shining, Stephen King