We stand on guard for thee!

Anyone who has ever known me will tell you many things about me, and hopefully one of those things is that I LOVE CANADA. Because I do. I mean, what's not to love? Their winters are harsh so they are tough and self-reliant to keep them going. Their winters are harsh so they are polite and helpful to keep each other going. Their winters are harsh so they eat poutine and Tim Horton's and drink beer and BEER is SO DELICIOUS. Wait, what was I talking about?

Oh yeah. Hot Canadians. Because they are. Hot, that is. And it has nothing to do with having the most adorable accent in all the world. (Okay, maybe it does a little.)

So, DUH, it's no wonder that my latest crush is Mysterygirl!'s future boyfriend. I mean, LOOK:







SWOON.

I just want you to know I'm in, I'm all in

I was getting into the zone last night to write this--and, of course, the zone means procrastinating to the point of almost even watching Chuck just because it was sitting in my DVR you're welcome Heather--and I had even spent the day pondering my ineptitude when deja vu hit me hard. I started to think about how I might write his face, his hair, his voice, and I realized that I had I already written about all the hims and explained every other bit too:

I don't fall for guys very easily. Don't believe me? I could name the guys I've liked--all of them, ever--in short, rapid succession starting from the sixth grade to the present and be finished before you finished reading this sentence. ... It's been a particularly dry spell. My heart got broken (years ago) and ever since then, I've had significant trouble meeting someone I like enough to like, let alone date. My stupid boundaries and my awesome friends are both obvious reasons for this.

The first and latest men I've loved nicely represent a whole love history of embarrassment and failure. You're either a douchebag, on TV, don't know I exist, out of my league, only go for girls who sing, work with me, live far away, or come with a serious case of dysfunction. But aren't you glad to know that you're one of a select few? You have something that I find inexplicably attractive even though I shouldn't, and that is very rare.

(from my January 27, 2009 post)

I watched the Friends episode in Barbados when Charlie tells Ross she likes him and Rachel tells Joey she likes him and the whole time I was watching I was thinking, "Schilbot, telling someone you like them is so nerve racking! In fact, it's pretty exciting!" Because of the ridiculous amount of time I've spent neither pining nor moving on I had forgotten the terrible, no good, very bad awfulness that is confessing. I am totally a trouper when it comes to unrequited love, but even I know when to call it a day and realize when something is never going to happen. (And by know, I mean remind myself every few months when I slip back into being a trouper.)

Let's say that right now I'm waiting for my latest crush.

The first rule of being a spy: never fall in love.

It would be easy for a person who excels at mediocrity (like I do) to get a real complex hanging around at Collective HQ, while Abiagil!, Kat! and Jennie! make a habit of waking up awesome every day of their lives. They are best at a lot of different things, but this week we get to talk about my best thing: crushes.

We're supposed to write about our most recent crushes this week, which, for me, is kind of the same as writing about my first crush -- there are too many for me to remember their proper order. In a given week, I could literally fall in love twelve times: with people I know, book characters I meet, authors who write the book characters I meet. But today, I'm going to talk to you about my fictional television crush/girlfriend, Agent Sarah Walker fromNBC's Chuck, because despite my cajoling and prayer, none of you are watching this show; so the only option left open to me is to seduce you. Let us begin.



You may look at the above picture of Agent Sarah Walker and think to yourself, oh, just another smokin' hot CIA agent in black lingerie who managed to beat down a bad guy while tied up with a leather belt. But Sarah Walker is so much more that.

She can drink coffee and weild a gun at the same time:




She loves a good at-home board game night:




She drives a sexy, sexy car:






She's totes a nerd:




This is what her bed-head looks like (+ nice t-shirt!):



And here's the thing about Sarah Walker: she'd a badass, yeah; but she's warm and empathetic and she fell in love, not with an asshole super spy, but with the adorkable underachiever with the crazy big heart, Chuck Bartowski.

Oh, also she's Australian. Funnest country/continent EVER.

The problem with Agent Sarah Walker is that Chuck is on the bubble, and unless ratings tonight and next Monday are super spectacular, NBC is probs going to cancel her. You can support my crush/girlfriend by watching tonight at 8:00.

Or she can just kick your ass.



Chuck is hands-down the best show on TV right now. Better than Lois and Clark ever was. And if you think that's easy for me to say, you don't know how hard I crushed on Superman.

Phone it in, lovers.

Now that you know all about our first crushes -- and about Joe's really intense feelings regarding Winnie Cooper -- it's time for you to pull out your old yearbooks/journals/youtube videos and tell us all about your first crush. Go on, don't be shy.

love me, love me, say that you love me

I thought long and hard (heh) about who my first crush was, and the closest I could come was Bobby from first grade. I don't think I noticed him until the end of the year, when we decided suddenly that we were best friends. The teacher told us that to pick someone to sit next to for the remainder of the year, so of course we picked each other (BFF), and when he put his arm around me to celebrate (what a FLOOZY) I thought, "Hmm, I could get used to this," which is a BIG DEAL because I like my personal space. I think there was a crush-worthy boy in kindergarten, although I can't for the life of me remember his name. However, I do remember that this little 6-year-old whore stole my seat one day when we were making mother's day cards, and the seat was next to crush-worthy boy, and so I squirted glue at her. Because she was in my seat! MY SEAT! Ahem.

My parents would probably disagree with both of the above first crushes. They'd say my first crush happened when I was 3 or 4, and we were at my cousin Jenny's wedding. Legend has it, I fell in love with a little blonde-haired boy and made him dance with me throughout most of the reception. I call shenanigans on the first-crush front because I don't remember this at all (pictures do not count as memories and yes there are pictures and no I don't have them so no you can't see them). Ahem.

There were other crushes, of course, some lasting ALL THE WAY THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL, but those are boring because I never, ever did anything about them. Which is good because then they technically wouldn't be crushes anymore. The point of a crush is to sit idly by, watching and waiting for your crush to notice you, and ignoring those nagging thoughts that THEY NEVER, EVER WILL AND NO ONE LOVES YOU AND YOU WILL DIE ALL ALONE SO GET USED TO IT. Ahem.

To be honest, I've always been much more enamoured with fictional characters, starting with Kermit the Frog and moving right along to Jim Halpert, because there's a reason those crushes ignore me. They're not real people (it hurt to type that). And so, here is a list of all of the fictional characters I have had crushes on, in chronological order (I think):

Buster Bunny (this could explain why I used to do imitations of Babs on the playground)

Zack Morris (even though he had weird hair, it still wasn't as weird as Slater's)

Kevin Arnold

Mike Seaver

Oliver Wood (even though he belongs to Abigail)

Mr. Darcy (both the Austen and Firth variety)

Chandler Bing

Fox Mulder

Sydney Bristow/Michael Vaughan (who can decide?)

Marshall

Chuck Bartowski

Dr. Horrible

(also DUH Jim Halpert, obviously)