Ah, the Classics

It is my tradition that when I have a Disney trip coming up, I watch all my Disney movies before I go. I also get all the Disney movies from the library, and this time Netflix even got into the mix. To me, that is like another countdown as I save my very favorites until right before I go (meaning on the docket this week is Beauty and the Beast, The Princess and the Frog, The Rocketeer and Wall-E). One thing I wanted to do this time was revisit some of the classic Disney films, ones I hadn't watched since I was a child.

From Listal

I started with Dumbo. I have only vague memories of ever watching this film as a kid. Re-watching it, I was touched by the drama of the animation. The storm when they are pitching the circus tent, the fire in Dumbo's clown stunt, the very odd almost Heffalumps and Woozles sequence after Dumbo gets (gasp!) accidentally drunk. The artistry of the film struck me as I know this was not one of Walt Disney's favorite films because of what he saw as a lack of artistry in it (it was essentially only made to make money and that was never something Walt was interested in doing really). This could be because hand drawn animation is becoming more and more a lost art that I just revel in it when I watch it. So that struck me. What also struck me was how...well...politically incorrect it is. The animal cruelty it displays is a bit appalling at times especially in the treatment of Mrs. Jumbo, Dumbo's mother. And I won't touch the singing crows with a ten foot pole. That said, I liked Dumbo. It's a fabulous little movie with a lovely story and great music. The crows that sing it might be questionable but "If I See an Elephant Fly" has to be one of my all-time favorite Disney songs. It's so catchy and bouncy and, English nerd alert, the word play is just plain fun!

From Amazon

I next tackled Bambi, and I do mean tackled. I have memories of sobbing watching this film as a kid because remember, it's me and this is a film where animals will be in peril ergo there will most likely be tears. However, I actually made it through without crying and I think that was because I spent the whole movie waiting for the other shoe to drop if that makes sense. I knew what was coming so I was on pins and needles, steeling myself for it the entire film. The first basically has the two major disasters and the plot works around both of them. It's almost episodic, more along the lines of a Fantasia with the same characters reappearing in each section. Now, in Bambi, hand drawn animation is shown at its finest. It was one of the film they used the multiplane camera on and you can tell they had fun playing and continuing to learn how to best use that camera. The depth of the camera shots is astounding and reminds me a lot of one of my favorite scenes in Beauty and the Beast - the opening shot of the Prince's castle through the forest and over the waterfall - the depth of that scene never fails to capture my imagination and all of Bambi basically had that sort of depth. The story is perhaps not my favorite - it's portrayal of family dynamics was fascinating but very 1940s and I won't even go into the ridiculousness of Bambi's love interest Faline. I didn't think it was possible to want to smack a deer...it is. That said, I am in love with Flower - he has officially entered Krystal's Favorite Disney Character Annuals.

From Listal

I finished up with Pinocchio. I distinctly remember not liking this film when I was a kid. I think Pinocchio annoyed me. I was very much a goody-two shoes (still am, let's face it) and Pinocchio's failure to do what he was told at every turn was just irksome, even to my eight year old self. Particularly when he had Jiminy Cricket there telling him that what he was doing was a bad idea (I am very much a fan of Jiminy's - I associate him more with the Disney environmental movement and as the voice of Wishes than I do with his own movie though). I also remember being scared by this film, a lot more than any others we watched when I was young. Not even the evil queen in Snow White could scare me as much as the scenes at Pleasure Island when the boys are all turning into donkeys. However, I am happy to report I liked it on my recent viewing. It will never be my favorite Disney movie - I doubt I'd ever even shell out the money to add it to my movie collection but I appreciated it much more as an adult than as a kid. The storytelling is really quite good - it flows well and it is plausible for Pinocchio to end up where he does at all times. Again, the animation was impressive, particularly the Monstro scenes. A belated kudos to the special effects animation team because those scenes were awesome as were the appearances of the Blue Fairy.

Overall, I was glad I took the time to re-watch these classics and revisit them as I truly don't think I'd watched any of these films since I was 8 or 9 years old. I grew up in the second golden age of animation - I was much more into Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King but as I get older, I can appreciate more the legacy those films fit into. I particularly wanted to watch these films again as these were Walt's films and as I get to (FINALLY) visit the park that Walt built later this year, I wanted to make sure to fit the classics of the first golden age into my schedule. 

Did Cinderella Eat Your Daughter When You Weren’t Looking?

From Goodreads

Sigh, I need to be careful here, I know. I don’t have a daughter of my own nor will I have one any time soon. I only have my experience as a daughter myself, along with four years of women’s studies where I read books like this by the dozens - Particularly ones that look at how fairy tale mythology operates in today’s culture. I wrote my thesis on that after all. It was even focused on Cinderella. My conclusions dealt with the idea that Cinderella is an ever-adaptable myth; whether you put her in science fiction or horror. She is also at her best when she is surrounded by strong support groups, often female, rather than isolated as she is often pictured. Even Disney’s Cinderella had her band of faithful animal friends to fall back on for a dress. So, I’d say I came to this particular examination of Cinderella and how she translates in the modern world "girlie culture" with a fairly solid background of knowledge. 

In Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, I agree with the main thesis. I cannot argue against the fact that the way culture and society inundate girls from the second they leave the womb with conflicting messages of pink, princess, sex and more pink is a problem. However, that problem goes in both directions because don’t we inundate boys with black, blue and how to be a "real" man from the start as well? I’d say gender modeling hasn’t quite gotten to the equality stage we’d like and science, as Orenstein explains, may not ever let the sexes be entirely on the same footing because, like it or not, some of it is genetic. There are some things we do seem to be hardwired to do, to be. What made me anxious reading this book was how anxious that made Orenstein. Is it a bad thing if there are a few inherent differences? Shouldn’t we celebrate those as much as we do when we make a step forward in gender equality? Wouldn’t it be slightly boring if we were all the same? 

I know, it bugs me that I was wondering that too. But Orenstein is anxious, worried, almost obsessed with the fact that she might be somehow either not raising her daughter anti-girlie or not raising her girlie enough. As I am not yet a parent, I have to ask – does everyone get this worried about this? As I thought about my own childhood, I tried to think about my parents and how they approached raising my sister and me, opposites from the day we were born. I come from a Disney family so the Disney Princesses were always there in some fashion. I had a Beauty and the Beast lunch box for years in elementary school, I saw all the movies when they came out, and we went to the parks all the time. I, however, wasn’t a kid when Disney Princesses was a brand, when parents spend fortunes to let their daughters go to the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, when it seems like a family vacation to Walt Disney World is now somehow ruined because the little princess doesn’t get to have breakfast at the Castle with Cinderella. 

Personally, I loathed wearing dresses as a kid (still do), had more guy friends than girls (that changed when I got to high school), could play tackle football with the best of them and wanted to be smart, brainy Belle when I grew up. The fact that she was a princess somehow didn’t really seem to register. She liked to read, she spoke her mind and she wasn’t afraid of the Beast. Oh, and I hated the color pink. I have made my peace with it over the years but I’d still pick blue over it any day of the week. My sister? Adores dressing up, loves pink, can ride any horse you put her on and will give you an opinion of any college basketball team in the country on demand. Now, I’d need to ask but I don’t think Mom and Dad ever fretted over whether to buy me the Barbie house versus a book nor do I think they worried when Ally discovered horses, makeup or declared her wish to become a sports broadcaster. I think they were just always present; paying attention, supporting us and letting us find our own way whether that was by decking out in pink and frills or enjoying earth tones and hiking boots. 

And that brings me to my biggest issue with this book – I don’t think Orenstein needs to be that worried. She is ever present in her daughter’s life, a little girl who seems to have a healthy curiosity, who enjoyed Disney Princesses until she graduated to Wonder Woman and who sounds, quite frankly, that she is more aware of women stereotypes than I am. This is a little girl who asks questions and who has a mother informed, interested and open enough to answer and then see what her daughter does. Culture and society are not going to change any time soon. We still see trends today that we’ve seen from the 1950s. At the same time, there are new trends, trends yet to show themselves and trends we haven’t even thought of yet. Yes, Cinderella is always going to be there, be she in Ashenputtel, Cendrillon or Cindy garb, but I think the best way to deal with her is head on and see what happens. I think we may find our daughters just might surprise us. Or, maybe I’ll go into spasms of worry the second I have a baby daughter of my own but I think having a little more faith in ourselves as caretakers and our daughters as bright, intelligent women with equally strong women ahead and behind them will be the best cure to Cinderella fever we’ll ever find.

Some Thoughts on Princesses

And no, I'm not going all Kate Middleton on you at this late date. I was recently catching up on some Disney podcasts and the last episode of Mouse Lounge was focused on the Disney Princesses. It's a fascinating topic to me because 1) I am a bonafide Disney geek and 2) I was a women's studies student and a proud feminist to this day. I found myself defending my love of Disney often in my women's studies classes.

Still from Disney's Fairy Tale Wedding Line. From Ranker

I never really analyzed though until a fellow WS student asked me a few questions about her senior project. She was looking at the Disney Princesses and their effect on young girls. This was just a few days after the first release of the Disney Wedding dress line and she hadn't heard about that yet so I told her about that and didn't think about it again until her presentation on her work in class. Her findings were telling if not unexpected - Disney Princesses could give girls the wrong impressions, and those imprssions fell all across the board: If I just wait, he'll come rescue me (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella); If I change enough, he'll fall in love with me (The Little Mermaid, might have an argument for Mulan here as well); If I just love him enough, he'll change and be the man I need (Beauty and the Beast). I'm paraphrasing and certainly hoping I remember this well enough but you get the idea - the princesses are passive; beauty objects to which things happen but they themselves have no control over them. I remember listening and getting progressively more uncomfortable. Did I subconsciously take all that in? I was a kid long before the current Princess craze and Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutiques but maybe, a part of me had taken that in anyway? The more I sat there in class, the more I thought back and wondered.

Ariel was technically my first princess. I vaguely recall seeing The Little Mermaid in the theater when it came out and I loved the music but the story was never my favorite. It was Belle and Beauty and the Beast that ruled my world. I had loved to read already; all I had to do was perfect walking and reading at the same time and I was set. However, I don't recall pining for my prince. I wanted to go off and have an adventure sure - wander forests, ride in to the rescue in the end, marry the Beast for his library...sorry, off track. The thing is, I never saw Belle as someone who was fishing for a man; the fact she finds one in the end is just sort of a bonus. I think it helped that my dad focused me on how smart Belle was, on how much she liked to read, on how brave she was. He never pointed out that she got to wear a pretty dress and married a prince. It was sort of besides the point in my world. So, I spoke up in class. I don't think my friend was surprised. I was the girl writing her thesis on Cinderella after all (for WS, I was more into looking at the sexual revolution of women in the 1890s-1920s, but I got Disney in on the English side. Poor Cindy, she needed someone to prove she was a bit more than a perfect shoe model). I talked about my Dad's point of view and how he presented Belle to me. It was true, I was an odd kid but I was just as inclined to love princesses as anyone. I am a born hopeless romantic but for me, Belle was never just a princess, she was first and foremost her own woman, with or without a man in the picture. My class found this interesting and we ran off into the whole nature vs. nurture discussion. But I've never forgotten thinking about my relationships with the princesses.

Fast forward to today and Disney Princess culture is everywhere. Talk about a merchandising mint. But my approach to the princesses hasn't changed. They have their place, most of them accurately reflect the idea of women in society for when they were created (let's all have a field day approaching Sleeping Beauty with that in mind) which is why Belle reigned supreme for me even over the more overtly feminist princesses Jasmine and Mulan. Then came The Princess and the Frog.

I had totally gushed over her dress first

I discussed this briefly when I looked at Tangled; Tiana, the princess for my 20s. Hard-working, practical, secretly funny and a dreamer at heart though she tries to deny it, Tiana and Belle run neck in neck for my favorite princess award these days. "Almost There" is a song that gets me through the hardest days, the days when I forget I do have bigger goals, bigger dreams and if I just keep working for it, with a little dreaming for good measure, than I'm almost there for sure. Mouse Lounge focused on Tiana a lot and how she is a more "modern" princess and has the mentality to prove it and I had to laugh because the little girl they were discussing in the podcast still just loved the music, the colors, the adventure of Tiana's story. She wasn't thinking about how Tiana is a positive representation of women in animation but about how pretty her dress is in the end. Because, let's face it, girls will be girls and even those of us who like to think we're above that stood in line to gush over Princess Tiana's dress at the Magic Kingdom.

The Princess culture is fascinating but ultimately, I think it is a combination of things that make some girls fall head long into it and others just enjoy the ride along the way. One thing is for sure, it's not going anywhere anytime soon and I am sure to see many a little girl happily skipping up Main Street decked out as her favorite princess on her way to the Castle for breakfast with Cinderella during my trip in September. And honestly? I don't see a thing wrong with that.

Now for something different

I realize I am a bit book-heavy on this blog. I haven't even talked about movies in depth in awhile. Mostly because, other than seeing Tron: Legacy while I was home, I haven't seen a new movie in awhile. I've been digging into TV shows. I got Castle for Christmas, Veronica Mars on my Netflix instant watch list and have been watching movies I got for Christmas (Sherlock Holmes, The Sorcerer's Apprentice) which I've actually already seen and love hence why I was gifted them.

 

But I wanted to take a minute to share a hobby with you all. I collect pins. And not just any pins. Disney pins, specifically the pins that you can find in abundance in the parks and have been able to since the pin trading hook was introduced back during Walt Disney World's Millennium Celebration. Mom and Dad brought my sister and I back identical lanyards with identical pins (sisters - you have to make sure it doesn't look like you are favoring one). The lanyards had a pin for each park: Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney-MGM Studios and the Animal Kingdom. Honestly, I thought it was cool but wasn't too into them. Until I went down myself. There were pins for everything! Parks, hotels, rides, characters, movies...the list goes on and on. I was hooked.

But, well, I liked to collect them. The idea was you were supposed to trade them. This baffled me. I bought a pin that I liked, with my money. I wasn't going to trade it! Trading was an odd concept to me anyway. My sticker collection was carefully curated and organized. It was to be looked at, not traded people. Sheesh. My pin collection has developed the same way. I have careful chosen and picked most of the pins I've personally bought. My parents and sister have continued over the years to get pins for me every time they go down to the World, much more often than I get there anymore. Often, I send them looking for a pin pertaining to a certain character or movie. I can hear their curses from here. It seems I very often send them on a wild goose chase...

Don't ask for a favorite. Writing this, I took down each lanyard for pictures (until I realized hanging, I could get better shots)and remembered some hard earned pins and even ones that hark back to a Walt Disney World that no longer exists. One of my first pins is the Earful Tower emblazoned with Disney-MGM Studios.  My Dixie Landings pin was one of the first I ever personally bought; the resort is now called Port Orleans Riverside.

I have a Belle pin that came from Europe; my parents couldn't find one in the States at the time.  I have pins with my favorite characters (Belle, Stitch, Chip and Dale, Tinkerbell, Figment), my favorite rides (Big Thunder Mountain, Mission: Space, Soarin'). I like the quirky ones too. I have a Mickey wearing a Mickey poncho, a pin with Stitch hanging from the chandelier as Beast and Belle glare up at him, and a Mickey emulating Gene Kelly in Singin' In The Rain. I always make a point to pick up the latest conservation one at Animal Kingdom, usually with Jiminy Cricket. Special events are marked with a pin: My one and only times attending Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party and Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party, taking the Backstage Magic tour, finally going to Epcot's International Food and Wine Festival. I have pins from my favorite countries in Epcot and new movies on their opening days. One pin even has a picture of me from my trip in the fall of 2002, Senior Year with the Mouse as me and my friend called it. I even have the set of pins you had to pre-order Up to get. I may have pre-ordered the movie just for the pins...

Perhaps more than pictures, my pin collection marks my trips to my home away from home these days. It is a unique collection and I always look forward to growing it. But if you're looking for a trade, look somewhere else!

Couple of Things

There will not be much blogging this next week or so. Tomorrow, I have a work event that goes all hours for the next three days then Sunday I need to do a massive clean of my apartment and car because my parents are coming to visit for a week. So I will be super busy though hopefully collecting blog ideas to share when I get back.

For now, enjoy the full-length trailer of Tangled, Walt Disney Animation's next film release. I am not as excited for this one as I was for The Princess and the Frog but still, it looks like a continuation in the right direction for my favorite company.

Things to Say

I was gently reminded I had a blog the other night and I automatically said my standard reply, "I don't have anything to report." It's true in the past I always kept a blog only while I was off on some exciting adventure. Bath, England. Washington DC. My daily life just doesn't inspire me to words like the Royal Crescent or the Jefferson Memorial.

However, I will try again and join every other Tom, Dick and Harry that keeps a blog these days. I am back living with my parents - first fun fact for the post. My delightfully expensive education that has put me into more debt than I can comprehend, has failed to procure me a job yet. No worries there. When I keep finding entry level jobs listed as requiring PhD's, I figure it's the job market and not me. Some days are better than others for convincing myself of that line.

I am still working for the Sindecuse Museum of Dentistry back in Michigan. I am finishing up a research project I've been working on for them on the early women graduates of the University of Michigan dental school. Tracking them has been a lot of fun - a treasure hunt of sorts. Some of them lead quiet lives. Others went off and did extraordinary things. My favorite though must be Flora Mae Spore who alternately went by Marion Spore and then, her married name, Marion Spore Bush. She had a successful dental practice in Bay City, Michigan for over 20 years before her mother's death caused her to start hearing voices that told her to paint. So, she went off to New York City and did "spirit" paintings. Fascinating, isn't it? She even has her own Wikipedia Page here . I especially love that she literally married her husband an hour after his second divorce was finalized. How the broad sheets of New York must have screamed!

I've been re-reading my books since I got home from Michigan. Slowly working my way back through my shelves, deciding if I want to keep them after I re-read them or if it's time to send them on their ways. I started with Gregory Maguire. I will forever love him for giving me Elphaba and Iris but his later books are not as much to my taste. Both Lost and Mirror, Mirror are just well...weird is a good word for them. Lost tries to combine elements from Dickens' Christmas Carol next to the stories of Jack the Ripper and elements of Possession. It never successfully does that and then , towards the end, really goes off the deep end. It has an unlikable heroine who is completely untrustworthy and, let's see how best to put this....whiny. I cannot abide by a whiny character. Mirror, Mirror is in a bad position from the beginning with me - it's based on Snow White, the least likable princess I know. Its premise is more interesting than Lost but still fails to capture my attention. I fight my way through it and then post it on Amazon. Someone else more inclined to like Snow and her dwarfs is welcome to it. I hope to work my way through my bookshelves, purging once I know I'll be happy to never open the book again.

I did re-read, and adored all over again, Jane Eyre. Charlotte never did write another one as good (personally, after Jane Eyre, I think she just stole and re-tooled her sisters' best ideas). Jane is witty, courageous and independent. Though Rochester is right there with Darcy on my list of "Literary Heroes I adore on the page but are 'too costly for daily wear,'" Jane and he make a great couple to root for throughout the novel. Definitely on my keeper shelf.

Tomorrow is an excursion to Skaneateles and then to visit my cousins in Marcellus. My little cousins are apparently asking for new playmates - I think they have that end of summer, don't want to go back to school but really are bored out of their minds syndrome I remember well. We're also going to help them plan for their Disney trip in November. Mine is in three days! Boo-yah!

A brief ode to Disney

I am going to take a moment out of my current thread of DC topics to give a brief ode to my favorite company/entity/state of mind. This past weekend I not only saw yet another reason to love the marriage between Pixar and Disney in Wall-E, I was able to attend the opening weekend of The Lion King at Kennedy Center. It was like a brief visit into a world I usually have to fly to Orlando to get to.

In all my attempts to explain my love of the Mouse, I always get that blank look with a vague idea that the person is laughing at me behind their eyes. Why would someone who has gone to Walt Disney World ten times at last count long to go again? Haven't you seen it all yet? How many more pictures of the Castle does one really need? To which, any Disney fan worth their salt replies, just one more of course. Since being forced to grow up and go off to college and now graduate school, I don't get to go nearly as much as I used to (at least it feels that way - I think the truth is Mom and Daddy just go more now that my sister and I aren't home). So any little way I can bring Disney to me, I jump on it. I read the blogs faithfully and download the podcasts to listen to at work while haunting the discussion boards. Every new Disney movie, every time I can watch the Disney Channel for a little while, each time Samantha Brown is on the Travel Channel with a Disney special, I savor it.

So, a weekend where I get a movie and a musical, I am in heaven. Let us begin with Wall-E. I have been watching the trailer for this eons ago it seems and I knew I was already in love with the little guy before I sat down in the theater. For those of you who saw my facebook status later on Friday after I saw it, you know I found my soul mate. It is characters like Wall-E that cements my love for this entity that is Disney. Not too mention, they gave props to one of my all-time favorite musicals, Hello Dolly! How could I not love this?! Yet another reason I have to agree with many of the Disney Bloggers when they say Lasseter is the second coming of Disney.

Next up this past weekend was possible through a stroke of luck that must of used my luck quota up through next year. But it was worth it. My supervisor at work came in on Friday with a single ticket to see The Lion King, just opened at Kennedy Center this past week. I think it was the fact I practically jumped onto my knees for the ticket that got me the ticket - I must have looked pathetic but put Disney and Broadway together for me and that is near nirvana. So, I ventured off Saturday night to Kennedy Center, a place in and of itself amazing to see a production. The Opera House is massive with an absolutely beautiful ceiling fixture. It was lots of little chandeliers making up the design of a snowflake. I had seen The Lion King before in Rochester, NY, aka on a small stage and from several levels up. This night, I sat second row, three seats in from the aisle. The drummer was right next to me as well and was interesting in himself to watch at times. The first time I took in the spectacle that is the stage show, this time I got to revel in it. To see the facial expressions and to enjoy which was a better cast than my first experience. The opening sequence (recently just played on the Tony broadcast as it celebrating 10 years on Broadway) simply takes your breath away. It was a fabulous production and had that touch of something extra that I can only find from a Disney story - especially one hailing from the second golden age of Disney animation.

So, I just needed to get out an ode to a love of my life. I will now return the regularly scheduled programming of my DC summer.

It's that time of year again

I do this every spring when school is starting to get hectic. I have presentations, papers, research and a million other things going on that I need to be worried about. It is then that I, all of the sudden, decide to become eight years old again.

Those of you who have been lucky enough to be around me for any length of time know I would have preferred to remain eight years old. Don't ask why I ever decided on eight - as far as I know the year 1993 wasn't anything special - it wasn't even a Disney year, either in trip (we went in '92 and '94) or movie (we were between Beauty and the Beast and the arrival of The Lion King). But eight has always been my number and at this time of year, I have an adult temper tantrum and revert to childhood comforts.

Take my recent movie choices - I recently purchased Enchanted (i.e. the day it came out on DVD I happened to be at Borders and it was a good price...I couldn't just walk away...). No, it's not only that I purchased it and watched it. It's that I've watched it four times since then. That's about eight hours of my life - eight hours when I should have been researching the authority of the written word, discovering what exactly the Library of Congress's metadata scheme actually is as well as reading for my classes in general and overall, being more productive than laughing hysterically yet again when Prince Edward gets creamed by bikers in Central Park. Next, we'll add Nim's Island, a delightful adventure romp with an agoraphobic writer and Abagail Breslin as adorable as always. I may also have shared a bucket of popcorn with peanut M&M's at that movie...Lastly, what did I do last night? Instead of finishing my reading for my classes on Wednesday? Oh right, I rented Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium. iTunes rentals will not help my future productivity. Not only did I watch a loopy Dustin Hoffman and his toy store (a store I would still frequent at my age if it actually existed), I watched it with a massive bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream while giggling like a school girl at the escaping bouncy balls.

Leaving aside the fact that this time of year is not good for my very slow metabolism, what makes me throw my temper tantrum against being an adult every year at the same time? Firstly, I think I need to admit to myself it's not a random temper tantrum. I am always game for a good "kids" movie (hence my love affair with Nanny McPhee but that's another story entirely...). And to be honest, I love acting like a kid. I think I need to send Walt Disney World a thank you card for that. Somewhere along the way, trips to a place where grown adults are encouraged to act eight years old again, coupled with a healthy dose of childhood delight and a death grip on childhood culture, I actually managed to preserve the kid in me this far. And she's not happy at this time of year because, let's face it, she has to act like a grown up constantly. Not that I'm complaining, I've always enjoyed school and it is the one thing I have always been really good at. But, this time of year, I have to let the kid in me have her temper tantrum, take one for the team, and eat copious amounts of junk food while watching movies that remind me of the joy and freedom I felt as a kid. Some days, I think I cherish those moments more than any of the adult ones I've ever had.

So, if you're like me, and heading in for the finals collision in the distance, take a moment and let that eight year old who made it this far, buried maybe beneath layers of responsibility, due dates and stress, out for a run. Giggle with friends and buy out a candy store, play hopscotch, swing, walk proudly into the G-rated movie loaded down with food you'll be sweating off at the gym for the next month. We give ourselves so little carefree time these days - why not let out the eight year old before the temper tantrum hits?