Pop-Culture Smash

Sometimes I look at my old cds or through my ipod at songs that I downloaded a few years ago, and I find it difficult to believe that I used to actually enjoy listening to some of them — so much so really that I purchased most of them legally! SAY WHAT? Yeah, I guess I was a much more honest kid back then, but since then my college education has really broken me down. Now, I’ll pretty much steal a bagel if I can. Hey, I gotta eat breakfast before my shit 9am poli sci class, okay.  Anyway, Jimmy Eat World’s album Futures was particularly important to me when it came out because it really resonated with all the stuff that was going in my life back then.  I was seriously emotionally unstable at the time and having a lot of difficulty dealing with my family.  That album, which I still think is the best thing the band has ever made, was on repeat for about six months straight and then I stopped listening to it entirely.  I went through it again and rather than finding the songs so relatable, I just kept sifting through memories of my teenage self.  Those songs, which once felt as if they were taken out and pieced together from the crevices of my soul, are now just painful reminders of the terrible time I went through that year.  They don’t bring me ease anymore.  I guess things like that just happen naturally, but still, it’s so strange to find yourself not feeling the same connections with things that once meant so much to you.

Life goes on whether you feel like you can’t move because you are so inconsolably depressed, or whether you are insatiably happy.  Everything moves constantly and with such speed that by the time you actually come around to noticing it, you feel like so much has happened and that you might have missed something important.  I don’t want to just exist.  I want to live.  Maybe it’s harder that way, but I’m going to try.  All the negativity that I suffocate myself with has gotten old and it really isn’t very productive.  I hate self-loathing, so I’m going to try and be better rather than just talking about it.  It’s okay if I am disliked for being myself because, really, that is still infinitely better than pretending to be someone that I am not.  My motto from now on should be: good books, good music, good friends, and good wine.  I will not be afraid to challenge myself, and I will not hold myself back because I am uncertain or fearful of doing something.  I’ll take failure if it means that I am actually out there doing something.  I am going to let myself live my life the way that I want to. 

So many times people say that art is subjective, yet when it comes time to actually judge a piece or give your interpretation of it, this idea doesn’t come through.  The artist him/herself has a clear, distinct feeling and motivation behind it, and I guess the super well-cultured art authorities bring it upon themselves to make sure that everyone else only sees it that way.  I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes, even when an artist intends their piece to be a certain way, that is not the way that I interpret it.  Is that really such a bad thing though?  Because, really, I always just want to evoke some sort of a true, visceral opinion in others through my own stuff, so I just don’t understand why others have to bring people down if they have the opposite or slightly different reaction to a piece.  It’s frustrating and quite frankly it is one of the reasons so many people shy away from actually ever trying to understand art.  

I know this happens to everyone, but it feels strange to watch people you’ve known for so long change into different versions of themselves.  Nothing is constant; growing up is unavoidable.  People begin to piece together who they are and what they want, and somehow in the process they realize that the people they are closest to no longer share the same outlook as them.  Keeping the memories is easy, but trying to hold onto what you’ve built is too difficult.  Sometimes you just have to let things slide through your fingers because you can’t hold onto everything.