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What do you love?
I'm more than pleasantly buzzed right now so apologies ahead of time, but y'all need to know that my husband is a delight. It's been over 10 years, and we're still together, still happy, and still very much in love. He's awesome.
What do you love?
Acts of human serendipity.
Across all media, there is one specific snippit of a scene that I consider to be my personal favorite, and that is the point in Les Miserables where Jean Valjean has been caught stealing silverware from Bishop Myriel and is brought back to return them, only for the Bishop to give more of his silver and telling him that it was the price he paid to make Valjean into an honest man.
Understanding, empathy, sympathy, forgiveness, generosity, altruism, goodwill and good faith in general - those are the things I love the most. They are the building blocks and the tools we must use in order to create the future we want to live in. So whenever I see it it makes me happy. Even if it's the small things like buying a stranger a drink.
I remember reading that scene as a child; it's been stuck in my imagination so clearly ever since.
Whenever I think of magnificent gifts, I think of Harper Lee's friends gifting her one year's worth of salary so she could take time off to write whatever she wished.
I am glad for you!
The thing I love the most is silence, something that is not always available where I come from. Silence is like a blank canvas where I can put anything I want, including but not limited to more silence. In silence I am calmer, I can hear my own thoughts and ruminate on them with no rush. I'm happy in a sea of silence.
I also enjoy high doses of solitude, for similar reasons.
Because of that, I love the night, it is when I recharge. I don't cherish a conventional agenda. I don't think I would mind being a security guard if that meant being paid to be up all night.
I love my dogs, what would I do without dogs? They're wonderful.
I love my fiancée, how could I not love her? Too much to put into words.
I love my parents, they give me nothing but love and support.
I love Tildes, it's hard to find people with a certain sensibility, but I'm a centaur and Tildes is full of those -- where else will I find people who love poetry as much as they love math?
I love my house, even though it is so imperfect, and I love taking care of it.
I love technology. It never escapes to me how far technology has evolved, and how crazy it is for me to have lived through so many changes. I used to watch VHS tapes on a tube 14" TV, and I was so happy to have it! My grandpa had a short-wave radio and we listened to the BBC in English, and it was such an alien and fascinating experience to hear people from another continent speaking a language I couldn't understand! Now I do that every time I open YouTube.
Earlier today I grilled a steak and it was so perfect I wanted to call people to talk about it.
So many things that I love, really. So many things.
The bit on silence reads like art to me
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A centaur is "a creature with the head, arms, and torso of a man and the body and legs of a horse". I used it to refer to people made of highly distinct "parts", or apparently contradictory traits, such as those who are, for example, equally enthused by both poetry and math.
Edit: In other words, lots of people in arts and humanities are resentful and prejudiced against STEM, and a lot of STEM people have similar sentiment towards humanities and arts. It's nice to be around people who values the "opposing" side.
As those of you with good memories can attest, I'm a bit of a car nut and while I love cars and building them and all that comes with it, I want to be specific about something here. Except for sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, which I haven't had to do regularly for years now, I love driving a manual transmission. There's just something about the interactions required, the control over what the car is doing, the tasks that must be done to get from one gear to another, to accelerate at a desired pace, to set off from a stop, to be at the torque peak coming out of a corner, on and on. Even just driving normally from one place to another the visceral interactions required are just incredibly enjoyable for me compared to how utterly boring an automatic (transmission or otherwise) can be. Looking at old photos, since 2019 I've been without a working manual transmission vehicle and it pains me every time I take a favored onramp or sweeping curve in my automatic Honda Accord grandma car.
"The Guys" - The three of us together have been through thick and thin, from sleeping on each other's couches when we each individually had nowhere else to live to helping build new lives. Marriages, divorces, birth of children, death of parents, celebrating triumphs, picking each other up after defeats. I've known these men for more than 2/3 of my life so far and it's a fraction that'll only get larger as time passes. There's not a damn thing in the world I wouldn't do for them.
My wife - We initially met under unusual circumstances, didn't exchange contact info to keep in touch, then met again under a different set of unusual circumstances and have been at each other's side ever since. There's not a single person I've ever just meshed with so immediately. She has a direct line to my funny bone and I to hers. We are straightforward, honest, loving. She's witty, intelligent, wonderful, and drop dead gorgeous. Our individual strengths and weaknesses are balanced with the other. We have pillow talk and inside jokes that are so convoluted, outlandish, and have their own made up backstories that to explain them would be like trying to explain Primer. We are the annoyingly happy couple. We don't fight or argue, we don't have anything to complain about to join the conversation when others air grievances about their spouses. We have differences in opinion or approaches, sure, but they aren't points of contention or impact our relationship. If there's something bothering one of us, we bring it up with the other instead of letting it fester. We sincerely apologize if one of us slights the other and if it's not apparent we discuss why we felt that way. She is simply amazing and my life would be worse off in every imaginable way without her in it.
I really love the banjo. I will preface this by saying I really don't look like I like the banjo, and I don't like a lot of the things usually associated with banjo - I'm really more of a metal head, I don't like most country music, and I'm nowhere near the U.S. south. But in college I tried to learn the guitar, and made a friend that had a banjo in the corner of their apartment. I asked to play it on a whim, and oh my god - it was like dancing for the first time, but with my hands instead of my feet. I love the sound of the strings reverberating off of the drum head, and I love how bouncy the strings feel, especially with scruggs style blue-grass. I ended up going back to that friend's house every couple of days to play with my new obsession, until I could get one of my own.
My banjo playing has never gone beyond my living room, but anytime I'm feeling tired or blue or just lacking feelings at all - I like to sit down in my little corner I have set up and pluck my banjo for a while. It doesn't usually sound great, but it never fails to put a smile on my face :) When I play, I immediately forget about how things are going or what I'm worrying about, and I focus entirely on dancing with my hands.
Also, @kfwyre, I gotta say I love this question and I'm excited to see what loves my fellow internet neighbors have to share.
Man, everything. But let me water it down to the things that have previously made me feel absolute utter joy, the kind of "wow, I feel complete and happy right now" feeling.
I could go on…
Music. One of the few things I consider myself to be is a musician, even if it is a private practice. I had a rough start in a pretty bogus choir program, and a competition-oriented band program my freshman year, but eventually got to the minimum of where I want to be musically. Between instruments (guitar, mandolin, ukulele) and making electronic music.
I love learning about it, making it, and listening to it. The best thing I can do with a spare bit of time is grab a ukulele, guitar or mandolin and pluck away at it, and the second best thing I can do is find an album that just clicks.
I love dancing. I talk about it too much. I love movement, and exercise, because I love to feel in touch with my body. My senses are the gateway to appreciating the world; the "views" and all associated feelings that open up in front of me as I travel. I rarely feel more alive than when I'm active, whether that's in a dance, on a bike ride, or while climbing a mountain. It reminds me of all the opportunities ahead of me.
Amen! Have you tried ice skating? ;)
Not since I was very young. There's actually an ice rink down the street from me, so I could give it a shot! I do have this idyllic image in my mind of ice skating on a frozen lake or river, though that hasn't been realistic around here for about a century. :P
I love colorful sunsets and sunrises. I always think of them as unique to me. Like I can be sitting with other people and we can all be loving the sunset, but I think we are seeing and experiencing different things, and so it almost feels like a gift tailored to me specifically. It's the one time where I feel beautifully special. Not only do I love their brilliance, but I love that I can empty myself into them - I am mesmerized, turned into love itself without effort.
I love large moons rising over dark ocean beaches. There's the anticipation as it first crests the horizon, the awe as it reveals all it's glory, and then the best part, the part I love, the light. All that light playing off the water and illuminating the shoreline. I love the way it makes me feel like a child up past bedtime doing something secret. It makes me skip and dance and twirl and play. I love love love the moments spent with the moon.
Learning
I'm usually always trying to teach myself something or taking some sort of class. There are times where I wish I could just attend university full time taking on different fields and disciplines, or work on the job at different places. I never believe I am unable to learn or do something if I have enough time (or money) to take it on. It doesn't matter if it something physical or intellectual, I am happy to try anything at least once. I'm not particularly keen on pop-documentaries or YouTube channels, unless I need a surface level intro to something, but would rather jump into the nitty gritty lecture style or research papers.
One day a new drawer in my head was opened and I suddenly discovered I love tanks and tank destroyers and armoured cars and all sorts of weird vehicles inbetween. The weirder, the better, particularly if there's an interesting backstory involved. The Vickers Independent, the TOG II, the SMK, the Kolohousenka, the Ram II, the Schutzenpanzer Lang, the KV-7, the Panzer 58, the Rooikat, the Panhard EBR...and there are so many more fun and wacky machines still out there to discover.
I've never thought about it, but learning about Tanks must be the ultimate geek hobby. It's extremely broad, there are tanks that get designed and never come to be produced, and they are filled with interesting and unique implementations of a large number of interesting features, most of which will be implemented with some ingenious mechanical device. Plus I'm sure that a lot of the newest stuff is very hush-hush, so you literally can't know what the current state of the art really is.
I'd imagine it's the same kind of satisfaction I got when I learned that Europe, Southeast Asia, and the USSR all had unique markets for incompatable home computers; it was like an infinite well of interesting historical information you never had access to for the simple reason of never thinking to ask about them.
I think the appeal of tanks is that even the most modern tanks are still very much feats of basic mechanics and engineering. They can be highly complex, but you don't need a degree to understand tanks and they're largely controlled by humans in a more direct and straightforward manner, unlike jets and airplanes for example.
Pets in general. But also my neighbor’s cat. He sits out of the sidewalk. When you approach he’ll get really comfy and make a weird cat noise indicating his demand for being pet. I frequently see people stopping to pet him. It’s always so wholesome, like a grandmother and granddaughter on a stroll talking a cat petting break. He’s a good cat.
Awwwwwww.
(That is so sweet. Coming from anyone else, I would find it almost sickeningly disgusting. But you exude so much personal warmth, even through this simple site, and it seems so genuinely you, that I am actually touched.)
For me? Doing fun new things, or going fun new places, with my kid.
I'm in the process of finding out what I actually love. I don't think I know what I actually love and I have always had a hard time with that question. Besides certain people and that can be difficult too. I don't think I really know who I am.