Stream-of-Consciousness

This will just be a blog entry that reflects on my thoughts and activities over the course of the past few days.
I had been looking at this Smitten Sketching dress from Modcloth, which my friend sent me the link to:

I love that this dress is so romantic! The ModCloth website advertises that this dress is meant to "show the world that you're in love with love. So I think that I, who am so much in love with love, is made to wear this dress to represent that passion. I plan to wear this dress when I am deep into a relationship and on a date since I always like to double my clothes and activity (particularly for photography purposes). I love that the dress says, "Hello, Beautiful" and "Kiss me." I love the beautiful black-haired lady that is paired with the black-haired guy. The heart-shaped cut in the back completes the romance of the dress! I definitely want to buy this dress when I have the money! However, letting go of my current unhealthy shopaholic impulse to buy the dress also made me feel better. I do know that this dress is on my list for the future! After all, I need a dress that showcases the romantic dimension of my persona.
I love print clothing that tells a story! That is why I love the brand, Storybook Knits! My platonic guy friend told me that the brand name. Storybook Knits sounds like it was designed just for me! I have one Storybook Knits sweater.
Reading "Kiss me" on the Smitten Sketching dress reminded me of the song, "Kiss Me" by Sixpence None the Richer. I saw the official video for the first time and was very surprised to find that clips of She's All That, which features the song is in it.

I loved Freddie Prinze, Jr. in the movie! He was my high school dreamboat--caring, sweet, romantic overachiever!
Well, I see that I have implemented a stream-of-consciousness in this blog entry. There is something else that I wanted to mention. Today I wore one of my cupcake dresses for the first time and took a picture with an Easter cupcake from Natale's. I had to include this in this entry since I love cupcakes!

Schoolgirl Innocence

I have come to realize that a girl that has never had a boyfriend has a schoolgirl innocence. I will provide a lengthy definition of this term, which I hope to have coined, in this blog entry.
I would like to start off by stating that I still have the schoolgirl innocence, even at this age, since I have never been in a relationship in my life. So that is why I decided to dedicate a blog entry to this topic.

Schoolgirl innocence involves approaching the world with the wide-eyed curiosity of a child. A girl is often idealistic and thinks about love and relationships through a romantic, idealistic, point of view, perceiving it like a fairy tale. The girl often is prone to blushing and gushing. She thinks of love and marriage as a "happily ever after." She usually wishes to remain a virgin until marriage although she may find that once she has a relationship, it is not practical. One of my relatives has told me a lot about what she and her friends visualized as schoolgirls in conservative India. One concrete example is that when you have a zit in the middle of the bridge of your nose, you will be in love.

I will also define the schoolgirl crush. A schoolgirl crush is when you have a crush on a boy and build him up to an ideal in your head. You blush at the thought and mention of him. You may write poetry about your love.
A romantic relationship really grows you up. You learn the difference between real and fairy tale love. You learn to compromise and be independent. I have found that constant fighting  and tears are common experiences among couples. In the soap opera, One Life to Live, Marcie said that before she fell in love, she thought of love as swooning, but that it was really about having a best friend that you wait for to tell everything. Someone told me that a virgin is noticeably different from a woman that has had sex as sex is a big change in one's life, that I am still noticeably innocent. Another person told me that a certain maturity comes about you after having sex. When I was in high school, my closest friend, like me, did not date, We then had very similar ideals about life and about love. She, like me, was prone to blushing and giggling and idealizing love and marriage. However, in college, she started to have serious relationships while I remained cut off from the dating zone. Now she is completely different than in high school. I do not know exactly what her experiences with love are, but she is no longer innocent and idealistic and more practical and condones pre-marital sex, unlike before. In college, the best friend that I made had already been in several serious long-term relationships and so did not have that schoolgirl innocence when I met her. I had another close friend in college that like me, did not date. So she and I had very similar personalities and really clicked. However, I found that after college when she started dating, she changed a lot and was no longer wide-eyed and quite independent. At this age, I am the only person that I know that is left with this schoolgirl innocence, being unique in never having a relationship. I have, however, tried to learn from what I have observed from other people's experiences.

Romance

I once took a quiz on Facebook, "Which personality trait stands out most in you?" and predicted a result before I received it: romance! Exactly in that word form! I have always been a true romantic at heart...

Most girls go through a phase where they hate boys in elementary school. If I remember clearly, I may have gone through that phase, but for a very short time. I remember liking boys (platonically) and wishing I could be friends with them when most girls hated them. I remember when I was just five years old asking my Mom whether I could marry my friend's brother. I remember one strong crush in elementary school on this other guy. That was the first time that I felt the gushy feeling and butterflies in my stomach. I always secretly loved the jump rope game, "Down in the valley where the green grass grows" and hoping that the girls would say the name of the boy I liked for the person that kissed me on the cheek in the song! I was so disappointed the one time that I played that game with the girls during recess, and the bell rang right before the girls could choose a name of a boy for me!

I loved games of imagining love like that. I went to boarding school, a very romantic idea in itself, in India in eighth grade with the hopes of finding an Indian boyfriend--a hope that was far from being fulfilled to put it very lightly! There was this game that us boarding schoolgirls played, which started during one secret midnight party where we matched boyfriends for each other and from then onwards teased each other about them! It was very interesting since it showed how different girls in India at that age were from girls in America. I went from one world in seventh grade of kids going out for a day and making out to conservative schoolgirls shy at the prospect of love, but dreaming it up and toying with it! I never told anyone this, but I loved the game that we played of matching with boys & teasing each other! At the beginning, people told me that I was so lucky that I was not getting teased, but I felt so unlucky! Then when I finally got teased, I showed that I was mad on the outside while blushing and being thrilled on the inside!

The same went when I came back to school in America when I surprisingly got teased about being matched with a guy in my class whom I had never before thought of in that way. I showed on the outside anger, but just loved that game of an imaginary prospect on the inside! I would be thrilled whenever anyone teased me about him. It was surprising to me that this teasing would happen in America where people did not have to make up and imagine and could just implement romance in action.
Now I will write about the loves of my life. When I say love, I do not mean it literally, but guys whom I have had deep infatuations for. My first love was a guy that I hated at first. He was the Prince Charming of our class whom all the girls pined for. I, on the other hand, was at the other end of the popularity spectrum. This aforementioned guy made fun of me all the time. However, at the end of the year, he asked me to be his friend, which I unofficially accepted. He kept flirting with me after that, and he was so charming that I fell for him. Far from being in a relationship with him, I never told him how I felt. But he did tell me, "I love you." It so happened that I left school after that, before anything could happen between us officially. It just made me feel so wonderful that he felt the same way about me that I felt for him, what I thought was a rarity at that time. My second love was a guy that I met much later in life. He was everything that I dreamed of in every way imaginable. I had a typical schoolgirl crush on him and built him up as the perfect guy in my head. However, he did not wish to be more than friends with me. I never told him how I felt about him, but I was heartbroken when I found out through actions that he did not feel the way about me that I felt about him. I remember that the first thing that made me feel better was going to Barnes & Noble reading Sideways Stories from Wayside School. My heart paradoxically simultaneously melted and chilled when I read the chapter on Alison (one girl and name that I love; the girl in the class that I am most like). I remember it said something like, "She was very pretty so a lot of boys teased her, especially Jason." I especially loved it since one of my first innocent kid crushes was on a boy named Jason! And it also reflected back on how my first love teased me because he liked me. I wished that I could go back to elementary school when everything was all fun & games, and you could have innocent, gushy feelings of butterflies without expectations of anything more! I wished then that I could go back to being a child and never having experienced serious romantic feelings. The only thing that made me feel better after my heartbreak after that was reading kid's books and wishing I was a kid again, before my heartbreak.
I believe that I am one person that is born and made for love. That might sound paradoxical since at this older age, I have never been in a romantic relationship. However, ironically, it is this romantic nature that has led me to this condition. I have always only wanted to ever be in a relationship with one person my whole life and marry him. So I am comfortable with never having been in a relationship. I would like to marry a person that is everything that I have dreamed of; a person that makes my heart flutter and dance whenever he walks into the room!
I know that I have a theoretical, bookish, schoolgirl approach to love, rather than a practical, experienced approach. That is because I still have the schoolgirl innocence of never having had a boyfriend, something which I will detail in a later blog entry!
I will now skirt the issue of romance and sex, love and lust. I love how the Wikipedia entry on Romance (love) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_(love)) renders romantic feelings distinct from sexual feelings, demarcating the difference between love and lust. I, myself, had thought before that romantic feelings could be distinguished from sexual feelings. One can feel butterflies in the stomach without being sexually turned on. Romance by itself is cleaner than sexual feelings. I have felt romantic feelings for a guy without feeling sexual towards him. That is not to say that I am immune to sexual feeling or against it. I think that a marriage needs to have a good combination of romance and sexual attraction.
I think that procreation is beautiful since it symbolizes that living beings are maintained through love. It is sweet that babies are created through love. I used to want to try IVF when I am married out of fascination for multiple births, but now I think that babies should only be created through love.
I also would like to raise the topic of blushing, which I find so fascinating. In Keats and Embarrassment, Christopher Ricks theorizes that blushing is the paradox of having sexual feeling within and the need to preserve chastity. I think that a blushing, shy schoolgirl or blushing bride is very romantic and endearing! Blushing is what makes love so exciting!
I also want to state that gushing is another part of what makes love thrilling! I remember that in Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, one of the boys brings in this love letter.Louis Sachar writes that the letter is sticky with some substance, but the content of the letter is what makes it the stickiest! You can tell I learned all about love from the Wayside School books..
That brings me to my next topic, fiction on love. As most of you know, Romeo and Juliet is the signature love story. It is in theatrical form. That is a part of the reason why the romantic Juliet is my favorite heroine. "Romeo" is synonymous with lover. Casablanca is the trademark cinematic love story. I have come to notice now that in both these fictional love stories, marriage is not the end. That makes me very curious. Any thoughts on how this might be?

I would also like to specify that although I am crazy about romance, I am not boy-crazy. As I have written, I have just liked two guys in my life. I put my energies into other activities than chasing guys and dating. As a romantic, I believe in destiny, that the right person will come to you. So I have not been dating in the past since I did not want to go out of my way to get a guy. I also am a virgin from every form of sex. I believe in sexual abstinence until marriage.
Whoa, I have infinite thoughts on romance. I know that I am not even close to being done. I will be writing more entries on romance in the near future.
To Be Continued...