okay i can’t

holy fucking shit you guys i know i’ve been away like i was busy as fuck and then just never posted again because i was like i can’t explain my absence except i’m busy as fuck

but who even care none of that matters i am sitting here in the middle of class unable to deal with the fact that fall out boy is off hiatus

i feel like a grinning lunatic

i’ve had so many thoughts about fall out boy and music and initially i wasn’t posting because i was busy being conflicted about the whole concept of music? i’m fucking ridiculous. but like. just when i thought i had all the pete wentz feelings one could possibly have, i realized i wasn’t around when he had a blog. like a stream-of-consciousness shot-to-the-head kind of blog. and i found an excerpt from one of his blog posts, and his writing is incisive and poetic and all the things that make good music and nervous breakdowns and restless nights with your eyes wide and wondering, and mostly it seems like the kind of writing that happens when you’re overwhelmed with too much or not enough feelings and you’re translating it into words that are made of jumbled metaphors and whatever comes out on paper, just so you can look at it and not have it stuck swirling in your head. (even though it doesn’t go away.) like, I don’t know, I have no idea how he does it, maybe he picks up stray thoughts that strike him as poignant and collects them to be saved later, maybe he pours them all out at once when his brain gets going. but it’s not translated into, like, a conversational register, broken down into something easier to explain. there isn’t that degree of separation. so it feels very personal.

but it also feels like you’re getting hit by a freight train of statements that each could send you on another two-hour quest for the meaning of life if you think about it too hard, so my initial reaction was just holy shit there’s more? gimme everything. and I went looking, realized the source link to his old fbr blog was broken, quote-googled a bit, and came to the conclusion that I honestly don’t know if it’s possible to read them all anymore. there are multiple pages where it seems like people have duplicated stuff, but they don’t all match and it’s hard to tell what the original was. I found one blogspot page that seemed to have all the content of the original post, but it was locked to invited readers. and my gut reaction was aww but I wanted to read it. and then I took a step back from myself, because really? I don’t know if that was really his blog. but if it was, and this was basically his inner life he had a place to spill, who the fuck am I to feel like I should have been able to see all his pretty thoughts?

and then I realized that it was a small jump from Pete Wentz’s pretty thoughts to his lyrics. like, there are bits in songs I recognized from much older duplicated-blog posts. and basically this is his joys and fears and panic attacks with a few corners cut off and some verse-chorus structure, and you add melody and suddenly half the teenage population is singing along like they understand, and your panic attacks are saving their lives, and suddenly when you’re standing on stage is this exhilarating catharsis or does it make you want to scream? or both? how does it even feel to stand on stage and relive that over and over?

but. the fact that a lot of fall out boy’s lyrics are this giant ball of jumbled metaphors and exsanguination and meta self-aware self-awareness and sardonic unapologetic feeling is part of the whole reason i love them so.

and now they’re back. so heyy everyone group hug!

gender and sexual minority 101

I know there are lots and lots of versions of Trans 101, and lots of times what seems more important is something that goes more in depth, but I was looking for one recently for family who’ve literally never heard of transgender people and realized that a lot of them seem kind of combative? and I didn’t really want their introduction to transpeople to be jumping right in with DON’T MISGENDER THEM UNLESS YOU WANT TO LOOK LIKE A DOUCHEBAG.

so I…wrote one? and it’s really just the same stuff you find everywhere else, written how I conceptualize it and copy/pasted from an email, but if you do find it useful feel free to use it! (it ended up including sexual (and romantic) orientation too. because I kind of fail at keeping things that basic in favor of accuracy. and there is a bit of sociology and history because I couldn’t help myself. of course, it really is basic — the genderbread person is an updated version, but (for example) it still uses the arrow spectrums, and I’m sure there’s still plenty that’s not addressed here, so you are completely welcome to add to it. this is just a starting point.)

First of all, re: trans 101 links, here’s a pretty good one.

another commonly used resource to explain the very basics of gender is the genderbread person, which looks like this:

(credit)

(although that’s a slightly more advanced version than most, chosen for accuracy.) Essentially, to break it down, there’s gender identity, gender expression, and physical sex, and then there’s sexual orientation and romantic orientation:

gender identity: a person’s inner mental and emotional sense of affinity with being male, female, neither, somewhere in between, fluid, bits of both etc.

gender expression: a person’s behavior and appearance as they choose to present it, which may or may not follow the stereotypical “gender roles” their culture assigns to whatever gender identity they have; for example, a boy may feel entirely like a boy, but like pink and find dresses pretty; there is no reason that would make them any less a boy — it’s simply that our culture has arbitrarily assigned those things to girls. A hundred years ago in western culture, pink was for boys and blue was for girls, and all young children once wore what we would consider dresses.

physical sex: the “boy parts” and “girl parts” one is born with that cause many (but not all) doctors and parents to “assign” babies to male and female gender, although of course gender is in the head and sex is not. Some people are born intersex, which means they have both or ambiguous parts, and historically they have been given surgery as babies (usually to “female” parts, because it’s easier) and told they were one or the other. Many intersex people end up rebelling against this designation if they end up not having the gender they were arbitrarily assigned at birth. Clearly, this is one of the most obvious examples of how the sex = gender designation is arbitrary.

Most people, because of a combination of being born that way and cultural expectation, have all three of these match. Those who don’t are called transgender. They’ve been a part of the larger gender and sexual minority (mainstream designation LGBT) movement for a while, because so many people associated gender with sexual orientation and they were discriminated against along with the rest, and they were pioneers in gender theories and fighting for the rights of all of them, and started gaining recognition with their participation in the Stonewall riots along with sexual minorites, but were only added to the acronym sometime in the 90s. (there is a sociological concept of gender being socially constructed and people being “socialized” to “do” (act) the gender they were assigned at birth, and gender can be considered a combination of nature and nurture in this way, which is why for some people that socialization feels natural and for some it doesn’t.)

sexual orientation: the gender(s) or sexes one is naturally attracted to/compelled to have sexual relations with. This can be same, “opposite” (which is a misnomer because the gender binary, saying there is only male and female, is socially constructed), both of those, any (in or out of the gender binary), not dependent on gender or sex at all, none at all, and so on. Everyone feels differently. And, of course, what gender you are has absolutely nothing to do with what gender you’re attracted to, thus the existence of so many different orientations.

romantic orientation: the gender(s) or sexes one is romantically attracted to, and is compelled to do “romantic” things with. Although for most people (again, because of a combination of being born that way and cultural expectation) sexual orientation and romantic orientation match, for some it doesn’t (thus the existence of people who would have no problem marrying and sharing the rest of their lives with someone of any gender, but are really only sexually interested in one, and vice versa, and asexual people who are not sexually attracted to anyone but would like to marry/share their lives with someone, etc. etc. and on and on.)

Pretty much all that can be concluded from this is that there is incredible diversity in living beings, and society has historically been constructed to organize people and sort them into groups, which is obviously not very diversity-friendly, which is why some people have been marginalized and pushed into minority groups of all kinds. And gradually, these groups push back and gain acknowledgment and social change through activism (black people, women, sexual minorities, transpeople, people of different ages, disabled people, etc. etc.) And because there is so much diversity, the only real way to categorize people is for them to categorize themselves, and because no one can have quite the same experiences as someone else, the only really valid way to know someone’s identity is to hear it from them.

In general, when someone comes out as transgender, it’s slightly different from coming out re: sexual orientation, because it’s not a matter of saying “it’s okay, you’re not going to hell” (and not expecting them to marry straight, even if they do, or invalidating their identity and all) — it’s realizing that while they’re the same person you’ve always known, that person isn’t necessarily everything you thought they were. It’s putting them in a different category in your head from where you always have, and treating them like you do other people in that category. It’s foreseeing major changes in their lives. As such, it can be hard for people to deal with, not only because of this but because there’s still less awareness than there is for sexual minorities, so although there are a few major guidelines

- don’t “out” people to others who don’t know, just like for sexual orientation, as for many it’s an intensely private and major decision

- eventually change names and pronouns

- expect a “transition” — often used to refer to the process of changing physical characteristics and/or social perceptions of oneself so a transperson can live to be treated as the gender they are

still the really major guideline is actually very similar to the guideline for sexual orientation coming-out: don’t freak out. because although this may seem like a very new and radical change, it’s almost always something that’s been simmering in the person’s consciousness for a while, and coming out is just letting other people in on it, as the next step in living a life they’re comfortable with. Panic may be your natural reaction, but coming out is simply breaking down boundaries — the first step to making it something not taboo, so you can talk to them and make sense of something society doesn’t talk a lot about. It’s really only necessary because society puts up those boundaries in the first place, makes a default expectation so anyone who doesn’t fit within them has to say so. Ultimately, a society that respected the true diversity of human experience wouldn’t have those expectations to begin with, and not put people in categories when they haven’t categorized themselves. People have to be more comfortable with simply asking someone of ambiguous gender presentation how they identify. That pretty much requires that things like gender and sexual orientation are something you can talk about.

I have been awoken

from a deep and dreamless sleep deprivation known as academia

(read: FINALS ARE THIS WEEK D:)

so of course I shall drown myself in fandom instead. thanks, peridexis, for the TOTALLY LEGIT questions :D

meme rules:

1. post the rules

2. answer the questions the tagger set for you and then make 11 new ones

3. tag 11 people and link them to your post

4. let them know you’ve tagged them

1. your favorite tv show and why

gah, how am I supposed to pick? despite my obsessively singleminded tendencies, I really have quite a multifandom background. I probably still have a ridiculous soft spot for Star Trek TNG, though, so I’m claiming nostalgia-addlement and putting that even above Doctor Who, Merlin, Sherlock and Criminal Minds, which is my most recent drug. It’s a show that gave me an entire new framework to see the world through, that made me want to go outside at night and look at the sky, that made me think of the future as full of infinite possibilities. It literally was the show that made me learn about quantum mechanics and the fact that warp drive is really possible and the Drake equation for probability of alien life and try learning Vulcan and decide that Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations meant that all things, even seemingly impossible ones, have the tiniest possibility of occurring, and all things actually DO happen in multiverse theory and

…and I am such a nerd, it’s unfixable /o\

2. your favorite book series and why

oh, damn. this past semester I’ve been reminded of a lot of book series I loved - the Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper, the Black Magician trilogy by Trudi Canavan, the Time Master books by Louise Cooper…but the Young Wizards series by Diane Duane still holds a preeminent place. I don’t think anything can knock it. I mean, for one, I started reading it at the point in my life when I started getting all ~philosophical like above, and the teen angst combined with that to make THE WHOLE WORLD FULL OF MEANING. and Young Wizards writes this whole world just like ours, but puts a different spin on everything from science to magic and makes it all REAL. like, if wizardry made scientific sense at all it had a possibility of existing, and if it was really just HOW THE UNIVERSE WORKS, well, how cool is that? and it wrote about kids like me, doing eternally significant things, and love and death and the meaning of life. and computers that could transport you across the galaxy. and alien friendships. and redemption and there being no such thing as good and evil, light and dark and life and death not being polarized. it’s fucking beautiful.

3. your favorite fanfic and why

jesus christ, are you serious? I CAN’T DO THAT. MY BRAIN HAS LIKE TEN THOUSAND OF THEM IN MEMORY STORAGE. Fandom is the security blanket I wrap myself in through high and low and, like Linus, I’m NEVER LETTING IT GO. because when there’s so much community and creativity and friendship built around common interests and passions, well, great things come out of it.

but. If you’re making me pick one, stele3’s Underground Earthquakes/Second Circle fic holds a special place in my heart. I can always flail about it. I read the entire thing without much of a break during a particularly low emotional point, and it strikes at some of the deepest parts of humanity and brings them out into the light. it’s about friendship and darkness and fear and attachment and carefree laughter and profound connection and childhood protectiveness and forgiveness and memories that won’t let go and people you don’t want to, about change and fear thereof and people who will always be there. that said, it (mostly Second Circle, as Underground Earthquakes kind of sets the scene and the atmosphere and the relationship behind it all) addresses a LOT of issues, and you may not be able to or want to deal with them - it kind of centers itself around darkness to find the human connection beneath. It’s gripping, beautifully written, brilliantly plotted, and there are all these MOMENTS of revelation that leave you not just able to face the world, but able to see the profundity in every moment. and it’s probably a major contributor to why the relationship between Ryan Ross and Spencer Smith is one of my kryptonites.

aaand now that I have fanboyed myself into a faster heartbeat and pretentiously deep turns of phrase, well

4. pick a ship you like and briefly explain why

THIS WAS ON PURPOSE WASN’T IT

I can’t pick Spencer and Ryan. Not allowed. I mean, it’s probably the basic friendship between those two that gets me, anyway, and pairing them is just an extension of that that sometimes works.

no, actually, I’m picking Gabe Saporta and Pete Wentz. and I’m picking them because they’re brothers, and they’ll tell you so themselves. Pete Wentz kind of has a tendency to pull out my heart and be like YOU KNOW HOW YOU FEEL? I’LL TELL YOU. IT HURTS. LIKE THIS. and he has this incredibly self-aware self-dismissal thing going on, so Gabe will call him on his bullshit but only because Pete already KNOWS it’s bullshit, but needs someone to acknowledge it, and also acknowledge when he’s just in emotional need and fly across the country to hang out and be understated best mates.

and Gabe has had so many things happen in his life, and he’s like unofficial pop-punk idol of Midtown and then that all goes to hell and Pete’s like HEY COME ON YOU CAN DO THIS and Gabe’s like FUCK IT ALL I’M MAKING PARTY MUSIC and who knows how that break affects him, but he’s got this simultaneous I DON’T TAKE ANYTHING SERIOUSLY and DUDE YOU KNOW THE MEANING OF LIFE IS IN SERVING PEOPLE thing going on, I mean, seriously. and so they hang out and laugh at themselves and really just want to make the world a better place. and I love them.

5. if you had to fight to the death with one of these characters if both of you are armed only with a knife, which would you choose: Jack Merridew, Roger from Lord of the Flies, Odysseus, or Leela of the Sevateem?

ahahaha English class, here we come. I think maybe Odysseus, mostly out of process of elimination: Jack and Roger both want to kill too much, and their bloodlust is kind of scary; I don’t really want to kill Leela but also she’d probably be too competent for me to beat. (at first I read this question as who I’d want on my side, which would totally be Leela.) Odysseus is, well, he’s a PARAGON OF HEROISM but he’s an ancient Greek epic paragon of heroism which means he actually angsts a lot more about honor and glory, and I could probably play on that. LOOK, ODYSSEUS, I AM MUCH SMALLER AND WEAKER THAN YOU AND THIS IS NOT A FAIR FIGHT. LET’S SET SOME RULES. and then I break them! :D

6. pick two (or more) of these characters to ship together: Luna Lovegood, Simon from Lord of the Flies, Dean Winchester, the TARDIS, Amy Pond, Sherlock Holmes, Gwen (from Merlin), and the Yellow Teletubby

OH MY GOD THE YELLOW TELETUBBY SCREW YOU

I’m actually really tempted to ship Luna and the TARDIS, because come on. Luna has that ~spiritual connection with everything she sees and touches and understands more possibilities than even a magical world acknowledges. She would understand something like the TARDIS having a consciousness and be enamored with it just like she’s enamored with anything else, not see anything strange in it. It would be so good for them.

7. favorite character from a book written more that twenty years ago

*checks if Young Wizards started more than 20 years ago*

\o/ any of the first three books, okay.

but now I don’t know who to pick. the Lone Power? Ed(rashtekaseret? I haven’t even looked at it in months, so if I got that even vaguely right I will be very impressed with myself). Tom and Carl? (but they’re inseparable). I really want to pick the Lone Power because I’m always a sucker for the supposed-villains, but also Ed. The poor guy who’s just been alive so much longer than he wanted to and (SPOILER ALERT) sacrifices himself for other people’s lives ;_____; and he’s got so much wisdom and too many years, and it hurts. Yeah, it’s probably Ed. For now.

8. first character you can think of that has unnaturally colored hair

define unnatural! IT’S ALL NATURAL :D okay. Gerard Way probably doesn’t count as a character, um. Tonks? does that count as unnatural? cause she’s actually a shapeshifter-type person, so that’s currently her natural hair color. why am I analyzing this so hard? /o\ I think at some point Penelope Garcia from Criminal Minds might have had pink in her hair? SHE IS AWESOME AND EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW HER.

9. if you had 20 minutes to put up a defense in your house against an advancing group of 5 armed soldiers, what would you do?

RUN. come on, I’m a Doctor Who fan. I’d take my computer and my ipod, and…actually I’d probably freak out. and call 911. Something horrendously practical, because I can’t think of anything guaranteed to be clever or effective enough /o\

10. if you could only go out of your house for one day and you were locked in for the rest of your life, what would you do in that day?

PANIC. also I would go to a concert. and walk the streets and talk to people. and basically take advantage of every opportunity I could see. and PANIC. and run, and sing, and play guitar badly because I have an excuse, and go for a swim in the ocean. and try to meet people I’ve never met irl. and sing kumbayah in a protest song circle. and look at the stars and sleep outside by a fire. and spend most of that in line for a concert because music high. and panic some more. because that’s a scary thought.

11. if you had to choose between being born and dying on your 3rd birthday or never being born at all, which would you pick?

definitely being born. three years of life is better than no years of life! you can definitely experience human connection and the joys of doing things when you’re under 3, and I want that. I think you can be quite philosophical-minded as a kid, in that way, because everything’s in the moment and everything’s “why” and everything’s important.

so now that we’ve established I think too much, eleven questions for you! answer with one word, two pages, whatever. just have fun.

1. what’s the last song that got stuck in your head? (for inclusiveness to any deaf people, which I apologize for not being skilled at: what’s the last creative thing you couldn’t look away from/kept coming back to?)

2. name a fictional character you identify with. why?

3. if you didn’t have to worry about money, what would you do with your life?

4. explain any philosophical ~epiphany you’ve ever had.

5. talk about a band/tv show/movie/book/fandom you love. why?

6. what gets you high? (chemical or not, as you wish)

7. would you rather die in a day or live forever? why?

8. if you could create an ideal nation/political system, what would it be like?

9. what’s your favorite story (in any form - book, tv, fanfic, storytelling, comics, song, anything)?

10. if you have any tattoos, and/or if you were to get any tattoos, what are they?

11. if you could go forward/back in time to any year, when would you go to and what would you do? (you have the option to come back.)

tagged people are in the tags.

okay, just so you know, I was am sorely fucking tempted to tag dduane because 1) I have still not gotten over Diane Duane finding me on tumblr and 2) YOU WOULD APPRECIATE IT RIGHT but -1) I actually rambled on about YW here and /o\

actually though.

scratch that, it’s worth a try. CAUTION TO THE WIND BECAUSE IT’S FANDOM. do it or not as you wish! just have fun, y’know :D

WE LIKED YOU BETTER FAT: CONFESSIONS OF A PARIAH

nervousbreakdance:

There’s this really nice piece at underthegunreview.net by Jacob Tender that a friend forwarded me today. It’s about how important Fall Out Boy’s album “From Under the Cork Tree,” was to him. After reading it though, nostalgic and well-written as it was, I really found myself more depressed than anything. It’s a complicated feeling, one that I’ve been incapable of explaining to anyone and have them fully understand. In spite of this though, I suppose I will give it the old-I-didn’t-go-to-college-try:

Tender had one line that really hit home for me. I related to it in terms of my feelings towards other artists, but I also winced at the profound implications it touched on in my own professional life:

“I didn’t like those pretentious assholes who didn’t like anything after Take This To Your Grave. I now recognize that I’m one of those assholes, but I still fume when some of my favorite records are so easily discredited by ignorant semi-listeners.”

The reality is that for a certain number of people, all I’ve ever done, all I ever will do, and all I ever had the capacity to do worth a damn was a record I began recording when I was 18 years old.  That I can live with. That’s fine and fair; I have those records in my collection that seem to stand out far above the rest of my favorite artists catalogues (and especially for artists in whom I only have a passing interest). I suppose there’s nothing wrong in thinking I’m at a point in my life where it seems I’ll never catch up: If anyone’s going to appreciate the work I’m making, it won’t be until long after I’m done doing it. Again, this is fine: I’m insanely lucky to even imagine anyone ever appreciating anything I ever do, let alone in real time. Countless artists far better than I have only achieved posthumous acclaim. If I am to be obscure and financially unsuccessful, there’s nothing disheartening in that. The thing that’s more disheartening is the constant stream of insults I’m enduring in my financially unsuccessful obscurity.

Fall Out Boy’s last album Folie A Deux was our most critically panned and audiences openly hated it (it was also our poorest selling major label album even if one adjusts for the changing music economy). Now, that’s not to say it didn’t have its fans, but at no other point in my professional career was I nearly booed off stages for playing new songs. Touring on Folie was like being the last act at the Vaudville show: We were rotten vegetable targets in Clandestine hoodies.

That experience really took the wind out of the band’s sails; It stopped being fun. I suppose I’m just not that thick skinned. So perhaps it was even more ill-advised when I went out and did something I’d always wanted to do; make my album and have it released by Island Records [my solo record Soul Punk]. I coincidentally happened to achieve another goal which was to lose the weight I’d been carrying around since a month-long drinking binge after a bad breakup. Those accomplishments were happy things. Living in the moments of achieving them were perhaps among the happiest in my life.

So when I went out into the world to show off the self I felt like I was happiest and most comfortable being, I suppose I knew there would be the “Haters” [I loathe the clumsy/insufficient word but it seems the most universal]; The elitists that would always prove impossible to please.  I had always been prepared for “Haters,” because there’s never been a moment since I graduated high school where I haven’t been the guy in “That Emo band.” First said emo band was dismissed as third rate pop-punk played by hardcore kids…a pale imitation of Saves the Day. Then we were swept up in the emo backlash [I really didn’t know we were an emo band…that’s not what the word meant a decade ago]. To this day my favorite writer at cracked.com will occasionally take swipes at my band as one of the worst things to come out of the 2000’s. We were a (albeit funny) running joke on an episode of Children’s Hospital. 

Those examples of “Haters,” were people who never liked me (or at least never liked my music) and, by all rights, never really should. Such is the way of things. Different strokes for different folks as it were. What I wasn’t prepared for was the fervor of the hate from people who were ostensibly my own supporters (or at least supporters of something I had been part of). The barrage of “We liked you better fat,” the threatening letters to my home, the kids that paid for tickets to my solo shows to tell me how much I sucked without Fall Out Boy, that wasn’t something I suppose I was or ever will be ready for.  That’s dedication. That’s real palpable anger. Add into that the economic risk I had taken [In short: I blew my nest egg on that record and touring in support of it] the hate really crushed me. The standard response to any complaints I could possibly have about my position in life seems to be “You poor sad multi-millionaire. I feel so sorry for you.” 

Quite right, I still have access to enough money to live on in order to avoid bankruptcy for at least a few years as long as I stick to my budget, but money really isn’t everything and it never was. Perhaps those are the words of a privileged man who doesn’t really know what poverty really feels like. Again, that would be a fair rebuttal; I wasn’t raised rich, but lower middle class upbringing in early 90’s Midwest US of A is still a far way from the bread line. Still, there’s no amount of money in the world that makes one feel content with having no self respect. There’s no amount of money that makes you feel better when people think of you as a joke or a hack or a failure or ugly or stupid or morally empty.

This of course isn’t Tender’s fault. He never said anything negative and indeed only said great/supportive things. I guess I’m just angry because he illuminates why I’m a 27 has-been. I’m a touring artist and I feel I’ve become incapable of touring anymore with any act…whether I were to go out as a solo artist or do some Fall Out Boy “Reunion” [nope: Still never broke up] or start a new band…there will still be 10-20 percent of the audience there to tell me how shitty whatever it is I’m doing is and how much better the thing I used to do was. Not only that, but that 10-20 percent combined with whatever notoriety Fall Out Boy used to have prevents me from having the ability to start over from the bottom again. I can’t even go back to playing basement shows. As the saying goes: I couldn’t get booked at the opening of a letter.

It’s as though I’ve received some big cosmic sign that says I should disappear. So I’ve kind of disappeared. I know a lot of you have wondered where I’ve been. I’m sure others of you are disappointed to hear I’m still kicking around somewhere (kidding…sort of). But the truth is wherever and whoever I am, whoever I am whenever I release whatever release is my next, whoever said recording is recorded with: I will never be the kid from Take This To Your Grave again. And I’m deeply sorry that I can’t be, I truly am (no irony, no sarcasm). I hate waking up every morning knowing I’m disappointing so many people. I hate feeling like the awkward adult husk of a discarded once-cute child actor. I’m debating going back to school and learning a proper trade. It’s tempting to say I won’t ever play/tour/record again, but I think that’s probably just pent up poor-me emotional pessimism talking (I suppose can be excused of that though right? I am the guy from That Emo Band after all).

I’ve managed to cobble together some work…I’ve been moonlighting as a professional songwriter/producer for hire and I’ve even been doing a bit of acting here and there. I have no interest (and evidently that sentiment is reciprocated) in performing music publicly any time soon but as I’ve said I’m sure that will happen when it happens. I have been debating releasing the unfinished follow-up to Soul Punk. We’ll see what happens there. Still no word on Fall Out Boy…I know Joe’s working on his new record and Pete’s mixtape just came out so I don’t expect anything on that front in the near future. I, as always, would be super psyched to do the band again though. I’ve been watching a lot of Downton Abbey and I’ve finally caught up on the Office. Friends have been turning me on to all the records I’ve been too busy to listen to over the past couple years.

I do suggest reading Tender’s column if it sounds interesting to you; He’s a great writer and it’s a fun/relatable little story regardless of who the band is within it (film adaptations of Nick Hornby novels should be proof of that).

http://underthegunreview.net/2012/02/28/editorial-the-cure-to-growing-older-a-musical-retrospective/

I think I can legitimately say that, reading Jacob Tender’s piece, I know the feeling. Fall Out Boy was one of the first bands that I was exposed to, that I listened to of my own accord, that made me realize what music can do for a person, that made me seek out all the other music I could possibly have missed from 17 years of being alive and several more decades of not, that made me want to experience the indescribable natural high that comes from being in too-close quarters with too many too-tall people and ten feet from the band whose art has touched all of our lives.

I started with Infinity on High. I loved From Under the Cork Tree. And Folie à Deux made me cry, sing, press repeat, walk outside at night, and try making contact with the world again. I will never understand how people can draw border lines on an artist’s world and divorce the artist from their creation, associate them with what resonated with you instead of respecting what resonated with them. The same way From Under the Cork Tree will always resonate with Jacob Tender, 21st Century Breakdown will always resonate with me, and all of your music will resonate with you - it is a memory and a part of you that is never lost. You may not be able to start from the bottom again, but that person isn’t gone. He’s just been added onto and added onto and there is more, now, that will cry out for a place to sing and a place where no one will hear you. You deserve both. But I doubt either will ever be enough by itself.

I saw you on tour with Panic! at the Disco last year, my first time seeing either of you live. I saw the people you speak of, with their “where is Pete Wentz” signs and their Fall Out Boy hoodies. I couldn’t understand how we could share a fandom. I don’t think I’d even seriously expected that there could be people who would dare that kind of disrespect and pretension at understanding. I had my fingers clenched and my teeth gritted and I wanted, so bad, to walk over and rip into them: “do you actually think this is supportive? do you actually think you’re doing this out of love?” I knew they got to me - it would have taken an additional level of comprehension to consider that they could actually get to you, that they could mean something more than another sign to brush past on the way to touching fingers with the fans who knew all the lyrics. If I’d truly understood that, I probably would have said something. I wish I had, now.

But I also see all the people who, for all they’re distanced from the “rockstar life,” understand better than the people who claim to that you are just a person. Music may flow in your veins, but it might just bleed to get it out. None of us are entitled to your blood. But we can’t help but hope you’ll listen if it calls to you.

That hope is still there. It, and therefore you as an artist, are most definitely not a thing of the past. But more than that, as you’ve grown as an artist and a person, many of us have grown to understand that people need to heal those wounds, too - and so I say: the haters may be loud, but sometimes in music it’s the quiet spaces that make the song. Please let us be your quiet spaces.

OCD: I’m not ruining my life washing my hands all the time

(okay, for a while there when I was younger - like nine - I did have a washing hands thing. But it was never about being clean, just about washing them evenly. I had a symmetry thing.)

first of all, I feel like I should put a disclaimer saying that while I’m pretty sure I have an OCD diagnosis, it might just be psychologists saying I have OCD tendencies and going from there, because it would have been around the age of 12, and - from what I know from having a psychologist mother who talked about ethics whenever I asked questions, meaning I’m not a professional or anything - you’re not supposed to diagnose a lot of things that young, because some behavioral/emotional/thought patterns have a tendency to change just with time and even out later. But this is coming from the perspective of someone who probably has an OCD diagnosis. (I also have social anxiety, and possibly some sort of bipolar, but I don’t know about that…it just might be mentionable because an intersection of issues will lead to a different experience.)

I just feel the need to say this because a lot of things about my experiences are things I haven’t seen talked about anywhere I’ve seen people talk about OCD. So I want to put out there that this is a possible experience, too.

First of all, the usual image of OCD is a hyper-awareness of things needing to be clean and orderly. So you get the person who needs to wash their hands forty times a day, who needs all the tables to be parallel, who needs there not to be any dust anywhere because they’re afraid of germs, who needs to check the door to make sure it’s locked, who needs to tap all the lampposts…I don’t even know. And - especially from an outside perspective - it’s easy to define OCD from these behaviors, which individually don’t really make sense, and say “they have an irrational compulsion to wash their hands and tap the glasses and otherwise they get really distressed” and that’s it.

But it’s not, because the things my brain does actually do make sense. They may have a tinge of irrationality to the intensity or extent to which they feel important, but they have a basic logic to them. There’s no reason I would feel a need to tap every glass, unrelated to anything else in my life. I would not randomly choose tapping glasses as a thing to make everything feel right. That wouldn’t make sense.

Instead, my brain works like this: if something isn’t right - you exploded in an argument and now your family hates you, you need to write a paper by tomorrow and it just isn’t coming, you’re breaking down about the meaning of life, your gender dysphoria is fucking killing you and if your voice comes out wrong to one more person - then you find something, something vaguely logically linked to the problem, latch onto it, and say this will fix it.

You take a problem that seems unsolvable, like you’d just have to wait for the world to right itself again, and find something you can do that you can tell yourself will be the turning point, and then act like it is the turning point, and the world will feel right again.

So your mom hates you because a screaming argument just went down in the kitchen? You’ll make her tea, and have a conversation about - pick something - can we go to the library? and you’ll be back to normal. You need to write a paper by tomorrow, and your brain’s just not in writing mode? You’ll turn the music up and sing along for three songs, get a mug of hot chocolate, and think about something interesting until your thoughts give you a poetic turn of phrase - it doesn’t matter if that phrase is completely unrelated to your essay topic, it just means your brain’s back in writing mode - and then you will sit down and write.

Of course, this can backfire spectacularly. If you’re in a good mood, and you decide you’re going to go home and listen to American Idiot and sing along, and your brother’s on the computer and your dad’s like “I need everything to be quiet, I’m working,” then everyone else fucking ruined your perfect plan.

Sometimes you can say “okay, I will hold on to this good mood until exactly 5:00 please give me the computer then.” And you sound crazy, because why the hell is everything riding on a random time? But the crucial part is that you can convince yourself to hold on, because there’s a reason to it. It’s a lot easier to settle on 5:00 than 4:57 or 5:06 because 5:00 is an even hour, it’s a good turning point. It’s something you can schedule.

But then you can have a perfect plan about making your mom tea and asking to go to the library, and a group outing like that will smooth over the way you just made everything awkward between you by having a screaming match, and your mom will say “no, we can’t go to the library.” Or you might have had a great day, for whatever reason, and as you were walking home from school you felt an overwhelming awareness of the miracle of your existence, because seriously the world is tiny and in the eternal millions of years of the universe’s existence how is that there’s you on this tiny world and you can think about shit like the meaning of life, and just look at all the thousands of people living, and we should all band together and sing, and nothing else matters because you can feel it - and you’re going to go home and write a goddamn song, okay? and it will be the beginning of a wonderfully meaningful life - and then you get home, and you can’t sing because your brother’s busy with the piano and your dad needs it quiet in the study to work and you can’t sing with people there anyway, and you’re going to lose it, you’re going to lose it and you’ll never get it back and your chance at life is gone and your state of mind is gone and there’s no point, you’ll never be able to get that exact inspiration back and write that exact song and you’re just going to end up at a goddamn desk job and what’s the point, no you can’t let go of that state of mind. It can’t be gone. You’re just going to curl up on the floor and make noise, sing tones without melodies in endless near-screaming, avoid any familiar note combinations, just so you can’t hear anything else to jolt you out of it and make you think, you can just hold on like that until you get a chance to write it down - but you don’t get a chance and you don’t get a chance and your throat hurts and you can’t stop because there’s no reason to, there was no turning point to say “things are okay now and you can stop,” nothing changed so any stopping would be completely random and it would just mean you ran out of steam, it would just mean you lost that state of mind.

But the thing about having a brain like this is that it also means I can notice “hey, my voice is capable of sounding like a boy this evening! goddamn, this is amazing, I feel like I can take on the world, I can talk to people and I can sing Folie à Deux and you don’t even realize how much constant pressure gender dysphoria gives you until for a moment, you don’t feel it.” And if I were neurotypical, that could be a momentary thing. I would feel it one moment, and the next time I said something I would notice how my voice sounded and it wouldn’t sound the same and bam, gone. Back to normal. But with this, I can notice - I can notice and say, hey, this evening is good, and I’m not going to eat or drink anything in the vague hope that will help me keep it. Because logically, yes, within the next hour my voice is going to change and fluctuate and that’s just how voices are. (And if it were morning, I’d have to deal, because I have to eat.) But I can convince myself that not making another cup of tea will mean not triggering that change, and I can have an evening to myself of singing along to Fall Out Boy and for once not caring about monitoring my voice.

Sometimes, OCD impulses aren’t random germ-aware compulsions people need to follow or else they’ll explode. Sometimes they’re actually ways our brains provide for coping with our issues and with the world.

New Hampshire GOP Speaker: Kids these days shouldn’t be allowed to register and vote. Because that just leads to them voting how they feel. “Liberal.”

think-progress:

We don’t make this up:

Kids [are] coming out of the schools and basically doing what I did when I was a kid, which is voting as a liberal. That’s what kids do — they don’t have life experience, and they just vote their feelings.”

-New Hampshire Speaker William O’Brien (R) to a Tea Party crowd 

basically doing what I did when I was a kid

so you’re saying other people shouldn’t have the same freedoms as you? nice going, defender of American ideals.

American politics and public awareness has never been very friendly toward young people, but the current right wing candidates are setting new records. First of all, whenever I see the phrase “kids these days” I know something stupid is going to come out of your mouth. Second of all, everyone votes their feelings. If you don’t, you’re probably voting your wallet, which I respect far less. People vote for people who agree with them and who they think will protect their political philosophies. Young people tend to vote more along idealistic lines, old people tend to vote with what they’re comfortable or to protect “future generations” or their money. But you can’t generalize that either. And if I had to pick one, I’d most definitely go with the young. If our generation could redesign this country, I guarantee you it would be better than the traditional system we’re stuck with. If five-year-olds created a society from the ground up, it would be better in so many ways than what we’ve got now. NO SOCIETY IS EVER IMPROVED BY FEAR OF CHANGING THE STATUS QUO. If liberalism means wanting to make things better for everyone, then yes, I’m voting liberal. But the truth is there is no good vote for us young idealists, and it kills us every time.

I. Support. Music.

themerchdude:

This is something a talk about supporting music, many people support in different ways either buying music, concerts tickets or buying merchandise.

Everyone has their unique way of doing it and every band and crew out there is thankful of it, bands say it at their shows they publicly say it on their blogs and tweets, bands go throughout so much to get shows for fans, setting up a tour take a lot of work and expenses, the main reason bands tour or at least back in the day was to promote a CD’s the way things are now bands make a Cd to promote their tours, why the change? Because they barely make any money in CDs unless they sell millions of CDs but if you think about it even when they sell one million cd’s the portion of the money the band makes on that cd is minimum, plus they have to pay whatever advance they got from the label when they got signed. Example labels advance the band 1 million dollars when they get signed, when a cd is sold at 10 bucks the band gets maybe 1 dollar which that 1 dollar goes back to the label to pay the advance they got not from the other 9 label keeps that (see how more or less it works) people may think because they see a band selling millions of cd’s that they are killing it and it won’t hurt the band if someone downloads the music for free but it does, it hurts the band, the label and the crew so every illegal download from one band hurts a lot of people.

Some bands give away their music and I tip my hat to them but this is a decision that the band is entitled to do, not us fans we are not entitled to take their music for free. Yes I know it happens and it won’t stop same way I wont stop saying its wrong. It’s hard for anyone that is a real fan to hear people that say that they are fans but steal music and even try to steal Merch at shows (it happens to many bands) even now bands are getting their Vans and gear stolen.

The music business is going through rough times you see it in ticket sales (increase in fees and prices) because every time someone steal a song someone else has to pay the difference and guess who that is? Yep the real fans.

People will do what they want and most of the time this is because they don’t know better, I make it an effort to inform people how it works and how it affect many, information is a powerful tool that we need to use and help people understand. I cant do it on my own but I’ll tell you one thing I’m willing to give it a try and you should do the same.

This is my opinion and only an opinion.

This is why I think anyone who has the money to spare to buy a CD should do it. I did, when I still had money (now I have to save everything for food until the indeterminate time someone sees fit to give me a goddamn job) and really, I don’t see why you wouldn’t choose to. It’s better all round - the band gets money, you get a physical CD with an actual lyrics booklet (those things are the best ever and why I want the actual CD for all my favorite albums). See, I totally understand why people download music illegally if they’re really fucking poor like me; I just think it would be much better and more excusable if you only download stuff you really want and intend to buy when you can afford it. Especially if you’re a fan of a small band that still has little publicity and isn’t well-known, you buying an album is what enables them to keep going. You’re making it possible for them to make music. A band like Empires, for example, who started out putting all their music on their website for free in the hopes people would realize how fucking amazing they are - and they are, and that album is still there, although they’ve started charging for the newer stuff - you’re what make it possible.