Tom Hanks – Rant and Roll

1. It’s completely ridiculous how much I love this music video.

Which has me a little worried.

Because it seems as though the older I get, the more my musical tastes regress.

Now, I’m no scientist, but I feel like I used to have some pretty some solid street cred when it came to my everyday jams, and then I turned twenty-five and everything started to go to pot, and now I use terms like “my everyday jams.”

And now, with every passing year, I find myself more and more, drawn to manufactured, heavily-produced sugary schlock.

And by schlock I mean SOLID GOLD.

God I love this stuff so much it feels criminal.

(I probably listened to this song thirty times on loop this morning. Half the time lip-synching like a fiend, and the other half dancing about like a madwoman.)

At least when it comes to Tom Hanks, my love for him will never die, nor shall I ever be ashamed to proclaim this affection.

It doesn’t matter how many terrible movies he makes, or how many times he doesn’t get the hilarious jokes in a Tina Fey and Amy Poehler Golden Globes opening monologue – the power of A League of Their Own, The Burbs, That Thing you Do, and Forrest Gump will live on, ad infinitum.

At least, scientifically speaking.

2. One of my first major celebrity crushes was on Jeremy Taggart, the drummer from Our Lady Peace.

This probably means little to most of you reading this blog, but those Canadians who remember our country’s late nineties music scene, or at the very least spent some portion of their lives watching Much Music, are all probably thinking, “Really!? Him?”

Yes, yes, we all know that Mr. Rain Maida was the sulky, skulking sexy frontman (of what had to be one of the best representations of what we now think of as a “90s band”) but even as a fourteen year-old I was always one to buck aesthetic trends, and go for the outliers.

I mean what can I say? The guy had one set of rocking nerd glasses!

My teenage hormones never stood a fighting chance.

3. I always weirdly hoped that Britney Spears and Kevin Federline would make it.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

4. I was quite sick last weekend and couldn’t run for about a week. The first time out after being laid-up by illness, I always concoct insane survival scenarios, and pretend that I’m in an Armageddon action movie, wherein I have to run as fast as I can to the secret CIA bunker because I am the last remaining top-secret operative trained in nuclear bomb disarmament.

The survival of the entire western seaboard is contingent on my success!

Normally this leads to me running so hard I feel as though my lungs are on fire and the only way I can put out the flames is by ralphing them right up.

(My lungs that is.)

But goodness knows I always make it to that bomb.

Just in the nick of time.

5. Spring is in the air.

I can feel it in my heart.

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See more snaps of my madcap adventures on my new Instagram! Follow me @Vanessaisrunning.

Hey chickadees.

I cannot believe that it is already Friday. The mind boggles.

I took this snap of the sunrise yesterday morning:

I seem to have developed a rather large obsession with the sky, in all of its variations, which has manifested itself in an insatiable need to take dozens and dozens of photos of everything from mid-day cloud cover, to startlingly brilliant sunsets.

But in all honesty, my favourite will always be the sorbet coloured striations that divide up the early morning, and patch together the early evening skies.

Always.

Fry-Up Time!

Tom Hanks.

So I watched Sleepless in Seattle for the first time the other night and I have to say it wasn’t half bad.

Despite never really warming to Meg Ryan, I’ve always loved Tom Hanks – in particular 1980s/1990s Tom Hanks.

Sure, I haven’t been that a big fan of his work post-Y2K scare, but nothing will ever take away from the majesty of his early stuff.

(Except of course, for Joe vs. the Volcano. What broke acip trip was responsible for that hot mess?)

Erm, right. So what I’m trying to say here is that while I don’t go to see any of his newer stuff, I certainly do love to dip my toes in his more seasoned pool of material.

For instance, I always, always laugh my face off while watching The Burbs. Yes, I understand that this movie is completely daft and terrible, but nothing will ever stop me from falling over during the scene when the weirdo neighbours drive their garbage to the bottom of the driveway and anytime Mr. Hanks goes absolutely bonkers.

(Which is pretty much the entire film. See the below video for details.)

I will never stop laughing at pretty much every scene in Splash, I LOVE That Thing you Do (and still know every single word to that song), and A League of Their Own is, well, in a league of its own.

Remember kids: Avoid the clap.

It’s sound advice!

Anyways, I was thinking about ole’ Tom as the end credits to Sleepless were rolling, and I was trying to figure out what it is about this actor that I like so much.

M put forward the hypothesis that so many women (and dudes too) love Tom Hanks because he’s a normal human being. He’s not stereotypically “hot”; he’s not ripped, or suave, or an Adonis in human form.

He’s attainable.

Women (and men) can actually see themselves with him.

Men (and women) can see themselves being friends with him.

While I’ve never thought about Mr. Hanks this way, I can see his point.

However in my case, what really does it for me, is the fact that Tom is the absolute master of the hilarious angry yell.

Even when he’s pissed off, he’s bloody entertaining as heck. Seriously, check it out:

Ohhhhh, I die.

Next!

Elevated discourse.

So it’s no big surprise around here that I am massively in love with my cat and will pretty much do anything for her because of how nuts I am about her.

However, of late I’ve really started to notice just how barmy I sound when I talk to her.

(And just how barmy I sound even typing out those words.)

But it’s true. I’ll be walking around my house, jabbering on like a monkey in a tree, regaling Nymeria with details of my day, when I’ll just start telling her over and over again how beautiful she is.

Eventually I’ll transition to complimenting her on how good of a job she is doing of cleaning her paws, how awesome that last yawn of hers was, or how impressed I am that she jumped up on the windowsill with such grace and agility.

Sometimes I’ll just pick her up and do nothing save mutter “beauty cat” over and over and over again. (Sometimes for variation, I’ll make those words into some sort of three syllable nursery song.)

I’m seriously waiting for the day when she’ll turn, look at me and say, “Look lady, is it possible for you to stop talking to me like I’m some kind of simpleton?”

But until that day…

Ten kilometers go!

So I made the executive decision to sign up for the Fall Classic 10k race.

It’s on November 19^th, so it’s bound to be raining, and freezing – but I think I have managed to coerce a number of my amazing pals to also run, so I am really looking forward to a massive post-race hang-out fest.

(Hopefully somewhere warm, and dry, where people won’t be turned off by our non-stop laughter.)

When I signed up to race, I had to enter my estimated finish time, as the two individuals with the closest guesses will win a New Balance prize pack.

I submitted a conservative forty-two minutes, but I’m hoping to run it faster than that. However, I don’t know how the rain or cold will affect my race, so I figured I would rather be safe than sorry.

My comedic genius of a friend Alannah just entered: I’m done when I’m done.

Brilliant.

Also, I think she may have made herself an automatic shoe-in for the prize!

Humour and brains, folks.

Humour and brains.

(If I was a zombie, this is what I would put as my “ideal match” in the zombie classified ads.

…

So that’s all she wrote folks.

A very merry weekend to all of you fab chaps!

I hope it’s absolutely smashing.

Tag: Tom Hanks

Sunday Night Confessions

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