Tag Archives: galentine’s day

Some Long-Distance Love

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Galentine's Day

Courtesy of the official Parks and Rec Twitter account.

Happy Galentine’s Day, all you poetic noble land mermaids!

Leslie Knope was right (as always), Galentine’s Day should be a national holiday. It’s a day to celebrate female friendship in all its forms—from the sisterhoods we established in school to the best friends we found in fandom and all the love we’ve chosen and nurtured along the way.

And if ever there was a year when we needed Galentine’s Day—a day designed to remind us that friendship is a valid and essential kind of love, a day to reach out to the women in our lives to tell them we’re thinking of them and that they matter to us—it’s this year.

We’re all a little more isolated this year.

Last year, we found ways to connect—we had Zoom happy hours and FaceTime dates and coffees shared on porches or in parks. But this year, we’re all a little more tired, a little more burned out. So many of us have faced struggles even beyond the universally traumatic experience of living through a global pandemic for two years, and we bear the scars of it.

Connection is hard when you’re just trying to keep your head above water, when all you can think about is surviving from one day to the next or how you’re going to find the energy and strength to get out of bed in the morning.

Even on the Internet, the place where we should be connecting with more depth and enthusiasm than ever before, things have changed. Social media has become even more of a void we all just shout into, an increasingly negative space that so many of us have had to take breaks from for our own sanity.

Things are hard right now.

Loneliness and loss of connection is hard.

But there’s a difference between acknowledging that and staying in it. And today I refuse to stay in it.

So consider this my hand, reaching across the void to pat you on the shoulder or hold yours or offer you a hug or a cup of tea or a mimosa (fair warning: I make them strong).

I see you—whoever you are.

And I’ve got you.

Today, on this day to celebrate the power of women and the bonds we form with each other, I’ve got you. I’m here to remind you that your struggles are valid—no matter what they are. I’m here to celebrate your victories—no matter how small they may seem to you. And I’m here to remind you that even when things feel lonely and weird and hard, you are loved.

You are so loved.

Yes, this is obviously a love post (see the bottom of this post for how to play if you’ve never been around NGN for one!), but I know that’s not everyone’s favorite kind of content. So if you don’t want me to shower you personally with love today, please consider this a general blanket of comfort for all of us to snuggle under until things feel better.

I love all of you. NGN wouldn’t be what it is without all of you. I wouldn’t be who I am without all of you.

And no amount of time, distance, or global pandemics can change that.

I love you on the days you feel like a badass and the days you don’t want to get out of bed. I love you not for what you give to me and to everyone else, but for who you are. Because if you’re reading this post, chances are we’ve interacted in some way, and if we have, then I love you.

That’s just how my heart works.

So if you ever have days when you don’t feel loved, Bookmark this post, even if you choose not to leave a comment on it to get some specific love. Read it and remember that even if we don’t talk often or we’ve never met or we live thousands of miles apart, I love you. I see your struggles and your strengths, and I feel honored to call you part of this family. Because even one visit to NGN—if you come with an open heart—makes you part of the family.

Join the love today if you’d like, but if you’d rather just lurk and enjoy from afar, I hope you still know that today is a day I’m celebrating you. Because you deserve to be celebrated.

You deserve to be and feel loved.

That’s what today is all about.

Ladies celebrating ladies.

What a day to be alive.

**For anyone new to a Love Post, here’s how it works: Make a comment on this post with your username (and things like your Twitter or your Tumblr URL if you feel like people might know you better by those identifiers). Then, sit back and let others reply, telling you how much and why they love you. Finally, if you want to, you can share the love! Reply to your friends’ comments on this post and tell them how awesome you think they are.

Even if you’ve never posted at NGN before or think no one will know or remember you, leave a comment. I guarantee you’ll be glad you did.

A Galentine’s Day Love Post

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Happy Galentine’s Day, all you perfect sunflowers!

Galentine's Day

Courtesy of the official Parks and Rec Twitter account.

Today is one of my favorite days of the year. Although it was created as a fictional holiday spearheaded by my life inspiration Leslie Knope, the world beyond Pawnee, Indiana, has embraced this day of ladies celebrating ladies, and we’re all better for it.

Galentie’s Day is a day to celebrate female friendship in all its forms—from the people we share offices with to our travel partners, internet support systems, and all the sisters, chosen family, and platonic soulmates in between. It’s a day to honor the positive impact women have had on our lives—from our mentors to our mothers and every friend who’s ever given us advice or comfort over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. And it’s a day to raise a mimosa, a waffle, or a big plate of bacon to the ladies who’ve lifted us up and made us laugh, held our hands through the hard stuff, and inspired us to be the best, bravest, and brightest versions of ourselves.

This has been a hard year for friendships. Zoom happy hours and FaceTime dates and long text chains can only go so far in replicating the warmth and joy of spending time in the presence of the people you love. Skype isn’t a perfect substitute for girls’ trips. Five-minute, outdoor, masked gift exchanges aren’t the same as birthday dinners. Group chats aren’t the same as group hugs.

And this month in particular—with the one-year anniversary of the start of this mess right around the corner and the pandemic depression bearing down like a heavy weight—feels like a struggle. We all seem to be feeling a little lonelier, a little sadder, a little less patient, and a little more exhausted. The desire to compare our struggles to others’ social media highlight reels seems stronger, and the grace we should be giving ourselves seems to be wearing thin. Old insecurities have reawakened, and new anxieties have made their presence known.

It’s times like these when all really need our friends.

But in the midst of all of this isolation, we’re finding our way through it. We write cards and make virtual dates and send gifts just because. We celebrate when someone’s mom gets her vaccine and commiserate when we hit the working-from-home wall. We still cry together and laugh together and support each other—even if the ways we do it look a little different.

So today, I wanted to bring a little bit of my yearly Galentine’s Day celebration to all of you. Because all of you—my NGN Family of smart, strong, complex, and caring women—deserve to be celebrated. You inspire me every day, and your support and love has played a huge part in helping me become the woman I am today.

You know what that means…

It’s time for a Love Post!

For anyone new to a Love Post, here’s how it works: Make a comment on this post with your username (and things like your Twitter or your Tumblr URL if you feel like people might know you better by those identifiers). Then, sit back and let others reply, telling you how much and why they love you. Finally, if you want to, you can share the love! Reply to your friends’ comments on this post and tell them how awesome you think they are.

Even if you’ve never posted at NGN before or think no one will know or remember you, leave a comment. I guarantee you’ll be glad you did.

I’ll start things off below just so you can see how it’s done, and I hope that by the time this day of ladies celebrating ladies is done, the comments will feel like a true Galentine’s Day party.

Cheers!

GalentinesDayCheers

Source: The Atlantic

Sharing the Galentine’s Day Love

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parks-valentines-muskox

I love you all like Leslie loves Ann.

Happy Galentine’s Day, you poetic, noble land mermaids!

Galentine’s Day may have started as a fictional holiday created by my hero and ultimate life inspiration Leslie Knope, but it’s now become a day celebrated by women around the world who want to honor the ladies in their lives. Seeing this holiday grow from something shared only by our beautiful little Parks and Recreation fandom to a day that has its own decorations at Target has been incredible, and it brings me so much joy to know that so many people are taking time today to tell the women in their lives how special they are and to honor the power of female friendship (hopefully with lots of breakfast food).

I’m so blessed to be surrounded by the smart, funny, passionate, protective, warm, and welcoming women I call my friends. They support me and surprise me; they’ve challenged me and changed me; and they’ve helped me embrace the best and most authentic version of myself. My female friends have been the great loves of my life to this point, and I can’t think of a better group of people to call my soul mates.

And that includes all the brave and beautiful women I’ve met because of fandom—and NGN in particular. Over the years, this has been a place where friendships have formed both for me and completely independent of me (which is the coolest thing in the world). Even if our comment conversations aren’t as plentiful as they once were and even if our interests have diverged, I still treasure the moments and memories we’ve shared in this little place that I’ve called home for so long. The friends I’ve made through fandom are some of the best friends I could have ever hoped to have, and I love having a day to single out just how special you are.

With that in mind, I wanted to take a page out of Leslie Knope’s playbook and tell all of you how amazing you are. It may not be a 5,000-word essay, but I want to take a moment today to shower each of you with a string of compliments that would make my sitcom spirit animal proud.

So let’s have a LOVE POST!

Here are the basic instructions as I remember them from my old LiveJournal days: Make a comment on this post with your username (and things like your Twitter or your Tumblr URL if you feel like people might know you better by those identifiers). Then, sit back and let others reply, telling you how much and why they love you. Finally, share the love! Reply to your friends’ comments on this post and tell them how awesome you think they are. Even if you’ve never posted at NGN before or think no one will know or remember you, leave a comment. I guarantee you’ll be glad you did.

I’ll start things off below just so you can see how it’s done, and I hope that by the time this day of ladies celebrating ladies is done, the comments will be the best virtual Galentine’s Day party ever.

I’ll bring the waffles!

 

Galentine’s Day Goals

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Leslie Ann 617

Today we celebrate my favorite fictional-turned-real holiday: Galentine’s Day. Not only is today a day to eat waffles and drink mimosas, it is a day to celebrate the women in our lives. It is a day to celebrate female friendship, female mentorship, and female support systems.

Ladies celebrating ladies—what a novel, beautiful concept.

This year, it feels even more important to celebrate the power of women and the positive impact they have on our lives. As such, I’m reopening submissions for The Fan Mail Project for another month—with a deadline of March 13, 2017, at 9 p.m. EST. You can read all about the project and how you can contribute to it here, but the general gist of it is this: Write a letter to a female character who has inspired you in some way. Thank her for being a positive influence in your life or maybe in the life of someone you know and love. Share your story by sharing what she means to you.

That’s what The Fan Mail Project is all about—sharing our stories of courage, vulnerability, growth, struggle, and strength by sharing the stories of the female characters that helped us see our own beauty, power, and potential. And at a time in which so many people are actively trying to silence women and keep us from telling our stories and the stories of other women, it’s our job to persist in our stubborn belief that our stories matter.

We matter.

Throughout the process of compiling the letters that have already come in for The Fan Mail Project, I have been moved to tears more times than I can count by the beauty and bravery of every single person who has used their voice to take ownership of their story through their love for the stories of female characters from every corner of the media landscape. You are all my Galentines this year, inspiring me with your authenticity, your honesty, your openness, and your stubborn refusal to be anything but your most authentic self.

So this is your chance to join in the movement that has helped me—and I hope others—grow in incredible ways. If you wanted to write a letter but never found the time or the inspiration, this is your chance. If you wrote one (or more) but always wanted to write another, this is your chance. And if you already wrote a letter but want to add to it or change it to reflect the continuing relationships we all have with the fictional women who have imprinted on our hearts, this is your chance to do that, too. I know I have two letters I’d like to update myself and at least one more I’d like to write. For a while, I let the state of the world and the state of my own busy, stressful life keep me from the joy and hope that this project has given me for the last year and a half. My Galentine’s Day goal this year is to return to this project with bright eyes, a hopeful heart, and a renewed sense of purpose.

The world needs these letters and the stories they tell. The world needs our stories. But even more importantly, we need these stories. We need to remind ourselves today and always that we are just as amazing, strong, and inspiring as the fictional women we love so much.

So write your letter. Embrace your story. Tell the world that you have something to say and you won’t be kept from saying it.

Happy Galentine’s Day, friends. Let’s show the world what we can accomplish when we celebrate ladies not just today but every day.

A Galentine’s Day Message

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Courtesy of the official Parks and Rec Twitter account.

Courtesy of the official Parks and Rec Twitter account.

Happy Galentine’s Day, all you beautiful tropical fish!

Galentine’s Day is a day created by my personal hero Leslie Knope to celebrate the awesome women in our lives and bask in the power of supportive female friendship. I’ve written about the need for strong portrayals of female friendship in the media the last two Galentine’s Days, and today, Heather has a great post up on her blog celebrating some of TV’s best female characters. So this Galentine’s Day, I wanted to shift my focus from the awesome ladies of television to the awesome ladies who make Nerdy Girl Notes a place where it’s Galentine’s Day all year.

It was always my hope for this site to become a place where people—especially women—could gather and talk about the things they loved without people judging them for their emotional investment. Too often, we’re told that our passion is intimidating and our enthusiasm keeps us from being taken seriously. So I always feel a deep sense of pride when I read the discussions that happen in the comments sections here or in my Twitter mentions, and I can see women from all walks of life coming together to share their thoughts and feelings about the media they love.

I don’t know how I got so lucky to have a readership and group of regular commenters mainly composed of such strong, smart, and sincerely supportive women. You all genuinely amaze me. You’re scientists and students and amazing writers yourselves; you’re mothers and girlfriends and proud single ladies; you love characters and shows as different and amazing as all of you are. And you choose to share that love—that part of yourself—with me and with your fellow commenters.

When I look at NGN’s comments sections, I see a community of women who have strong opinions and aren’t afraid to voice them, but they’re also open and accepting of others who don’t share those same opinions. I see women who are articulate and sincere and encouraging toward not just me but everyone they interact with. I see ladies celebrating ladies for the passionate, enthusiastic, and supportive people we are.

Thanks for making every day feel like Galentine’s Day around here. And may your day be filled with friendship, happiness, and delicious waffles.

Ladies Celebrating Ladies

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Courtesy of the official Parks and Rec Twitter account.

Courtesy of the official Parks and Rec Twitter account

Happy Galentine’s Day, everyone! This wonderful fictional holiday was created by my personal hero Leslie Knope as a day to honor all of the beautiful and talented women who make our lives special. Valentine’s Day may be traditionally about romance, but Galentine’s Day is all about female friendships.

The idea behind Galentine’s Day—ladies celebrating ladies—is still such a rare thing in the media. I was looking back through my Top 3 Female Friendships on TV that I compiled last year, and I was saddened to see that two of those three are no longer really a part of their respective shows due to cast departures. And there aren’t very many friendships I would add to that list, either, despite the huge increase in the number of shows I watch nowadays.

For most of the mainstream media, it’s still common practice to feature one woman who’s friends with a group of men (see The Mindy Project or the Harry Potter series) or a female friendship that exists solely for exposition purposes in terms of the show’s romantic relationships (see Donna and Rachel on Suits or Lanie and Beckett on Castle). There aren’t too many examples of women forming deep, lasting relationships with other women based on factors other than needing a sounding board for their romantic problems. And that needs to change.

Women are often seen as superficial, backstabbing, petty, and prone to jealousy towards members of their own gender. If you were to make assumptions based solely on the media (a horrible way to form opinions, if I’m being honest), female friendships are mostly a series of interactions between “frenemies” instead of the supportive, inclusive, and warm relationships they usually are in the real world. Female friendships are all-too-often portrayed as being far less meaningful than the ultimate relationship goal: romance. Having friends is great, but what would a woman talk about with her friends if there were no romantic prospects to discuss?

The answer: Quite a lot, actually. You see, women can and do actually have conversations about things other than their romantic relationships (or lack thereof). We can form meaningful relationships with people of our own gender that often last longer and fulfill us on more levels than romantic relationships at any given point in our lives. As I said in my review of Parks and Recreation’s ode to friendship, “Ann and Chris,” our first soul mates are often our best friends. Women (especially young women) don’t have to be catty, petty, and suspicious of other women just because the media says that’s how we often are. Instead, let’s change the narrative and celebrate the fact that women are often incredibly generous, affectionate, and supportive towards other women. We don’t have to be each other’s biggest rivals and enemies; we can be each other’s biggest cheerleaders and most trusted confidants.

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