Showing posts with label youth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label youth. Show all posts

Friday, May 23, 2014

The Weirdness On The Wind

A couple years ago, I thumbed through my diaries and picked out some of my favourite scribbles, which I typed out on the intersnacks. These rather short writings have been stored away in a super secret blog that no one has ever read. Except me, of course, which is a mighty relief, to be honest, considering how painful it is to even glance at these posts. No, seriously. Even my most favourite entries are so tedious they make me want to weep tears over how I massacred the English language. 

Anyhow, tonight I found myself going through these handful of writings. Why? That's not too clear. Maybe I wanted to revisit the tortured years of my youth, or maybe I wanted to do some serious mental cringing. If the grotesque grammar and preposterous punctuation weren't enough to cause me to recoil, then the subject matter would have done the trick. 

Every last entry was an ode to forlorn love, being wronged, not liking the girl I used to be, and how heartbreaking the world is. Needless to say, I haven't always been a bright ray of sunshine. Most of my youth was spent feeling lost, uncertain and angry - how I imagine a lot of people feel in their younger years. Still, not everyone wrote down their inner turmoil to read through and relive later on in life. Lucky them. 

If you think I'm going to be sharing any of these embarrassing excerpt with you, think again. No one of them is good enough to show to a blind and deaf mule, let alone a unprepared reader. Having clarified this, there was one line that caught my attention.  

I can hear the weirdness on the wind and my heart echoes the sound. 

Something about this line made me smile. Truth be told, it's very hard for me to look at anything I've written and think it holds any sort of merit. To find this line, especially in writings well over a decade old, is a miracle in and of itself. It simply struck me as a beautiful observation. 

Yes, I am weird, but so is the world. It's in the wind. And I hear it. If weirdness is all around us, inside all of us, then we are never alone in our strange ways. Of course, I can't even remember writing the damn thing, but I must have, because it's here in my super secret online diary, riddled with typos even grade schoolers wouldn't make.  

And yet, in all the messy words, choppy paragraphs and complete lack of white space, I found a golden sentence. 

There is something very comforting in thinking the common thread binding us together is our weirdness. How perfectly abnormal we are. It's a beautiful idea, isn't it? To think we are all colouring outside the lines together.   

Monday, April 14, 2014

Musical Memories

No less than an hour ago I was in the worst funk. It came out of nowhere, side swept me and left me with a tiny storm cloud over my head. Instead of writing an angst filled post here, I decided to put my laptop away and work on the candy puzzle I picked up from Too Good To Be Threw, a local thrift shop. Anyhow, I started singing 'Pretty Fly For A White Guy', that abhorrent song by The Offspring. I am not too sure why it popped into my head, but when I stopped after the 'he's getting a tattoo, yeah, he's getting ink done, he asked for a thirteen, but they drew thirty-one' verse, I asked, "Why I am I singing this?"

The Sidekick said, "I have no idea." It was clear by the tone of his voice he felt the same way I did. Then we started discussing how The Offspring's music went downhill as time went by. We both distinctly remember Smash being one of those front to backers. You know, an album you could listen to without skipping a song. Then we started talking about other albums and bands from our pasts.

Here are eleven albums that came out when I was much younger than I am now, but which have, for me, withheld the test of time. I can still listen to these front to back, not skipping a song. Kind of like nostalgic songs of my wasted youth, I suppose.

Nirvana - Unplugged

Rancid - Out Come The Wolves  

The Cranberries - No Need To Argue

Green Day - Dookie

The Offspring - Smash

Portishead - Dummy

Tegan and Sara - This Art of Business

Snoop Doggy Dogg - Doggystyle

Sublime - Self Titled 

Garbage - Self Titled

Ani Difranco - Not A Pretty Girl 

As you can see, I've always been a bit of a varied girl. They are all linked because YouTube has all the full length albums up there, for anyone to listen too, if you want. Truth is, there were tons of amazing albums from my youth that I really got into later on in life as my music nerdiness truly developed. I am grateful I remember these. And also, that I can still sing them word for word. I now know what my brain cells are being used for.

What about you? What are some nostalgic albums from your youth?