It's Going to Be Lengen, Wait For It... Dary! - Short Story Blog 3 (How I Met My Husband)

"So I said yes, and I went out with him for two years and he asked me to marry him, and we were engaged a year more while I got my things together, and then we did marry."

~ Alice Munro, How I Met My Husband


The title is not the only ridiculously similar characteristic shared by How I Met My Husband and the popular television comedy How I Met Your Mother. The two are very structurally similar. How I Met Your Mother is a show about Ted, who is telling his children the story of how he met their mother. He takes many seasons to get there (and it still isn't over yet), and tells them about many, many, many, many women that he meets along the way. How I Met My Husband is very much the same. Edie tells the story of how she met her husband, although most of the story is comprised of her experiences with another man. She only gets to her husband in the last two paragraphs; in Mother, the series will end with Ted meeting his wife. The two also have pretty much the exact same idea of telling the story of how the main characters met their spouses.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star / Mood - Poetry Blog 1 (For Week 2!) (Bright Star)

The poem Bright Star, by John Keats, describes a man who looks into the sky and sees a star; he tells how he would act differently if he behaved as the star. The way I see this poem, it can be divided into two parts.

The first part is his description of the star's action. It watches the world and sees the beauty of it - particularly, nature. The star is compared to an insomniac who watches the "moving waters" and "snow upon the mountains and the moors." What the star is observing is later contrasted with what the man would.

The second part describes what the man would do if he were as loyal and constant as the star. He would watch, instead of the world, a woman. He says that if he were to do one thing for the rest of his life, he would "awake forever in a sweet unrest, still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, and so live ever - or else swoon to death." (It was definitely an "aww" moment.)

While the poem is creating contrast, there are several similarities in it. The narrator tells what he would watch forever and what the star continually watches, but they are both unchanging. They both are watching something. Also, the woman and nature are being indirectly compared. Each is the object of something's/one's attention, and each is beautiful enough to be so. Both the woman and nature are depicted as gently moving, which helps the reader make the comparison and creates a soft, peaceful mood. The narrator also uses words like "eternal" and "forever" to make time seem almost non-existent; this also contributes to the peaceful mood.