I love HIMYM. Love it. How much do I love it? I love it ALOT. Consider the facts.

• Before Season 1 I hadn’t watched TV regularly in years. Except HBO but that doesn’t count. Now, I watch a bunch of sitcoms. HIMYM gave me a new appreciation for television.
• All of my friends only started loving HIMYM after I showed all the episodes to all of them. That meant I had to watch them all over and over. A sacrifice I was willing to make.
• An alarming percentage of my vocabulary is based on quotes from HIMYM.
• This past Tuesday morning, I woke up in a good mood because Ted and Robin are finally together. I was as happy as I would be if one of my actual (meaning, they are real people) friends got a girl (or guy).
• A candidate for My Favorite Song of All Time is This Modern Love which I really didn’t see potential in until the Season 1 finale.

OK, you get the idea. Now, I couldn’t be more excited knowing there is over ten hours of unseen HIMYM just waiting to be watched over the next few weeks. I watched Monday night’s episode about three times in a row. It was great. Except for one thing. I’ll give you a clue, it is in the opening credits and rhythms with ‘fug sans serif font’.

The second time I watched the episode I started ranting about the change. My friends there watching it with me, two of which are engineers and one of which is a dumbass, scolded me for being a font nerd. Whatever that is. I stayed quiet for the rest of the night but on Tuesday brought my gripe to work.

In the company and support of other font nerds I brought out the screen shots I’d taken the night before after all my friends left. I was elated to get some support. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s official— the new HIMYM logo sucks balls.

Old, awesome, Century Serif goodness:

New, stylized sans-serif, Microsoft/AT&T looking bullshit:

Who makes these decisions? One of the joys of the show are little details. Remember the episode The Pineapple Incident? The first time Ted calls Robin, Marshall says “Woah. Bad idea jeans”. Look that reference up, it’s from an old SNL skit (which, incidentally, I think I heard someone reference on The Office last night, a show with an excellent logo, even though it is sans-serif. Coincidence? I think not.). But I digress. There are tons of these details throughout the series. One of my favorites was always the awesomely set Century logo. Too bad they ripped its heart out and I’ll never see it again (except for the dozen or so times I re-watch last seasons episodes each week).

I’ll leave the final decision to you because you’re entitled to your opinion but know this: if you prefer the new logo, you have no taste, are wrong and are dead to me. Over the course of this week, having watched the show over and over, even my engineer friends agree: bring back the serifs to HIMYM.

You cannot discover a great new song until you find yourself in a situation that needs definition. What do you think about that? First, let’s define the term Great Song as it is to be understood for this exercise. I’m talking about those songs that just, ugh, hit you right there. These aren’t songs you hear and sing along to a few times. These aren’t songs that you buy on iTunes at 1am because the chorus is in your head. These songs are true mixed tape fodder; these songs are part of you. These are songs that just come together—lyrics, instrumentation, melody—it’s a zen experience.

Great Songs don’t come often, maybe once every year if we’re lucky. The logical reason is just that the chances of someone else’s personal art touching you in such a deeply personal way are so slim that you couldn’t possibly hope to find Great Songs any more frequently. Well fuck logic, because I know the real reason.

One detail of a Great Song is the one lyric where you just stop and say ‘Yes. They get it’. Whatever is going on in your life, this song says it more eloquently than you even knew was possible. Coincedence? Nah, it’s projection. If there’s nothing going on in your life, you aren’t looking for words to describe it.

Great Songs can be happy, like that song that still reminds you of first love (I’m ashamed to say it’s What It Takes by Aerosmith for me) or heartbreaking, like the song that reminds you of a lost love (Black Muddy River by Grateful Dead, lay off me I’m from a small town). It doesn’t matter what emotion you’re feeling, just that you’re really feeling it hard. You’re searching for reason, for support, for anything that will make it easier to understand. Where do you find it? In music. Are you pinning for a girl that doesn’t love you back? Ryan Adams knows your pain. Do you feel like you made a mistake you can never take back? If Johnny Cash gets it, how bad can it be?

I think this phenomenon is what gets all of us into music in the first place. Those first new experiences convince you no one else has ever felt like this ever in the history of all feelings people have ever had ever. Then there’s that Great Song. We all have a first great song. I don’t even remember what mine was helping me figure out, something ineffable, but I remember how I felt that first time I heard R.E.M. sing Strange Currencies.

What’s sad for me is that the older we get, the fewer new experiences we have. We still fall in and out of love, we still suffer losses and celebrate victories, but a truly new sensation becomes rarer and rarer. Does that also mean that the chance of discovering these Great Songs goes down proportionally?

I wrote that last paragraph and hit the wall. “Shit”, I said, “is that what’s going to happen? Because that’s pretty dark.” Then I asked Drew what he thought. Then, much like a Great Song, he nailed it—articulating what I was thinking more succinctly than I was capable of. It’s not that we stop having first experiences as we get older. It’s that we have the same experiences slightly differently each time. Each variation adds details we haven’t seen before. Details that need definition. What will define those definitions? Looks like we’ll need some more Great Songs.