yum

Every experience is heightened when you're younger; it's why My Little Ponies used to be the most fantastic creatures on the planet and I could spend hours brushing their tails and arranging them in their stables (i.e. old shoeboxes) and writing stories about them, and now it's "Look at this dumb glittery fake horse; Jillian really wants one of these? OK..." When I was thirteen I knew every breath on every album by They Might Be Giants and Tori Amos; I still love music, obviously, but not with the fanaticism of a teenager. As you get older all the things you were obsessed with as a kid sort of get put in their proper place.

Except for one thing. My adoration of ONE THING has endured. Which is quite a feat for me, considering how ADD I am. I have had a massive crush on Eddie Vedder for, um, half my life. And the only reason I didn't have a crush on him for the first half is because I hadn't heard of him yet. And a fourteen year crush should be enough to call it a relationship, don't you think?

Okay fine, it's enough to call it a restraining order.

See, this is dicey because I seem to be younger by about five years than some of those in The Neighborhood, which would put you at enough of an age advantage to find this completely trite; you were old enough to poke fun at the irony of the grunge movement, while I just thought it was all WICKED COOL.

I've tried to break it down and understand it better. I've never been into bad boys, and definitely not into brooding musicians. He's good looking, but he's slight and definitely skinny. He had long, greasy hair for a long time. And yet he gives me the same goosebumps he did when I was fourteen. What he has, my friends, is a quality. He has the most ridiculously hot voice I've ever heard in my entire life. The song Porch is basically like sex to me; I can't listen to it without wanting to, I don't know, bite something or someone. He is, quite simply, the sexiest man on the freakin' PLANET. Can YOU explain this? Because I can't!

OK, I have to cool down, if not for your sake, then for mine.

Joe is a huge Pearl Jam fan so he always puts Eddie back on my brain when he tells me about getting tickets to their shows or downloading their new song. We were totally cracking ourselves up the other day talking about how Eddie was somehow angry as hell when he was like 27 and massively successful and selling out stadiums. Now that he's getting older and is a parent, he must only be more furious. Is he less amped up about bucking the establishment and now seething over having to cut his daughter's peanut butter sandwiches into triangles? What about when she gets older and she thinks he's unfair and too strict and "you're so lame, Dad, you don't understand anything!" I literally cannot imagine a world in which that conversation could take place.

So, yeah. This is my ridiculous, over-the-top, heart palpitation, breathless, sweaty, woozy, I'm sorry I'm really trying to calm down I swear...

Ahem. This is my crush. Big time. Who's yours?