no one's gonna push my buttons, no one's gonna have their say.

it's funny to think about it all now. my sister was 13, i was 10. i was into hip hop mostly, clear to the point where i had written "F U ROCK N ROLL" on my school binders. i was a weird kid. i suppose you could say that i was a social outcast, but that would be false. i was just weird in my shoes. while the other girls were wearing skirts and taking on the new fashions of the year, i was stuck in a weird paradox. i was obsessive with music, but i didn't understand that the things i was rebelling against were things that i actually loved. i listened to lots of early soundgarden, nirvana, smashing pumpkins, and strangely enough, built to spill. we purchased it at the old record exchange location off of franklin road, and we felt like we were onto something that no one else knew about. then again, we were from middleton. we probably were the only people there that had heard of them at this time.

it's funny to think of now. one of the first albums that my sister and i got into was "the normal years" ep from built to spill. we would sing the lyrics to "car" at high volume, and crone away our hearts at "three years ago today." that ended up being the theme song to my youth. within my heavy shoes, my slightly overweight prebuescent body, and my longing for a reason for existing after the death of my cousin, it seemed as though the song hit every nerve of my body with solace. i suppose you could say that it was the year that things started to become hardcore. maybe i really was cooler than the other kids. i never thought that at the time, but i suppose i was a real badass.