The 10 Days of Paramore – Careful
Day Four
First off, I love strategies. Rules. Lists. The calculated order of certain certainties. Problem is, this careful, methodical way of living can backfire and build a bubble around your life. Every time I took the careful way out, I kept myself from growing into a stronger, more mature person, and it certainly did not help me become any braver. The plain and ugly truth is that my life for the first 25 years or so was kind of ordinary (boring). Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. What is it that they say? For everything in life there is a season?
This week I took advantage of a friend’s suggestion to run away from home for a while, to sin city of all places. Guess what though – even in this half-assed attempt to be spontaneous, I still managed to come up with a list of to-dos – watch the water / light fountain show thing outside the Bellagio. Get a tattoo. Have some laughs with a couple of good friends. Watch a show. Drink. Come back with some memories. Sky jump off the stratosphere. I am proud to say that I did five out of the seven things on this list (with the exception being the first two items).
Now I don’t know about you, but I get vertigo walking too close to the railing on the second floor of a mall, so the idea of jumping off a building attached to a few wires seemed just a tad bit out of the realm of possibility. But I guess you just get to a point, when you get really tired of being scared ALL the time. So there I was, out on the ledge over a hundred floors up, bargaining with the guy in charge of all the safety checks to push me off, because let me tell ya – the really scary thing about jumping isn’t the fall. It’s that first step -that moment of conscious decision when you let go and step into oblivion. The falling part is easy. You scream bloody murder and gravity takes care of the rest. But that first step is all you. There’s a line in today’s Paramore song, which goes, “you can’t be too careful anymore, when all that is waiting for you won’t come any closer…you’ve got to reach a little more”. Stepping off that ledge made me feel something I’ve never felt before – the hope in uncertainty. It was a great feeling. I felt like Ethan Hawke in the movie Gattaca, when he said “it was the moment that made everything else possible”. Being careful, following rules and expectations = overrated. Knowing that you still have the ability to surprise yourself = priceless.
The 10 Days of Paramore – Hear You Me
Day Three
Good afternoon world. Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about family. Whether it be your own flesh and blood, or people who have seen you grow and been with you in good times and bad, there is nothing in the world more precious and rare than having that kind of support system as we stumble our way through this crazy thing called life. My family, immediate and extended, is awesome, to put it mildly. Who knows why, but they love me. They put up with my crap, and, most of the time, manage to bring out the best in me.
I spent this past weekend with my saster and our awesome friends. I guess this will be one of the last weekends, I will be spending with her as a “single” chick because in less than three weeks, she will be making her way down the aisle. Not saying that she’s going anywhere or that we’ll be hanging out less. It’ll probably just be different. Anyways, I love her. Not because she was nice enough to make me breakfast. Not because she didn’t complain when I sort of tricked her into doing my laundry. And not because she was nice enough to drop me off at the airport just now. Words really cannot describe how happy I am for my loving saster, and how ecstatic I will be to have most of my nearest and dearest there to share in that moment with her and my future brother-in-law.
If I had one wish though, it would be to feel the presence of another particular person there that day. A person who I know would’ve been especially proud to see her more beautiful and happy than we’ve ever seen her. Proud also because he never had to remind THIS daughter to never have regrets, to be herself, or to let things go.
The following is a cover of a Jimmy Eat World song. I love when bands I love, cover songs I already loved and make them feel new to me again. I first heard this song in the movie Butterfly Effect, but when Paramore covered it, I listened a bit more closely to the lyrics and was overwhelmed by how perfectly it describes my feelings for the first and maybe only man to really love me. I miss you Dad…everyday. I lift this song to you and hope that it carries with it, the weight of all the things I didn’t get to tell you. To those nearest and dearest in your lives, take my advice – don’t be a schmuck, let them know you care. Hear You Me.
There’s no one in town I know, You gave us some place to go.
I never said thank you for that. I thought I might get one more chance.
What would you think of me now, so lucky, so strong, so proud?
I never said thank you for that, now I’ll never have a chance.
May angels lead you in. Hear you me my friends.
On sleepless roads the sleepless go.
May angels lead you in.
And if you were with me tonight, I’d sing to you just one more time.
A song for a heart so big, God wouldn’t let it live.
May angels lead you in.
The 10 Days of Paramore – I Caught Myself
Day Two
So my wonderful nephew sent me an email for the first time. Weird, and holy crappola, I feel super old, because it seems like just yesterday the kid was the size of a football in my arms. Now, he and my troublemaker of a goddaughter are almost whole people, speaking full sentences laced with sarcasm which they have no doubt learned from my brother Mike. Suddenly they’re calling me on the phone and sending me emails from their own personal accounts about how I owe them a guitar lesson or two and that they finished the third Harry Potter book. Actually, I’m going to digress for a bit and talk about Harry Potter for a while, because let’s face it – the magical land of Hogwarts is far more interesting than the whole me-getting-old thing. So for those of you who have not had the pleasure of reading the books or watching the movies – haha what have you been doing with your life? And remind me again why we’re friends? Just kidding, but no seriously…do yourself a favor and go remedy this immediately, because you are really missing out buddy. I’m not sure which is my favorite, but the third installment, Prisoner of Azkaban, is up there on my list, mainly because this is where they introduced us to the idea of dementors.
So dementors, as explained to Harry by Professor Lupin, are described as the following:
Dementors are among the foulest creatures that walk this earth. They infest the darkest, filthiest places, they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them. Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself…soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.
Haha, so I don’t know if I’m alone in this, but in my own life I definitely have come across a dementor or two, haha or three. Maybe mine didn’t look like the grim reaper variety the movie depicted them to be, but the effects seem comparable. Problem is, that here in the real (Muggle) world, we have to come up with our own version of a patronus charm in order to shield us from these vicious, soul-suckers. In talking with one of my best friends the other day, it hit me that there IS a real-life equivalent. She was talking about her own personal dementor (though we definitely didn’t use that term, but this certain character definitely epitomizes the very essence of one) and how she had just made the decision to cut this person from her life. I guess you just get to a point when you realize that certain people no longer add anything positive to your life, and you have to go into self-preservation mode. For those of you who feel at the mercy of your own dementors, try applying my friend’s wisdom as your own patronus charm – when you feel yourself getting sucked in, you just got to catch yourself. Remind yourself of what you really want, or if you don’t know what you want, just know that you deserve something more. Anyways, this friend over the last year has been kind of an inspiration and a personal hero to me, which is why I am dedicating this post, and today’s Paramore song to her. The song is called I Caught Myself, and it is basically about the danger of not knowing what you want. Enjoy this awesome live version. Sigh…dear Paramore, we keep missing each other. Please come back to the US soon so I can finally see you in concert. Shpanks!
The 10 Days of Paramore – Brick By Boring Brick
Day One
I have a confession. For years, I’ve prided myself in being a cynic, particularly when it comes to relationships. Falling in love is for the birds. Romantic comedies are for weak minded women that wistfully wait for men to come into their lives to justify their existence. They mope around at home watching movies like Valentine’s Day, when they could be watching movies of substance like Ghostbusters or Memento. Alas I have been doing some extra soul searching lately, and I’ve come to the realization that all my cynicism has been a lie. A classic case of the lady doth protest too much. Even more pathetically, the only victim of this lie has been myself. In about a month, I will be 28 years old, and as I look back on my life, all I see are the times I succumbed to my better judgment and thought, “hmmm, maybe this time will be different”. My life before existed only in a journey of broken memories of people I should not have given my heart to, all out of some insane need to feel loved. Always ending in failure. Always another tick mark of regret. I have no one to blame but myself, because since I was child, I bought into the fairytale stories.
And so for day one, I choose a song from one of my favorite bands of all time, Paramore, called Brick by Boring Brick. It’s a song that pulls at my heart strings with its hauntingly powerful lyrics, calling me out for the lying, naive little bitch that I am. Correction – was. To me, this song is about the moment that a girl decides to grow up…the moment she realizes that life is NOT a fairytale, and it is finally time to put an end to childish dreams. Time to “bury the castle”, and stop waiting for love to come around and save you. To stop being in love with love. Because who knows, one day you might just wake up from the dream and find that the home you built, brick by boring brick, isn’t really what you wanted, and the wolf that is reality, might just come and blow your dreams away.
Who wants to build their life, Brick by Boring Brick? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe this song is saying that love DOESN’T exist, but MAYBE, just maybe, there is a better, far more tangible “happily ever after”. Maybe the fairytale worth believing is the one where the girl discovers that she was already somebody awesome before any prince or frog came along and noticed her…to realize at the end of the day, that in order for our dreams to come true we simply just need to wake up and find that the power to do so lies solely within us.
If My Life Had a Soundtrack 