Friday Favorite: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I can see you rolling your eyes. I can feel the judgment radiating off of you. I can hear the thoughts flitting through your mind: "Buffy? Really? The vampire slayer." And for you I feel pity. That's right. Pity. Because you are apparently not privy to the genius that is Joss Whedon. You have not been witness to the pithy dialogue, the heart-crushing plot twists, and the magnetic characters that make up any universe that spills from the mind of Joss.

Buffy fills up a small corner in my heart. A corner that is nestled between fluffy blankets, hot tea, and snuggling (my heart is a strange sort of thing). I was skeptical, if not completely unaware, of Buffy when it was originally airing on television. I have a vague memory of stumbling across an episode where no one could speak (Hush!) and then shaking my head and flipping away.

It wasn't until my sophomore (or was it my junior year?) year of school when my lovely roommate finally introduced me to the Wondrous World of Whedon (actually my very first Whedon was Firefly--a story for another time). We watched it in huge, random binges. I think that the entirety of season 5 was consumed in one glorious weekend. It always served as an escape. A much needed escape.

Buffy still serves that purpose for me. Feeling stressed? Lets watch Buffy! Bored? Buffy! Depressed? Buffy! Excited? MOAR Buffy!

I recently acquired my very own copy of the complete series on DVD and have been re-watching the entire thing. I simply can't get enough. I hope that if you have, until the present, lived your life without Buffy, that this will be your last Buffy free day. You can watch the second season ENTIRE SERIES on Hulu. *ahem* Nothing is stopping you. GO.

Friday Favorite: Stargazing

Every Friday I write about my favorite things. So far I've covered, well actually, this is my first Friday Favorite post!

I am continually amazed by the night sky. There is nothing like the feeling that exists only in the middle of open grassy fields after night has fallen. When the air is still warm and thick, but the grass is cool and it sticks to the backs of your knees. And the sky is both dark and crystal clear.

It is in those moments that time stops and my mind reels from the enormity and timelessness of the vista. If there is one thing that I have trouble comprehending and accepting it is the idea of eternity. Stargazing makes me face that head on. The night sky that I see is the night sky that all people have seen before me, it has existed always. The stars that I'm seeing existed in a time that is too long ago for me to comprehend and are at a distance that I can't even begin to conceive. It is every magical, fantastical, science fiction dream I've ever had except it's real.

The stars calm inconsequential fears and anxieties, they make my daily dramas seem like the silly things they really are, and they remind me to take advantage of the days that I have. Most importantly, they give me hope that there is always more. There are things we can't even conceive of out there and that's the reason that we should keep on going. The reason that humanity should keep on plowing away despite our gross failures. Because there is more for us to see and learn and know and in that is the promise that we will keep evolving and growing. Here, right now, for this tiny little blip of time, we get to influence that. I'll take it.

Image Source: Flickr user, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. You can find the image here.