Finals are over. The apartment is cleaned and moved out of. I have evacuated out of the cold frozen potato-infested region. I survived one heck of a car accident (goodbye Phyllis the Toyota Camry! I have never had a noble steed to call my own, but I do believe you were the noblest of the noble as far as car/steeds go!). My 15 hour road-trip morphed into a 30+ hour road-trip due to the complications that come with totaling a vehicle in the middle of nowhere.
But all is well! I am home at last in the Golden State where you can step outside in a tee-shirt and not catch hypothermia. As much as I love that quaint little college town, I do not miss my nosehairs freezing when I'm outside. Life is beautiful. There's nothing before me now except for four months of pure magical bliss. Yes, Christmas is going to be wonderful. This is my favorite time of the year for all of those happy warm fuzzy reasons. But for me, the joyous feelings aren't going to stop and I can postpone the entrance back to the real world for a little bit longer.
Why, you might ask?
Because I'm going to go live and work at Walt Disney World for four months. I'm under no illusions: I'm hired because college kids are totally cheap labor and yes, my pay is going to be less than it would be if I had a minimum wage job here in my hometown. I'm totally aware of it. But on my days off I can take a picture with Flynn Rider and ride Space Mountain...so I'm not complaining :)
In order to channel my somewhat-obsessive/overly excited feelings towards this new adventure, I turned to Pinterest for some ideas on how to keep myself busy/distracted. And I stumbled upon a 30 Day Disney Challenge for bloggers. According to the beautiful CountDown App on my phone (hush, don't judge me), I have 14 days until I catch a plane to Orlando which means that I'll have to double up and do two days worth of challenges at a time butttttt that's totally fine with me :) So....let's do this thing!
Day Number One: Favorite Character
The issue with me (and trust me, I have many many issues) is that I have so many favorites that I really struggled to nail them all down into one category because they could fit in so many. For example: Belle is my favorite princess but technically she's a heroine. But anyways, I digress.
For the issue of favorite character, there really was no debate. If you know anything about me and my love of Disney, it's that I absolutely adore the Lion King. So my favorite character is, naturally, Simba.
It took me many, many moons to understand the themes and the dynamics all at work in "The Lion King". No, it's not completely original. Yes, it's based off of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'. But man oh man do I absolutely love it. 20 years of life later and I can still enjoy it. I have way too much of it committed to memory and I'm at the point where I have to monitor who I'm with when I watch it because I will do the full running dialogue throughout the entire thing.
Last Christmas the Broadway stage production of "The Lion King" came to San Francisco and my Christmas present to myself were two tickets to go and see it. My younger sister accompanied me and while she enjoyed it, I don't think she geeked out nearly as much as I did. I was in absolute heaven. If you ever have the chance to go see it GO. I'll be going again in a heartbeat if it ever comes to my neck of the woods again. The costumes are incredible and the way that the actors have taught themselves to move like wild animals...it's pretty amazing to watch. I'm a fan.
The nerdiness has continued since my discovery of using 'Spotify' to listen to movie/musical soundtracks while I work on homework or write. The soundtrack for the Broadway version of the Lion King is powerful. My personal favorite song: "Endless Night". So much beauty and depth. It's more than a story about a lion and his silly meerkat/warthog friends. It's a movie with powerful themes and motifs on life and accepting who you are despite the mistakes that you've made. Plus...c'mon, Pumbaa is adorable ;)
I'm including a link to a YouTube video of a performance of 'Endless Night' on the Rosie O'Donnell show back in the day. Seriously go watch it and just fall in love. Plus: look at that costuming. A man. But a lion. At the same time. Pure genius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7AeTFYsBgc
Day Two: Favorite Princess
Like a million other ladies, I have grown up with the Disney princesses. I've known them by name and loved their stories--specifically their love stories. Nothing makes me happier to see that these princesses are getting stronger and stronger: taking their lives into their own hands to get the job done rather than waiting around for the men to come save the day. I think that there's a fine line between being a damsel in distress and being too headstrong for a knight in shining armor to even have a shot with you. Life is a balancing act. For years I thought some of these princesses were a bit too weak (sorry Snow White, Cinderella and Aurora--I'm calling you out!). Mulan was fantastic. I loved Tiana, but I thought her prince was a loser and her storyline was just too weird for me to truly jump on-board with. Rapunzel was awesome and oooh did Flynn Ryder make me swoon! But Rapunzel was a bit...air-headed.
So on Black Friday of this year, I went with my family to go see Disney's new princess movie "Frozen". I hadn't heard too much about it, but all of the ads were saying that it was as good as "The Lion King" and the response by my Facebook friends was overwhelmingly positive. But I was skeptical. People were nuts for Tiana, Merida, and Rapunzel...but while I enjoyed them, I wasn't cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs for them like some other diehard fans were.
Oh. My. Gosh. I was blown away. Princess Anna was the full freaking package for me.
She was beautiful, but awkward. Brave, but scared at times. Hopeful for love and overly optimistic, but willing to admit that she made a mistake. She understood that her family wasn't perfect, but she loved her sister anyways. She overreacted and made a huge frozen mess, but put on her big girl pants to go and fix it.
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I don't want to say too much and give away a whole bunch of spoilers for people who haven't seen it. But Princess Anna is awesome. I'm a fan. I'm definitely looking forward to getting to meet her next month when I'm down in Disney :) I'm jumping on-board the 'Frozen' bandwagon in a majorly hardcore way. I probably should stop listening to the soundtrack on repeat but....I can't. I love it too much.
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