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 