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Random Things or “Love”ing-ly Ever After?

I never know when I’m going to fall in love. Especially when it comes to falling in love with new experiences, hobbies, or things. It always starts off innocently enough—there’s a little bit of curiosity, an itch to try something new. Most of the time, that’s where it stays—maybe I’ll take a class or check out a book from the library on “hobby du jour.” But when I fall for something, I fall hard, and I go from curious to “welcome to a new hobby/sport/language obsession” in a heartbeat. Like romantic love, it’s random, unexpected, wonderful, and brings out the best parts of me.

For this “random things you might not know about me” post, I’ve decided to list random things in my life that I love*. Because what we love, after all, helps to define a big part of who we are:

  1. I love being a Mechanical Engineer. I love how I was trained to be a problem solver, whether I’m developing medical devices or plotting out manuscripts. I get to use art, physics, and math to make really cool things to improve people’s health and quality of life, and it’s an epic feeling seeing something I made in action, whether in a surgery, recovery, or a post-op x-ray.
  2. I love languages. I’m multilingual—bilingual in English and Portuguese and conversational in French and Spanish. I love how language is culture and history all wrapped in the evolution of words and phrases. Writers are word alchemists—we turn words into bookish gold, and it’s fun to have a playground full of possibilities pouring out of multiple dictionaries.
  3. I love to dance. Ballet and contemporary were an important part of my life until I ruptured my Achilles tendon. I started figure skating as a sort of physical therapy and fell in love with it, too. Skating went from therapy to a new way to spin, dance, and fly (and I get to pick my skating outfits, which beats recital dress roulette by a mile).
  4. Phoebe’s love of archery in Bookishly Ever After was based on teen me’s dream of becoming Susan Pevenzie from the Narnia books. When I started researching archery for Bookishly, I ended up falling in love with the sport and have now been taking lessons in Olympic recurve archery since 2014. I love digging my feet into the grass of the outdoor archery range and I love the feeling when I clump my arrows together so closely, I can hear one arrow skim the others on its way into the target.
  5. I love to draw. When I was in high school, I had thought of becoming an English or Art teacher, but when I decided to study engineering, I had falsely believed I had given up all chances of ever doing anything with art or writing. I was certainly wrong with the writing, but I think drawing will remain something just for me and just for fun, like skating and dance and archery.
  6. I loved fencing, and fenced foil and epee on my college’s men’s team (we didn’t have enough women to form our own team). It made me feel strong and graceful, and I still feel a little thrill when I see my old gear.
  7. And, lucky 7, I love to write, but you’ve probably figured that out already.

What about you? What are the things that sneakily found their ways into your heart? What are the random things you love?

*Blogger’s Note: Omitted are the living beings I love: family, friends, cats… you get the idea, because this post would get way too long. WAAAAY too long. Ditto bigger things, like the world, snow, glitter, and old records playing on hot summer evenings… and… and…

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