Three Songs I Am Obsessed With
1) Gemini Syndrome. "Stardust."
"It's no mistake, you are perfect, you are perfect in my mind, and you won't fade away."
I know the title sounds kind of lame but the harmony during the chorus touches every atom in my heart. This song is musical perfection. I might even cheat on "No Apologies" with it and make it my new lover in song form.
The music produced by the fictional Bill and Ted was prophesied to "align the planets and bring them into universal harmony, allowing meaningful contact with all forms of life, from extraterrestrial beings to common household pets." One can only assume that they changed their band name from Wyld Stallyns to Gemini Syndrome, because I sang this song to Katniss the other day and I swear she understood every word.
2) Switchfoot. "The Blues."
"Are you discontented? Have you been pushing hard? Have you been throwing down this broken house of cards? It'll be a day like this one when the world caves in, when the world caves in."
SAD PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, I GIVE YOU YOUR ANTHEM. To prepare myself for the Switchfoot concert I'm going to next month, I started listening to all their albums, starting with the newest and working my way backwards. But... I never got past "Nothing Is Sound," which I think is around the halfway point in their career. I've listened to it four times... so far. To me, this is the most honest of their albums and expresses the most feeling. If you're feeling sad and you want to listen to a song that will let you fully indulge your sadness but still somehow give you the impression things will be ok, this is the one for you.
3) Thousand Foot Krutch. "Fly on the Wall."
"I'm on the run from a thief that I let into my head. I know I hold the keys so don't be scared when I turn and shout... I don't think I need you anymore, take the hurt and the pain, I don't need it... I want to live, I want to be the change"
If I listened to this song at the beginning of every day, I think I could finally turn things around. To me, this song is me singing to myself. When I'm listening to this song, and only when I listen to this song, do I actually feel like I can finally defeat me.
Three Things Me from Ten Years Ago Would NEVER Believe if Now Me Told Her
1) Hey Mandie. You know how the Lord of the Rings trilogy is kind of your sole reason for existing and set your social development back by at least five years? Well, guess what. Ten years after you wept all through the ten redundant endings of Return of the King while seeing it in theaters for the fifth time, Peter Jackson is going to come out with ANOTHER epic trilogy based on Tolkien novels, and it's going to have a lot of the same characters (whether it makes sense for them to be there or not), and... you're not going to care for it. In fact, the only reason you even saw the second one is because your boyfriend bargained with, plead with, and eventually threatened you (but then you had the last laugh because he fell asleep during it). Seeing and not liking the Hobbit movies is actually going to make you feel deeply sorry for all the friends you tried to force to give Lord of the Rings a chance in high school because HOW COULD THEY NOT LIKE MOVIES LIKE THIS? It's ok not to like movies like this... you're not even sure if you do anymore.
2) Hey Mandie. Would you believe that in ten years, music (the playing and performing and studying thereof, not the listening to, as made obvious by the first list) will have no place in your life... and you're fine with that? I know it's a big part of your life now, and you're struggling with the fact that you're not talented and want so much to get better, but... eventually you'll just stop. It will never even occur to you to sing in the car anymore, and you're more than cool with never owning a piano. (You will occasionally sing Gemini Syndrome to your cat, but that's about it.) And you're not sad about it. You've realized it's not you.
3) Guess what, Mandie... you and your brother are going to be roommates for a while. What? You don't believe me? Would it help if I explained that this will happen just after his army stint and your stint as an armed security guard at a nuclear power plant... Ok, now I see you completely don't believe me anymore and you're walking away, probably to go play the piano or watch some Lord of the Rings. Life is going to take you some strange places, Mandie, and your mind is going to have to open up a lot.
Three Lessons I Just Can Never Learn
1) SALADS ARE A LIE
"Oh, I think I'll be healthy and order a salad."
Mandie, your eating of a salad has three phases:
1) Devour all the toppings from the salad. Basically, what you're shoveling into your mouth is a blend of diced tomatoes, cheese of some kind, croutons, often cheese of another kind, and some type of olives or meatstuffs. If you got an entire bowl of this, it would be considered an almost suicidal act of cholesterol raising, but they put it on lettuce so it's ok.
2) Having eaten everything but the lettuce, turn your eyes to the salad dressing (always on the side, because salad dressing is bad for you and you shouldn't eat it, but always blue cheese, because if I'm going to get something and not eat it I might as well get my favorite of the non-edible things). See if it has blue cheese chunks in it. Eat all of the chunks. If the liquid surrounding the chunks is tasty, look for something to dip in it. You usually don't think to dip lettuce in it because you don't think of lettuce as food, but if someone is offering you the french fries they can't finish, french fries + blue cheese = delicious.
3) At this point, you have nothing but a large bowl of undisturbed lettuce in front of you. The waiter will ask if you want a box, because the majority of the volume of the food you ordered remains (but none of the calories). No, of course you don't want a box. You don't have a rabbit at home.
MANDIE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP ORDERING SALADS, YOU'RE GOING TO GIVE YOURSELF HEART FAILURE.
2) YOU'LL NEVER BE GLAD YOU HAD THAT THIRD BEER
You are actually acutely aware of this at all times but one time: when you're basking in that post-second-beer euphoria. When you've finished or are about to finish two beers, the third beer seems to be not only your destiny but the entire point of your existence. When asked if you want a third, you have images of yourself and the beer running towards each other in slow motion across a flowery meadow while the theme from Romeo and Juliet plays in the background and you prepare yourself to leap into its hoppy embrace. The next day as you examine your sub-par figure with dismay, you will wonder how the relationship with beer that started out just like Romeo and Juliet ended up as a tragedy.
3) THERE HAS TO BE A GRAY AREA
I don't think you're capable of learning this lesson, Mandie. You see every day as either perfection or a complete failure. Because of this, once you've slipped up at all and been less than perfect, you just want to throw the rest of the day away so that you can get started on the next morning and make it perfect. Don't you wonder why ALL your days are failures? Don't you wonder why you have to draw a black X through every single number on the calendar because you screwed it up? Do you really think you'll ever be able to circle one because it was perfect?
Yes, you do. Because you have to. It's the ridiculous belief that keeps you going. Well, a combination of your ridiculous belief and that Thousand Foot Krutch song.
