This Is Not A List: The 10 Things I Love About You

I’ll admit it. I’m a hopeless romantic who believes that love is worth fighting for, nothing comes easy, each day tests us to become better people if we are playing it right, and the world is a laudable farce on occasion asking us to forego principals and otherwise concede to cowardice. Love is the most difficult and amorphous quality of humanity, while also being our redemption and salvation.

So rather than directly quoting Julia Stiles (who is just rad), I’m taking a page out of hope’s playbook, and staving off dignity for one more day to produce a list which my editor recommended.

In fact, Fuck it: let’s all make a list.

In turn, it may be cathartic for us to take a moment and appreciate the wonderful things about the perfect people around us. Pick someone, and make the list of the inspired as well as the insipid. I promise that it may very well make your world a better place.

The Ten Things I Love About You.
1. Your smile. You melt the fucking world. Period.

2. Laughter. It does and should always feel like a waterfall purifying frustration.

3. True Resilience. You get angrier than anyone outside of kick boxing should, but you always seem to bounce back. Nothing stops you.

4. Passion. You put your heart into everything. There are kids in Africa who will thank you for it.

5. Commitment. You see everything through to it’s end.

6. Brilliance. You’re smarter than most and I appreciate any one who yells at me in multiple languages.

7. Beautiful. I am shallow as fuck, and you are a damn smoke show.

8. Your gaze. Everything.

9. Competence. You execute and manage a ton and I picture spending the rest of my life with a partner that good.

10. Inspiration. I’ve never written this well or this much music. You make me sing.

11. The ten things I hate about you. For every thing I can find to love you, there is something that is infuriating (that horrible Kale Caesar breath for example, the ex, etc) which while I could absolutely hate, I simply love all the more. Cause its you.

We have drastically short lives, made intermittently more difficult by tragedy and circumstance we cannot control, and while it is shocking that chaos does not make greater victims of all of us, we are here and alive. Hope that hope finds you in this moment and that somewhere in your heart, rather than vindictive, shallow, or meaningless behavior, you find your top ten list.

POST SCRIPT: Oh, and just to make this tirade a little more unbearable, if you’re not voting Hillary, drinking pressed juice and whiskey in equal measure, wearing sustainable fabrics, surfing only in your lane, reducing your carbon footprint, eating pasta and carbs like Pia in Italy, breathing deeply, advocating nudity actively, giving zero fucks, Celebrating Austyn, Cake Fighting, partying healthily with your ex, watching two seasons of Nashville, charging down the sun in some type of convertible, donating heavily, laughing with abandon, singing at every available opportunity, and listening to the Knocks and Phantoms, you can go fuck yourself.