hello seattle, i am an albatross.

Alright so I moved on to a new song for repeating all day long..
"Another Bag of Bones" by Kevin Devine is so damn good. He played it live with Jesse Lacey at the Roxy and I saved the lyrics in my phone to look up later. It's a great song. His music in general is pretty incredible.

There was some--

I started to post a second blog yesterday but that was as far as I got. :) I don't even know how that sentence was going to end haha. I'm not sure how the rest of this blog is going to end either cause, like I told Garrett earlier, I never know what I want to write about until I start writing. He suggested Mean Girls which is kind of funny cause my only other idea so far almost relates to that subject anyway. Stick around for a while, cause we're gonna have ourselves a story time folks. Names will be left out for the sake of being polite and so I don't have to feel like a terrible person for talking about people that don't know they're being talked about. Er- written about.

So there's this girl I know. She just turned fourteen last month I believe and has led.. an interesting life, to say the least. From what I can tell, she's the kind of kid whose life you take one look at and instantly feel sorry for. You want to help, to show her what she's doing wrong and explain how much better off she could be, but you know it's not up to you and she probably wouldn't listen anyway. For the most part it seems her life is the way it is due to bad parenting. Her real dad is a bit of a screw up and hasn't been in the picture for quite some time. It seemed like he was trying to get his life back on track lately, keeping a steady job and spending some time with her, but I just heard today that things weren't going as great on his side as it sounded like they were. The real issue though is her mom. This girl's mom is in her thirties but she tries to act more like the girl's best friend than her parent. She treats her more like a doll than her own daughter. Recently I was informed that she would be buying her daughter snakebites for her fourteenth birthday and while I laughed at my own mother for being old-enough to poke fun by saying things like, "Sure, that's what I'll do, mutilate my daughter's face for her birthday," I couldn't help but feel sorry for the girl.

I've heard much more gruesome things about her life than that but I don't want to be too detailed. I just hate to see situations like that where you know she's gonna end up in a place she regrets and wishes she could go back from and start over. We can all hope that she'll end up okay in the long run but situations like this are the kind of thing that make me terrified of having kids. The thought of shaping a person's entire personality and morals and behavior and influencing every aspect of their being just.. scares the shit out of me. That's such a huge responsibility that so many people fuck up horrendously and I'd hate to be another name on that list. If I turned out to be a bad parent, I would hate myself. In my mind, there are two types of parents that people try too hard not to become. Nobody wants to be the mean, strict, bad-guy parent, so they end up going way too easy and their kid turns out to be a crackwhore slut because of it. (Obviously an extreme case hah) Or you fear letting your kids get hurt in any way so you crack down too hard and they hate you for it anyway. I guess the way to go would be to try to combine the two and end up somewhere in the middle but it's gotta be so much more complicated than that. Writing it out like this makes it sound easy almost, but if it were easy, you'd think people would be a lot less fucked up than they are.

This reminds me of a story I read in Rolling Stone the other day, about the kid who started the Nebraska mall shooting last year. It was right before Christmas and he felt like his life had been a complete waste and he'd never be able to get himself back on track so why not kill himself and take a few others with him? His entire life had been lived in foster homes and boys' homes after his parents split up. When he was just a baby his parents were always violent which was probably a major cause of his issues in the first place. It was horrible. And it made me think that no matter how hard you try to be a good parent, even if you can find the medium between too soft and too strict, there's still no guarantee that your kid isn't gonna turn out to be a whack job anyway. And obviously you can't control that and it wouldn't be your fault necessarily but you can't really convince someone of something like that after some kind of massacre.

I don't even know what the hell I'm talking about anymore. This is turning into a crazy ramble but maybe it made some sense so far and I should just quit before I stop making any sense at all. I do wanna say one last thing though, because thinking about parenting and all made me stop and consider my own family, and I think my main complaint, if I try and ignore all the small things that bug the shit out of me, is that even after eighteen years, they still can't seem to trust me to make my own decisions. I know they're looking out for my best interests and all, but shouldn't happiness be in my best interests? And shouldn't I be the best judge of what makes me happy? I kinda just wish they would believe me when I tell them what I want and who I want to be with and support me in those kinds of decisions.