Your Ex-Lover Is Dead Dance - Aaron Sampson & Alina Cooper

So I Read This Awesome Book...

Let me start from the beginning.. I read this book a while ago.  It really opened my eyes up to love.  Not like romantic love.. necessarily.. but, you know, all kinds of love.  It's called "The 5 Love Languages."

*insert fancy introduction music here

This book is literally AMAZING.  I think for the next few posts I do I'm going to basically go over what the book talks about because it has been so inspiring for me and I think everyone should read it.  I'm going to take a step into the LDS, Mormon world for a moment.  Growing up in the church you're always to to be kind to those around you: in fact, our second great commandment is to love thy neighbor as thyself.  That is a pretty big deal.  So.. what?  Do we just say out loud that we love everyone and it's done?

NO!

Seriously, if that was it we would all feel loved and we would all be happy.  Life would be great.  Roses, Daisies, Chocolate, Meadows of Four-Leaf Clover.  There wouldn't be so much divorce.  There wouldn't be so much division between parent and child.  There wouldn't be angry feelings towards friends.  There wouldn't be homeless people on the street.  I mean, as a world, we would be a lot better off if it was THAT easy.  So.. what it is?

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages: we are not speaking the same languages.  Take me and my brother for example: YES, we both loved each other, but he was trying to tell me in Chinese and I was trying to tell him in French.  It just wasn't catching on at all on either end.

Get ready, write this down, now.

The 5 Love Languages:
1. Quality Time
2. Words of Affirmation
3. Acts of Service
4. Physical Touch
5. Receiving Gifts

It's that simple.  You see, we can all respond to each of these languages, but each of us has a primary language and a secondary language and the rest don't really make a difference.

We've got to fill our love tanks.

Let's create a scenario.. my love tank is running on empty.  Izaak, my gorgeous brother, gives me a bear hug (obvious form of physical touch.)  My engine dies.  Without a doubt, physical touch is NOT high on my list of languages.  Instead, Izaak and I sit down and watch a movie together (quality time), BAM! 5 gallons added to my tank and I feel much better!  In this thrill of a good attitude I rush over to Subway to buy my family dinner and pick up one of their delicious cookies for my brother Marcus, DING DING DING!!!  Marcus's love tank is full do to Receiving a Gift (a COOKIE!)  Marcus feels so splendid that he turns to my dad and tells him his bald head id just looking so wonderfully spherical and gorgeous and my dad's face lights up with pure joy that someone noticed his new haircut! (Words of Affirmation!)  In his good spirits he picks up all of our dishes and cleans them before my mom even gets a chance.. act of service? I think so.  My mom is happy.  My dad is happy. Marcus is happy.  I am happy. I run and give Izaak a huge loving bear hug, Izaak is happy.  We are a happy family. THE END.

Okay, so I may have slightly exaggerated it.  But there it is.  Who would've ever thought that gifts were not my thing?  Yeah, I took the quiz (which you can find at http://www.5lovelanguages.com ) and apparently gifts don't fill up my tank.  Quality time on the other hand is a huge boost to my good spirits.  I feel loved.

How many times have you heard of that wife who makes dinner for her husband every night and makes sure the house is clean and tries to make him happy and its just not enough?  Or the kid who doesn't feel loved by his mother because she never played a game with him?  It's real.  It totally makes sense.

So now I'm up at 10:30 on a Tuesday night writing about my love for this book.  It's seriously changed my outlook on life.

So you love someone.
Love is an act.
What're you going to DO about it?

Alina Lauren Cooper

Kiss..

So apparently yesterday was Kiss A Dancer Day.. totally missed that priceless opportunity. Bummer. :)

Alina Lauren..

Happy-Go-Lucky

So I was driving down the street yesterday and just feeling wonderful.  I felt good.  Like so good I was just smiling and stuff.  I felt like one of those girls in those movies where it just goes through one of her days and everything is just perfectly in line and wonderful and she's just smiling like some sort of weirdo.

I mean, school had gone great. I went to get gas and the guy and the cash register told me I had a beautiful smile.  I got $0.10 off each gallon of gas I got. The radio was playing my favorite songs all in a row (which never happens.)  I was headed off to dance class, which is always a good thing. I didn't have any homework.  I had been working in the theater the past few days and got to learn how to use the light board for the first time. My teachers were very proud of my performance in my dance classes at school.  I had a quiz that morning in video design that I felt great about.  I mean everything was just basically PERFECT.

. . . And I'm blonde so that happy-go-lucky look was really totally working for me.  I could've popped straight out of a movie. For real.  And then I realized.. that's always how the movie starts.. and then BAM. The character's world is shattered so you can have some fancy plot-line that interests the reader or viewer.

So now I'm a skeptic.. life can't be all that good, right?

It's like the calm awesomeness before the storm.

I wish I could say.. "my spidey senses are tingling.." but unfortunately I'm not an awesome character out of a movie or book that has any kind of special senses, but I'm on the lookout for disaster so I can avoid it as best I can.

I love being happy-go-lucky!

And on that note.. my spring break last week was wonderful and I'm just the happiest person in the world.

Before dance class.

Alina Lauren.. :)

Dance Presentation

Being a Dance Production major we've been really analyzing dance and design on stage. The more we analyze the "in general" aspects of performance the more I analyze my own relationship with dance.

I like ballet. Let's be honest. And I also dislike modern, except for the strengthening factor, but the performing factor sucks. Ballet is all about projecting yourself to an audience: proper posture, head high, open attitude. Modern is all about your "inner self:" contractions, pulling away from the audience, hiding from reality... Or facing reality head on?

I guess I feel like getting on stage and dancing for yourself and your poverty and your sadness and how you've been wronged is all kind of.. Arrogant and selfish. Don't get me wrong, there is a time and place for sad choreography and performance; however, when I get in a stage and dance for an audience it is really all for them,and I feel a lot more successful in the end.

Consider it a happy, feel-good perspective but I can't stand having to be subject to people's performances where all they can they about is them.

Coding

So I've been trying out this new "Do-It-Yourself" website for coding and I love it! Absolutely love it! In fact I love it so much I've been playing around with the HTML involved in this post. I can make my words...
bold
italic

change the color

or change the size and font.

This is SO cool!

Honestly I'm really learning to appreciate the hard work it takes to make a computer's programs work.  I'm hoping that at some point I will really be able to understand all the behind the scenes computer stuff.

Its odd.  I am SO dedicated to the arts because of the emotions and feelings involved.  I love more abstract stuff.  That's "my thing."  But I'm really finding this logical stuff fascinating.  I mean, its fun to have something that you have to think deeply about in a more "number-crunching" analysis type way.

http://www.codecademy.com/#

Try it.

Alina Lauren!

Classy

Although I am an avid believer in being a classy, young lady with pastel colors adorning my room and floral arrangements at every corner I sometimes find myself channeling my energy elsewhere.  In all honesty, one can only be upstanding and proper so often.  There have to be moments of fun, excitement, and craziness!  I found this picture today...

This is me and my very, very wonderfully good friend LeeAnn Spencer.  Honestly, she is probably the person I am the most crazy with. Easily. Really there's no question in my mind.  

In a lot of ways people might think there is no way we fit together as friends and in a lot of ways they might be right.  But who's to say anybody knows what type of friends are the right friends and what type are the wrong friends.  Are there wrong friends?  I mean, I can bring out LeeAnn's classy, lady-like girly side sometimes!  Even though most of the time she brings out my.. odd, unusual, wack, "awesome" side.

I don't really know where I'm going with this.  I just found this picture and it got me thinking...

I LOVE THIS GIRL. She's the best.  And although we don't exactly see eye-to-eye 94% of the time we really get along well anyway.  And we're awesome.

I love you sister!

Really though.

Recently I've been remembering memories not seemingly worth remembering.  I am reminded through friends of histories I had completely unremembered.  I'm not sure if I willingly forced these thoughts out of my mind in the absence of necessary remembrance or if I tried to avoid the unnecessary memories that had carved out a space in my mind filled with important memories that were immediately necessary.

That's confusing.

In other words, did I forget these memories on purpose or did they just really not matter at all?

An honest answer?  I don't know.

Regardless of being reminded of things I didn't necessarily want to remember I realized that more than half of our life isn't actually stored away in our heads.  We may never remember something we experienced that was critical in someone else's mind.  Literally, what percentage of our life do we actually remember?

AND (even more scary) how much of it have we changed and manipulated in our minds?  Our perception isn't perfect and neither is anyone else's so how much of reality is actually real?

Freaky to think about, huh?

Mind. Blown.

Tune in next time for some more of Alina's random thoughts!