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The t-shirt will be black and white, but here's the original full-color design.

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UPDATE:
I won! Many thanks to everyone who voted.

Thing to make you cry with joy #1: Guy proposes with a giant song and dance number

Okay, so I know stuff like this sets women's expectations way too high, but ... come on, it's so, so wonderful. You can't not love it.

luminous and happy

(video credit youtube user AgentThirtyFour)

I watched the solar eclipse with Nick last week. The internet misinformed us, and we thought we wouldn't be able to see the eclipse from home. A road trip to New Mexico or Arizona was out, given that we're broke, and Nick couldn't get Monday off of work. So we watched the eclipse online. After a while, though, we figured we'd give it a shot, and went outside to see what we could see. I'd bought a pair of flimsy solar viewing glasses a couple months ago, and we decided to give 'em a spin.

As we stepped onto the sidewalk, there was a break in the cloud cover, and we were able to see the last ten minutes of the eclipse. It was really strange, but very fun, looking at the little orange sun, grinning like the moon. A good quarter of its face was hidden in shadow. We watched the shadow sliding away and the sun slipping behind the horizon.

It was fun. I know I already said that, but it was. Fun in a summer vacation, staying up past our bedtimes kind of way - except this isn't summer vacation and I don't really have bedtimes anymore. It was nostalgic. It felt like when I was a kid and would lie in bed with the late summer sun coming in through the white curtains, falling asleep listening to the older kids playing down the street, to the irregular pong! pang! pong! of their basketball smacking the pavement. Comfortable, and familiar. Not the eclipse itself, I guess. But tumbling outside into late afternoon sunlight, getting giddy and awestruck. It was like being a kid.

Just a few days ago, Nick and I attended a friend's young brother's graduation party. It was another gloriously nostalgic day. Gorgeous weather. I sat outside and ate grapes and relaxed with friends and made plans to go backyard camping this summer. I also got involved in a lively debate about the relative believability of Voldemort's reign of terror in the wizarding world. (I love having intensely nerdy friends.)

It's weird. The stress and constant pressure of needing and failing to find a job (or rather, a job that measures its payment by the year, not by the hour) has me feeling pretty desperate and worried most of the time. But then at other times, I'm struck by these inexplicable kid-moods. Like, I'm overcome by these wild creative desires that are not at all productive or realistic. I think it's just subconscious escapism - just my mind trying to distract me from anxiety. Or maybe it's trying to motivate me? Like it's saying, "Look at all the rad stuff you could do once you're not worrying about how you're going to afford to buy groceries!"

For example (given the time and opportunity), I want to be in a big ridiculous joyful sloppy scornful loving cynical gigantic bizarro band that's like the Decemberists & the Head and the Heart & Florence + the Machine & Glittermouse & Mucca Pazza & OK Go rolled into one, all heartfelt and nerdy. With like twelve people on stage, playing weird instruments and being noisy and luminous and happy. Our shows would only be performed in the summer, at night, outdoors, with the crickets and frogs, and each performance would be accompanied by fireworks. And we'd hand out sparklers to the audience.

Realistic? Practical? Reasonable?

No. And, in all honesty, it's probably something I'll never actually do. But it's a nice daydream, and it reminds me of all the small ridiculous creative things I want to be doing. Filming youtube movies. Making music with friends. Trying out new recipes. Learning to swing dance.

It's a good reminder to myself to keep sending out applications, to keep editing and tweaking my resume, to keep churning out cover letters. Because, one day soon, I'm gonna land a decent job and I'll have time to be just as ridiculous and creative as I damned well please.

It's gonna happen soon. And when it does - look out.

Questions without answers

Lately, life has been filled with stress and uncertainty. Well. More than usual. It's mostly to do with trying and failing to find a job, attempting to figure out what I want to be doing, not knowing where to go next. The usual post-collegiate sense of failure and ineptitude, compounded by the three year gap since graduation, during which time I was supposed to have been busy getting my act together.

It's not hopeless, I know. It only feels like all that initial potential has been slowly draining away. But, I tend to think that things will work out one way or another. I tend to think that it's good to be proactive, but not useful burning up energy worrying - because one day soon, I'll find a decent job and life will continue. It's the inertia of being alive.

During a recent phone call with my parents, in which I was discussing my lack of success in finding steady employment, my father advised me to pray about it in the hopes that god would open the door to a job.

This was a loaded statement, heavy with worry for my damned soul and disapproval of my sinful ways and disappointment at my failure to keep to the religious line. It breaks my heart every time I hear it, or any of its many incarnations, come from my parents' mouths.

Of my circle of friends, I was probably the one who clung to religion the longest - at least, outwardly. I was good at it, good at acting the right way and saying the right things. It was easy, and it won me approval. Approval and acceptance were, for many years, the main motivator behind being religious. Which is terribly tragic. Sometimes I reread old journals and see myself struggling with religion, desperately repeating that I'd always believe, hoping to convince myself. It was a security blanket I held onto long after I ceased to really trust in its ability to grant protection or comfort.

One of the hardest things for me was admitting to myself what I'd known for a long time: that all the worst experiences and thoughts I've ever had have stemmed from the misplaced sense of inadequacy and guilt that was ingrained in me by religion. It was hard to admit that religion had driven a wedge between me and my parents. But my fear of letting go of the comfortable lie I'd built was overcome by my desire to live honestly. I was able to let myself say out loud that I've never seen religion do anything to edify or empower, instead of just choking back the words.

Original sin, humanity's inevitable fall, the essential brokenness and darkness of the world, any instances of good being instances of god - these are tenets of religion that have never sat well with me.

It's cheap. It's disingenuous.

To blame the horror and iniquities of life on humanity, and to credit its moments of grace and kindness to a deity, is so cowardly and despairing.

My parents want me to be religious. I know it comes from a place of love and concern; from their point of view, faith was the only thing that got them through their turbulent times. The generosity of their friends, the support of their community (which was largely religious) was attributed to a strong shared sense of faith, and to the ministrations of a god that watches out for his own. (I think it should have been attributed to the bonds of friendship and loyalty.) So I understand why they want faith for me. They find contentment and relief in "letting things go" and "giving it to god." They distrust the world, have experienced the dangers of putting your trust in people, who can fail you. They want me to think of my eternal soul, of the place I'll hold after I die. They want me to recognize and accept a loving and caring god.

And given half the chance would I take any of it back?
It's a fine romance, but it's left me so undone.

But I want to live in the world, among this flawed and imperfect people, a member of a beautiful and strange species. I'm not just a visitor here, as so many sermons have said. I'm a resident. This is my one real home.

I want to participate in the human pursuit of knowledge, in flexing our young ancient wild minds. I want to fall down and make mistakes. I want to be picked up and dusted off by other people who have fallen down and made mistakes, too. Failure is an occupational hazard, a mark of courage, a rite of passage - not something shameful, something to need forgiveness for.

I put my trust in my friends. Yes, people can fail you, can leave you wounded and lost. But shutting out the good for fear of potential pain is widely regarded as a culpably stupid course of action. It has always been my friends who supported me whether I knew I needed it or not. It was never faith that soothed me when I was hurting, never a sense of god's presence that healed a broken heart. It was the sense of camaraderie and love among friends, the immediacy of their understanding of being hurt and flawed, the balm of human empathy, and the tangibility of held hands and wordless loving embraces.

I don't need to think of a creator to feel awe when I stand at the edge of Lake Michigan, or when watching a sunset over the Rockies. I see the time, the staggeringly slow geological processes, that led to their births. And it's amazing. The thought that I'm able to stand here, aware and vibrant, is made all the more wonderful for the thought that it happened by chance rather than by design. In the heaving, roiling battle between life and entropy, this lonesome planet coughed intelligent life onto its shores. That makes us precious and rare.

For me, it's so much more freeing and humbling and awe-inspiring to think that I'm just one small, fleeting being in the vast universe, using this 1.5 kilograms of soggy brain tissue to imagine and question.

Disease and war and danger is understandable in a world that evolved by trial and error, without a master plan. It's unforgivable in a world supposedly guarded by a loving creator. The difference between living on a world that's evolving and a world that's the pinnacle achievement of an all-powerful god is that the evolving planet will keep evolving. Religion tries to take the despicable way out, running away from our problems to a different plane of existence.

I don't want the simple, narrow answers or the thin comfort that religion provides. The beauty of life lies in the risks we take, the recognition of our own smallness and worth, the marveling we might do at our achievements and the glorious world we find ourselves in, the seeking we do in the darkness, the lights and fires we set along our brief timelines.

My limitations are what make me worthwhile. My existence is made precious because it is ephemeral, because it's doomed but not despairing, because it reaches for the universe that dwarfs it, because it is so improbable and hopeful and lonely and loving.

I'm ready to suffer, and I'm ready to hope.

I'm never going to stop asking the questions, because no answer is ever going to be big enough for all the goddamned wonder I have for the minutest vibrations of atoms, the grand sweeping swirl of galaxies, the ridiculous amazing complexities of humanity.

I'm a child of four billion years of evolutionary success, and I will never stop being in love with this universe.