Perspective.

"It's hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst and then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life."

I've caught flack in the past for loving this quote but every now and again I'll have a day that reminds me how brilliantly it describes that feeling where all of a sudden you're fully aware of how small and fragile you are in the scheme of things. Alan Ball nailed it. It's a swelling of the heart and a vivid awareness of details and a sudden fascination with names and people and places and how they all came to be, despite whatever odds that stood in the way. Then you get to thinking about stories and people and how things happen in real life that are epic and poetic and everything any audience could hope to watch or read, except for that they actually happened. People really are brave and selfless and evil and snarky and fearless and they're their own protagonist and the sheer volume of stories that exist is staggering. I don't even know where to begin.

I absolutely love that awareness.

So I don't know if  many people know that I have a type of radar where I can sense the presence of a man wearing a Red Sox hat, but I do. Finding them in LA is a true challenge and kind of great, I imagine the Planet Earth producer who located that dancing bluebird of paradise had a comparable sense of accomplishment. In Wedding Crashers they mention that a tattoo on the lower back "might as well be a bull's eye". Lizzy and I concluded that a Red Sox hat warrants a similar reaction in Boston women. 

When you're actually in Boston, such bull's eyes are literally a dime a dozen, but for some reason a Sox hat has the magical ability to increase a man's attractiveness by, I'd say, a solid 10%. In L.A. that percentage is bumped up to probably around 20%-30% increased attractiveness simply because they're a rarer sight. 

Like that dancing bird on Planet Earth.