Something Missing

Since yesterday I've been totally pumped up.  It's absolutely because I remembered The Protomen.  I forgot how much I need to hear their music, and I'll tell you why.

So much music in modern society is about giving up.  I'm not one of those people who can just give up easy.  Anyone who knows me is aware of this!  It's probably really annoying to most of my friends.  They love me anyway.  I have awesome friends.  (Thank you for loving my stubborn self, friends!).  I digress; I can't stand a lot of modern music because I can't empathize with giving up or giving into grief.  Tangentally, I can to a degree.  I suffer from depression, but I've never just let it consume me.  I struggled for years to find a solution to this chemical imbalance in my brain, did research for years, used myself experimentally for years, until last year I figured out what my trigger was and am doing SO MUCH BETTER.  Also, I can't stand a message that tells us to just give up.  If anything, that only makes me want to fight harder against such a mentality.

I love music that pumps me up and inspires me to keep on going.  I miss that.  There are so few bands out there that get recognized who profess an upbeat message like that.  I want more of it.  I crave it!  My muse craves it.  It makes me want to go out and kick the world in the face and tell it to sit down and shut up because it's never going to keep me down.

That being said, this is also absolutely why I wanted to be a teacher to begin with.  I want to teach kids not to give up, and to better themselves.  I want them to know that they don't have to be victims of social consumerism telling them how to be and what's cool, but that they can derive the change just by being themselves and bettering themselves.  I also want them to learn to take a stand against people to try to knock them down, not through violence, but with tenacity.  I'm thinking of a specific incident here where a student I was subbing for came up to tell me that she didn't want to go to music because her instructor had taken all of the fun out of learning to play the guitar for her.  When I asked how, she said the instructor had told her she was awful at playing the guitar and should just quit.  The girl had only JUST picked it up.  Of course she was going to suck.  No one just picks up a guitar and plays well.  I told her this and then I told her "Don't let her win.  If it's something you love and want to learn, then learn it.  And don't learn it to shove it in her face later, but learn it because it's something you love and want to do.  Put your passion into it and don't look back and the naysayers; no one ever picked up an instrument and was a genius at it."  The world needs more people telling kids to try rather than preventing them from trying out of fear.

This blog took a weird turn.  I'm just going to leave this here.