I can’t fully explain how excited I am for Christmas. Amidst solving Lagrange Multipliers and going through my mountain of readings, I can’t help but stop and think about how absolutely glorious Christmas will be after this finals week of death.
And I’m sure all of you have been thinking the exact same thing. I’m sure all of you are looking forward to seeing your family and friends back home, and I’m sure all of you are just waiting to gorge yourselves on some good, home-made holiday food.
While Christmas is still almost a month away, I figure I’d start off the holiday cheer with my top 3 wishes for the holiday season and beyond.
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Nostalgia: Hello Kitty Makeup Collection
There are things from our childhood that we will never outgrow, and for me it’s Hello Kitty. Kitty White and her feline friends have been around since the day I could walk, making them an integral part of who I am. To give you an idea of how obsessed I was, until I was 10 the only stationary I used was Hello Kitty stationary, I had between 10-15 Hello Kitty dolls, a Hello Kitty backpack, a Hello Kitty purse, a Hello Kitty…well, you get it.
Now, you can only imagine how elated I was when Sephora launched their Hello Kitty line earlier this year. The first time I saw the Hello Kitty brush set, I swear I spent around 10 minutes just opening, closing, and turning Kitty White around in my hands. You can accuse me of being over-dramatic, but I’ll have you know that the experience was actually incredibly nostalgic.
So what better way to celebrate Christmas than to expand my Hello Kitty arsenal? The original brush set looks gorgeous and users have given it relatively good reviews. But what makes this even more special to me is how something so precious to my childhood has managed to follow me into my late teens and early adulthood. Don’t you wish everything could do that?
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Book I Should Have Read By Now: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)
Set in the Prague Spring of 1968, Kundera’s novel follows two men, two women, and a dog as they cope with personal struggles amidst a changing Czechoslovakia. I’ve desperately wanted this Czech classic since I had to return it, unfinished, to my local library, so repossession of it would make my literary year.
Unbearable Lightness was the first book that really forced me to question the weight of human actions and feelings. Do we attribute too much significance to love? Is the universe recurring so that we’re stuck in pattern of repeated acts, or do we only live once? The characters’ actions seem to flit by, but they weigh on you long after you close the book.
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Legendary New Year’s Eves: Tiesto in Vancouver
I started listening to electronic music sometime during eighth or ninth grade after hearing Benny Benassi’s infamous “Satisfaction”. From there, I found artists like Daft Punk and David Guetta, who paved the way for my love of electronica.
But no track defines my early foray into electronic music than Tiesto’s “Elements of Life”. Haunting yet incredibly uplifting, “Elements of Life” is one of the genre’s most infamous songs and a signal of Tiesto’s rise. Mixmagg recently named Tiesto the greatest DJ of all time, so what better way to celebrate New Year’s than with a man who turned my interest into a passion?