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Cheers, Oasis.

So, multiple sources have written that Liam Gallagher has "officially" declared the end of Oasis.  Even though I was disappointed over their last few albums and their '05 show at the Hollywood Bowl, and as much as I chuckled over the issue of the Gallagher boys and their tussle backstage in August, or at the thought of Snoop Dogg collaborating with Noel, and Jay-Z with Liam, this news is seriously upsetting. 

Oasis was never the band of my generation, but it was of my sister's.  Thanks to her, I grew up listening to Oasis.  When she was gone for the day at school, I would sneak into her CD collection and pop (What's the Story) Morning Glory? into my mom's Sony CD/Radio/Cassette Sound System, lay on my stomach and read liner notes and lyrics.  Wonderwall was the first full song, to my recollection, I had ever memorized...in the THIRD grade.  It became a huge sing-a-long song for people during high school, but I don't think I know anyone else my age that this song means more to.  Wonderwall and What's the Story opened up mind at the very influential age of 10, and showed me a world of music outside of mainstream and Top 40 radio.  To this day, What's the Story is still one of my favorite albums.  That guitar solo in Don't Look Back in Anger was one of the reasons I wanted to even play guitar (Unfortunately, I never learned how to shred like Noel). 

And don't even get me started on the first time I saw them live -- 2000 at the Universal (Gibson) Ampitheatre with Travis as the opener.  My first "real" concert.  You know when you go to a show and you see a 10 year old with his/her parents and think, "Damn, that kid is so cute.  He/she's so lucky to have such awesome parents"?  I was that kid.  Except those awesome parents were my sister and her friends.  I was that short 5th grader shyly rocking out and singing Oasis songs amongst a crowd of raucous high school and college students, and 30+ year old drunken Brits waving and holding up the Union Jack.  Suffice to say, that night was one of the most memorable of my life.  It was the night I realized I would some day end up in the music industry, where I would always be surrounded by people who shared the same passion and love for music as I do. 

Oasis...Liam, Noel, you guys changed my life in ways that you'll never know.

Cheers.

Hope, faith, love, & music.

It's been close to exactly two years now since Jaime from To Write Love on Her Arms posted a blog on MySpace that just about changed my life.  Since then, I've gone through some more important physical and emotional milestones, and I can't imagine having to have gone through those without Jaime's words illuminating in the back of my mind.  With this semester being the hardest and most exhausting I've ever had in my entire life, sometimes I feel like I just need to sit down and remind myself of what matters to me.  So, this post is just that.  It's a reminder to myself, and maybe it can serve as a reminder for you too.

My friend Byron says that life is hard for most people, most of the time. He is a very smart guy.

I suppose that hope suggests a need, and it suggests that something has not yet ended. To have hope is to believe for change, to believe for a better ending. I have been thinking a lot about hope because I have reminded lately that I am a person in need of hope.

I believe that pain is universal, which is to say that all of us can relate to pain. We break and don't fix easy. We break in different ways, at different times, for different reasons. We lose things. We get stuck in moments. We are slow to forgive, slow to change, slow to ask for help. We are slow to truly love people.

It is easy to talk about love. Easy to write blogs about it, easy to talk about it on stages. Love, in that setting, is an idea, and ideas make for great conversations - inspiring even. It is another thing entirely to love people. I suppose it's because ideas are more comfortable than actions. It is a much more challenging gig to be a person who loves other people.

Love is a choice. It is an action. It looks like this:
"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres."

It is tempting to write these things as if I always have it all together, as if I am a person without need, a person who cares about pain but is not affected by it. The truth is that I am a person in need, a broken person, a person who fails, often. I have a lot to learn. I have a long way to go.

The last few weeks have been some of the hardest of my life. It has little to do with the tour. The shows, the bands, the crowds, the conversations – all of that is great. The issues are personal and I suppose I'm writing just to say that we're the same, and to share some things I'm learning.

Pain seems to scream. It asks for all of our attention. Pain suggests that we are only broken, that we are only all the things in us that ache. Certainly, we are responsible for our actions but "forgiveness" is a beautiful word. "Change" is a beautiful possibility. "Hope" and "rescue" are important words.

We are a people in need. We need so many different things: Friendship, love, conversation, medicine, encouragement, wisdom, hope. Whatever is broken, whatever your needs are, it's okay to be honest about those things. It's beyond okay, it is essential. Your heart, your life, your mind, these things are golden, priceless. Please be careful with them. And your friends, your family, the people you love, they are golden too. Please be careful with them. Consider your words and actions, the way they affect people.

We've been given dreams and gifts and talents and ideas, and there are people in our lives that we are called to love. Pain would like nothing more than to destroy all of it.

Each of us will have to fight for the things we call important - the things we hope for, the people we love. It will be a different sort of fight, one of patience and prayers, actions and choices and change. It will be a surgery of sorts, and we will need other people to go with us. It may sound difficult but there is much to be hopeful for.

I am learning to love other people, and I am learning to love myself.

Peace to you.
jamie

Happy 2009 from Taiwan

To another year of: amazing music, awesome cinema, tasty food, laughter, growth, hope, faith, and love...all shared in the good company of family and friends.

When this memory fades, I'm going to make sure it's replaced with chances taken, hope embraced

The one part about my amazing weekend in Edinburgh that I will remember for the rest of my life is climbing to the top of Arthur's seat in Holyrood Park.  At it's highest point, Arthur's Seat reaches an elevation of 251 meters, a little less than three football fields stacked vertically on top of one another.  In my skinny jeans, backpack, and vans, I was expecting an easy stroll to the top of the hill (it's supposed to take roughly an hour).  Well, we decided to take one of the other trails from another side of the hill and that's where things got tough.  After about 10 minutes of climbing with hands and feet up a muddy, slippery, slope (for those familiar with San Marino -- think: twice as steep as Shenandoah) and another twenty minutes of walking uphill a beaten path, we reached an amazing look out point with a panaromic view of the city. 

The climb up there had my heart racing and my calves burning, but as you can see, I'm well enough to take douche-y pictures along the cliffside.  Well, it wouldn't really be a story if that was the real end of my journey, would it?  After enjoying the view and the fresh air for about thirty minutes, Crosby asked if I wanted to keep going.  "Keep going?"  I wasn't sure what he was referring to, because I thought it didn't get any better than that.  Well, silly old me looked behind him and saw where Arthur's Seat really was -- about another ten minute downhill (almost a backtrack) and thirty minute uphill hike away.  I looked at the steep dizzying climb and cringed, but decided to leave the rest of the group that wanted to watch the sunset on the first look-out, to go ahead with him. 

Crosby's a seasoned veteran at hiking so he was just zipping up this hill, but my sorry Southern-Californian-I-like-to-lay-out-on-the-beach-self, felt like dying.  About half way up the almost nauseating and dishearteningly steep set of part-man-made-part-natural-made "stairs" (think: walking in a short monotonous zig zag pattern up a staircase for 200 meters uphill), I was positive that my legs were going to give.  I just kept mumbling to myself "more than halfway, more than halfway!"  At one point, I began to sing Paramore's "Miracle" to myself because I knew that if I didn't do something to take my mind off of the pain, I could/would have lost focus, tripped, and either rolled my way down the rocks, or passed out.  When we reached the "end" of this part of the trail, I was incredibly relieved, but again, Crosby was standing there waiting for me and asked "You ready for the next hill?"  I looked up and dropped a weak but audible f-bomb through my heavy breathing when I saw that we still had another hill to climb. 

I knew there wasn't any turning back, though.  Hell, I knew there wasn't any turning back the second I agreed to really climb to the summit.  After pushing myself past physical limits that I haven't passed since high school athletics, we finally reached the peak, and when I saw the view, all of the pain suddenly left my body and the only thing I could feel was an overwhelming sense of happinness.  Standing on the highest point in all of Edinburgh and being able to see a 360 degree view of the city made me feel like I was on top of the world.

In retrospect though, I must have been in a heavy state of reflection and/or exhaustion, because I didn't even take that many pictures, and the ones that I did take don't even begin to capture what it felt like to be standing on top of that hill.  So all I can leave you with is my word and this:

As we began our descent I muttered, "I think I could spend the rest of my life doing this", and I meant it with all my heart.

Goodbyes are never supposed to be easy

I just finished watching the US Olympic Women's 100M Hurdles Final, and I still cannot get over Lolo Jones' mishap.  The hurdle slip went by so fast, but I felt my heart immediately drop as I saw her cross the finish line and drop to her knees and put her hands up to her face with defeat.  As Jones talked to the reporter and implied how unfortunate it was that her second mistake of the year had to be on one of the most important days of her career, I couldn't help but have flashbacks of my final go at CIF senior year for long jump.  I'm still not over (or sure of) what happened at that meet.  It was hard enough for me to come in as the former DIII champion, and end up on the bottom of the competition (with the help of three hairline scratches [a number close to the amount of scratches I obtained in my entire high school career]); I can't even begin to imagine how hard it must have been for Jones, "the fastest woman in the world this year", to be dead ahead of her opponents, but lose it completely in the second to last hurdle.   

I'm not one to truly regret decisions I've made in my life, but sometimes I wonder if it was a monumental mistake to not have done Track & Field at the collegiate level.  It would have not only been my shot at redemption, but a chance for me to continue enjoying the things that only a Track & Field athlete would understand -- the smell of new spikes, replacing worn-down spikes with new ones, the fact that spikes can refer to two things, the adrenaline that floods your body before the gun shot, the complete blank state of mind you enter when you sprint and all you can hear is your breathing and all you can see is the lines zipping past you.  Most of all, I miss my pre-jump ritual hops, bolting down the runway, jumping off the board, landing into the pit, brushing sand off of my legs, and turning to listen to my mark -- everything was so routine, in absolutely the best way possible. 

Watching Olympic Track & Field just makes me miss the sport more than I thought I did, which is already more than I'd like to admit.  Being able to admit my more-than-reminiscent (borderline stuck-in-the-past) feelings just makes me more sad that I let my career end in high school, and on such a sub-par note.  I can still hear Enright telling me that he expected me to continue jumping in college, and I can still remember getting a note from Mr. Hall telling me to meet him at snack break, so he could personally tell me that he would be disappointed if I didn't continue jumping after graduation.  Looking back, I wish I hadn't been so stubborn and fast to push aside that idea.  In the end though, the person I can most clearly hear is Gillan, the first person who talked to me after I walked into the practice field bawling.  I can still feel myself standing there looking into my hands and at the ground through tear-filled eyes, and hearing him say "Slo, look at me.  Look at me.  I'm so proud of you; we all are.  Don't let this day make you forget all of the other great things you've done". 

Finally, after over two years of looking backwards, I think it's time for me to really take Gillan's words to heart and let the past be the past.  Track & Field, ...Long Jump, I miss you more than words can say, but you treated me well and it's time to say goodbye.