A Birthday Treat From Yours Truly - No There's No Cake or Giveaways Sorry

So it’s been almost FOUR years since I’ve started this blog although it remains to be seen how well I’ve made my presence felt in the bloggerverse. A quick perusal through my blogroll will advertise the embarrassing fact that I’ve not exactly tried very hard to be an actual blogger.

In these four years, not once did I celebrate any blog-related milestones (probably because there aren’t many to speak of) so I thought I’d celebrate my birthday with you guys. And I wasn't lying, there really is no cake. No there aren’t any giveaways either. You know I'm too poor for either of those.

But there is something.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been vapid enough to google whether there have been anyone you admire/adore/adulate – I mean ANYONE –  who shares the same birthday as you. I have, and the results were dismal.

But then, inevitably, upon my baptism to the EXO fandom, I happily learn I share my birthday with this dork.

Is it just me or does he seem a little put off by that fact?

Anyways, this was my reaction when I found out

And I decided I’ll post a Kai GIF-rabilia post (I have to be the first to coin such a term) to celebrate my birthday. Pardon me for being way too excited to just let this momentous stroke of absolute luck pass by. Imagine if I hadn’t discovered EXO.

OH THE HORROR

Now everyone knows the dancing machine EXO Kai.

SOMEONE CALL THE DOCTOR INDEED

So, I thought I’ll throw up some (meaning, a lot of) gifs celebrating the man (kid? honestly I’ve no idea) off the stage. There is a difference between the two, actually.

If this is Kai –

Smoulder #1

Smoulder #2

The Smirk (that will be the end of me)

Then this is Jongin.

Aegyo #1 fail FAIL DAMMIT On Point

Aegyo #2

A Jongin Tutorial on How To Break Make Hearts

I thought I'd also share some other interesting facts about him that I've gleaned over the past three months.

(Does it show? That I'm a newbie to the KPOP fandom?)

(Really. Who am I kidding?)

1. EVERYONE loves Kai. 

BEHOLD Kai's fangirl army base

And then there's the biggest Kai fan of all time.

Featuring Kai's Death Stare and a Blushing Chanyeol

2. He hits people when he laughs. 

Mostly it's poor Sehunnie who gets the most of it, but really - no one sitting next to him is spared.

Chanyeol later gave as good as he got in the same "interview'

3. Acting sexy comes naturally to him. 

This can be seen by how frequently he combs his fingers through his hair or how he repeatedly sticks his tongue out. I already mentioned The Smirk, didn't I?

His tongue doesn't sit in his mouth, for some reason

4. Despite the I'm-A-Bad-Boy attitude you get from the music videos - 

He gets easily embarrassed for no reason

.... and easily hurt, the big baby

5. Does it surprise you that he's great with kids?

Look at the proud papa

6. He probably got all that daddy training by raising three poodles. 

He loves dogs, you know.

Kai's the one doing the Lion King thing at the back

7. Let's talk about ships 

Having a dozen members in the band guarantees a lot of permutations as ships. However the most famously shipped Kai-starring ship is - 

KAISOOOOOOOOOO

 A popular KaiSoo meme

Kaisoo is real, people.

Seriously. Thank you Tumblr for this gif.

Poor D.O. Can't move a muscle. I'd probably puke though if Kai was standing that close.

This post took a lot more time to put together than it should have because the wifi was having mood swings and because Photoshop ate my RAM. Also, my sincere apologies to all those with slow internet because BOY you're missing out on a lot of awesome gifs.

ANNYEONG!!!

LISTING AWAY: From Page to Screen

Here. I am offering up this beautifully long post in the hopes that it will compensate appropriately for the morbid lack of activity in this space. Believe me, it was not intentional. And for some reason, this list took longer than I’d imagined and I ended up falling asleep on the keyboard and jerked awake in the wee hours of morning with half the letters imprinted on my face.

I hope you find the punishment the bloggerverse conspired to inflict upon me, suitable for my grievous crimes.

Adaptations that broke my heart because they were the consummate apotheosis of their literary parent

1. The Help
2. The Secret Life Of Bees
3. The Book Thief
4. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
5. The Boy in Striped Pajamas
6. The Perks of Being A Wallflower
7. To Kill A Mockingbird
8. The Outsiders
9. The Hunger Games
10. The Lord of the Rings (I’m not so hot about The Hobbit trilogy, though)
11. The Kite Runner

 Adaptations that surprisingly surpassed their literary parent

1. The Princess Diaries
2. P.S. I Love You (The book’s still a DNF)
3. The Sisterhood of Travelling Pants
4. A Walk To Remember
5. The Time-Traveller’s Wife (I despised the book)
6. Stardust

 Adaptations that made me add the literary parent to my TBR pile

1. Everything is Illuminated (Lord, I need to read this real quick.)
2. Les Miserables (GOD, yes)
3. Memoirs of a Geisha (Why, why haven’t I still read it?)
4. A Series Of Unfortunate Events
5. True Grit
6. The Maze Runner
7. War Horse
8. Bend it like Beckham

 Adaptations that made their literary parent proud

1. Warm Bodies
2. Diary of a Wimpy Kid (only #1 and #2 - Let’s face it, Dog Days sucked)
3. Harry Potter (#1 - #3)
4. I Am Number Four
5. The Golden Compass
6. Speak
7. If I Stay
8. Gone Girl
9. Ender’s Game
10. My Sister’s Keeper (There’s that thing with alternative ending though)
11. Pride and Prejudice (UK version, 2005)
12. Sense and Sensibility (1995)
13. Divergent
14. Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (well, sort of – I’m kinda partial to Magnus Bane)
15. Life Of Pi
16. One Day
17. The Da Vinci Code
18. Angels and Demons

 Adaptations that I am literally dying to see but haven’t already

1. Looking For Alibrandi (please god please)
2. Pride and Prejudice (BBC version)
3. Insurgent
4. Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (and the reason why I haven’t seen it yet is probably because it’s R-rated and banned, but I’ve heard rave reviews)
5. Never Let Me Go
6. The Scarlet Letter (1934)
7. Gone with the Wind (maybe I should read the book first?)
8. Paper Towns
9. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
10. Notes on a Scandal
11. The Namesake
12. Jane Eyre

 Adaptations that make me want to fling it on the screen playwright’s/director’s face

1. Will whoever wrote the screenplay and directed the Percy Jackson movies please stand up?
2. Harry Potter (#4 through #8 – I have some unresolved screenplay issues)
3. The Host
4. Eragon
5. The Fault in our Stars (sorry, not sorry – but they slathered cheese all over it)
6. Dear John (For some reason, I was mostly insulted by how much I didn’t like the movie – even though with the Tatum/Seyfried pair I should have, by all rights)

If you think I have missed a book or two, or classified a book/movie under an undeserving list, please do let me know. And do recommend! Most probably, I would be labouring under the delusion that my favourite book still hasn’t been turned into a movie yet and if that’s the case, I demand to know ASAP.

The Perils Of Being A Fangirl

Here. This post is the raison d’être of my blog. This post is the one in which many of you will share a sense of camaraderie with me. This post will show you that YOU. ARE. NOT. ALONE.

And that it’s okay to be obsessed. You know, as long as it’s not drugs, or sex, or underground cults. 

(Note: Does anyone know the gender neutral term for FANGIRL? And please don’t tell me it’s FAN – as far as I am concerned, that word is an umbrella term, not a synonym. And I beg your pardon while I treat this post from the view point of fangirls specifically – it’s a shame I don’t know more fanboys personally.)

1. Risk of Degradation of 20/20 Vision

Due to –

(a) All that late-night reading under your blanket with a torch, because you don’t want your parents to catch you up past your bedtime and risk unleashing their wrath in the corporeal form of THAT’S IT NO MORE BOOKS

(b) TV show marathons as a reward for academic excellence (which is code for surviving through exams avoiding all your guilty pleasures)

(c) Excessive social networking – especially when the other fangirl you’re with over the miracle called the Internet, is in another time-zone, depriving you of sleep

2. Catching Up On Deprived Sleep During The Daytime Especially During Class HoursAnd Zombie-Walking Through The Rest

Due to the above mentioned.

3. Lack of Non-Fictional Romantic Life

Reading too many books starring heroes of the fantastically perfect variety, or watching too many TV shows with the same category of protagonists can affect the average reader to such a degree of romantic sterilization of the mundane sort by raising par of male excellence. (Or if you swing the other way, then female excellence.)

4. Managing All Your Social Network Accounts

I swear. This is a talent that is gifted to a fangirl, upon her baptism into this community. How else do you explain the superhuman memory and multitasking capabilities involved in remembering all your ten thousand usernames and passwords, who you last chatted or tweeted with, and maintaining an unbroken comment thread to avoid any non-civil interactions?

5. Empty Wallets

For those of you out there, whose financial aspects are still governed by a superior authority of the parental sort, then you have limitations (like me) on how much merchandise you can own. You resort to pinning wishlists and loaded virtual carts on your Pinterest boards and bookmarks bar, and just staring at what could have been on your laptop screen. When that happens, you turn to –

6. Your DIY Skills and Photoshop Expertise

However deplorable they may be, we have that shoddy wad of bookmarks made by hands smelling of Fevicol, t-shirts we spent that last batch of fabric paint on, and folders (both digitally and otherwise) filled with our own edits and sketches.

7. The Need to Celebrate Holidays Unknown to Mere Mortals/Mundanes/Muggles

We have reminders on our mobile phones and of course, in case they fail, we also have the ever-reliable power of the online fangirl-hood to remind us when to eat only blue food or randomly scream DEATH TO DEATHEATERS or whatever.

8. Research and Intellectual Debates

We are never happy knowing what we already know. We thirst to read up on all the different versions of backstories of the various characters, the author’s perspective on how (s)he chose all the proper nouns in the book, and then unwittingly become party to raging wars on whether or not a particular character is a hero or a villain or other civil debates. If you’re talking about a TV show, then it goes without saying that unless and until we’ve dug up bloopers and the actors’ Wikipedia pages, we’re never going to attain closure.

9. Shipping Through Choppy Seas

This is mostly self-explanatory. The FEELS fuelling our primal fangirl instincts to keep calm and continue shipping canon and headcanon ships in the face of tempests exacts a heavy toll on our head in the form of acute headaches that only tear-stained pillows can cure. Speaking of which – 

10. Tears Both Shed And Unshed

I have always maintained that a significant percentage of the average global tear-level has been contributed by the tear ducts of fangirls. To cry, clutching the damned book in your arms or after watching that tragic final episode of a Korean drama series, is an occupational hazard.

11. HANGOVERS, MAN. Hangovers.

It’s not enough that we’ve been cursed to harbouring eternal feels for a series (book or TV), but we’ve also been damned with being left to our own devices to deal with that inexplicable limbo stage of our life that follows after the final episode or chapter. We then face the big question – WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

We feel as if we’re trapped in a tunnel, the vision of closure mocking at us in the far-off distance. Comfort Food, Comfort Reading selected passages, and Comfort Replaying selected scenes becomes the norm for some days.

And I will thank Ron Weasley to define what being a fangirl truly means (courtesy of Tumblr) – 

20 Things You May Not Know About Me

Once upon a time, in a pretty large town called Buttlazyville, a babe was born. Before long she was elected Mayor of Buttlazyville. The Mayor happens to be yours truly. The End.

There happens to be a reason for the above anecdote. Skylar @ Life Of A Random tagged me sometime in December LAST YEAR, and it took five months and an Easter weekend to finally inspire me to make a move and bring forth this post unto you, Bloggerverse.

1. How tall are you?

I am a 157cm (approx. 5’2”) high pile of awesomeness. Yes, I know that translates to “short” and if you read this post, you’ll know exactly how I’m dealing with that irrefutable fact.

2. Do you have a hidden talent? If so, what?

There’s something you should know about me. Any and all talents I possess are guaranteed to be known to all mankind (or I make sure of that). And when I say ALL MANKIND I mean people in my Freemasons circle (like I care about the opinion of anyone else). Ooh there’s Talent #1: Dramatic Exaggeration In The Name Of Poetic License. You should read my Twitter (or not).

What else? I can waggle my ears and wiggle my brows. I can say the Periodic Table up to 20 elements in my sleep. I can also tell untrue stories pretty convincingly – the few times I’ve tried to con people, BOY did they fall. (But I also happen to be pretty gullible, so I think it’s safe to say the last one comes at a price.)

3. What is your biggest blog-related pet peeve?

The right to answer this question would demand the prerequisite that you visit other blogs besides your own. I don’t. And that’s not because I have a bigger head than my butt, but because my college ensures I don’t moonlight my way out of the academic shit-pile they’ve dumped on us.

(But if you still want to hear it, I’ll repeat Skylar’s answer – it truly annoys me when people don’t reply to comments. Then again, I have as many followers as there are roses in the Sahara, so I may not understand the logistics of commenting on blogs with legions of followers.)

4. What's your biggest non-blog-related pet peeve?

People judging others. People judging me. Me judging everyone else.

5. What is your favorite song?

I do have a favourite song, but it’s kind of personal so I’ll just go with a small list instead (since I can’t pick one) that’s on loop in my head these days –

Antarctica – Hands Like Houses

Love Me Like You Do – Ellie Goulding (No, I haven’t seen the movie, I just like this lady a lot)

Elastic Heart – Sia

Runaway – Aurora

Beg For It – Iggy Azalea

No Good In Goodbye – The Script

Dark Side – Kelly Clarkson

Good Life – One Republic

…. And the entire OST album from the Korean series The Heirs

6. What is your favorite Etsy shop that isn't yours?

7. What is your favorite way to spend free time when you're not alone?

Movie nights, TV marathons, and Youtube. There, that’s time well spent.

8. What is your favorite junk food?

Oily, MSG-containing potato chips, spicy tapioca chips, jackfruit chips, ghatia – they all work. Fortunately for my heath, the above gif holds good for this question as well and I’m a bigger miser than an eater, which is why I’m still alive and healthy and not at risk of entering the Guinness Book of Records for heaviest person ever.

9. Do you have a pet or pets? If so, what kind, and what are their names?

Oh. You meant non-fictional pets? I have a fish tank in which the population is declining rapidly despite mine and my dad's best efforts. And some potted plants. The End.

10. What are your number one favorite nonfiction and fiction books?

SHUT. UP.

11. What is your favorite beauty product?

My Kajal-stick. That’s because the only cosmetically salvageable physical feature is my eyes and also because I look like I have jaundice (or something) without kohl underlining my eyes.

12. When were you last embarrassed? What happened?

You know, if I actually did keep a list of all the embarrassing things I’ve done – that are known and unknown to me – it could wrap around the earth’s middle THRICE. I’m sadly not even exaggerating.

Fortunately for me, I’m pretty good at supressing bad memories. And fortunately for all ye that seek companionship in misery, if you’re willing to ignore the whole  Most Recent Embarrassment clause, I’ll regale you with an incident that I’ve made my peace with. (Meaning, I no longer feel the irrational need to bury myself alive ten feet underground).

I am undeniably, unequivocally clumsy. It’s like my feet have a mind of their own. So, for most of the time my feet are in contact with the ground, I have subconsciously reserved a portion of my busy brain to JUST CONCENTRATE ON MY LEGWORK. But, obviously Mr. Murphy wasn’t too happy that his law was being ineffective in my life. And, there I was in class one day, bending over to pick up my bag from the bench. I successfully picked it up, and threw it over my shoulders. I may have misjudged its weight and my shoulders weren’t ready to deal with it and somehow my feet tripped on the legs of the bench and suddenly I was falling backwards.

Now this is the craziest part. A sane person would grab on anything and try to pull herself upright before she actually landed on her ass. Not me. There was a bench right behind me so I thought I’ll just fall onto it and try not to look like I’d tripped but that I I’d purposefully sat on it. What I did not realize was that there was a guy already sitting on it.

And then there was this deafening silence while I leaped up from the poor boy’s lap and apologized profusely. He still hadn’t regained his power of speech when I ran from the classroom that had erupted in laughter and catcalls.

13. If you could only drink one beverage (besides water) what would it be?

Coffee, please. I have zero shame in admitting I’m a caffeine-addict.

14. What's your favorite movie?

15. What were you in high school: prom queen, nerd, cheerleader, jock, valedictorian, band geek, loner, artist, prep?

Not applicable to me – I didn’t study in the sort of high school Hollywood propagates. For the sake of, I’ll say nerd. But not a member of the nerd group that wears thick rimmed glasses and lugs around tomes of extra reading material, but the kind that sits around fangirling, pulling pranks on each other and then inexplicably acing through exams. Teachers love us, cheergirls hi-five us, and everyone acknowledges that we’re crazy and smart and aliens undercover.

16. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live?

Please. PLEASE TAKE ME TO HOGWARTS. I’M BEGGING YOU.

17. PC or Mac?
Pfft. Utility over fashion statements. PCs over Macs.

18. Last romantic gesture from a crush, date, boy/girlfriend, spouse?

I’m sorry, could you please hold while I refer my secret diary? Hang on – oops, sorry – But Dear Diary informs me I’ve got NON-EXISTENT ROMANTIC HISTORY so that’s that and let’s move on already, alright?

19. Favorite celebrity?

I have a thing for actresses who kick wizard asses, tribute asses and Erudite asses in reel life and regular asses in real life. Read Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence and Shailene Woodley. And David Archuleta (that’s another story for another time, folks).

20. What blogger friends do you secretly want to be best friends with?

Hey, this is unfair, alright? First off, there aren’t all that many blogs that I keep track of and the ones I do, we’re already virtual BFFs. And there are others with wonderfully weird, crazily stupid, and bookishly obsessed bloggers that I do want to be besties with, but alas. My academic life ensures I don’t have time for socializing over the internet.

Phew. It's done. OMG THIS POST IS FINALLY DONE. Skylar, you awesome thing, thank you for tagging me and sorry for the delay. And all you amazing people out there - THERE IS NO SHAME IN TAGGING YOURSELF. Go on, do it, and open yourself up a little more.

 I dare you.