Become what you blog.

I was cleaning up the ol' hard drive this weekend and came across this picture from the Chicago stop of the 2000 Warped Tour:

Yup, that's a significantly younger (and facial hair-free) yours truly with a significantly younger (and neon-free) Gabe Saporta, who at the time was the frontman for a mid-level emo-punk band called Midtown. it's kind of crazy for me to look back at that picture and think about how much has happened in my life. In the past eight years, I not only became the reviews editor at Punknews.org but also was able to parlay the skills I learned from doing that into a real-life job with AP, which still blows my mind.

When that picture was taken, I was essentially a "nobody" — just a kid who loved punk, ska, emo, indie rock, etc. (Yet somehow I was still able to finagle an all-access press pass which you can see stuck on my chest, thanks to my brother's old zine). About a month or so after that picture was taken, I started my freshman year of college, never actually thinking I could turn my love of underground music into anything more than a hobby to let me get away from whatever my real job would end up being. I actually entered college planning on majoring in music education, which I attempted for almost two years before, after having pulled enough hair out of my head to stuff a king-size comforter with, I gave up and made the completely arbitrary switch to Speech Communication, which was done for two reasons: 1)Because I like to talk and 2)It was the only major my college offered that I could feasibly complete in two years. It's kind of ironic that after all of that, I ended up actually being a music educator, just not in the conventional sense of the job.



I have no idea if Gabe Saporta thought he would still be playing music eight years after that picture was taken; at the time, Midtown's debut album, Save The World, Lose The Girl, had been out for a few months, but the band were still very much an opening act (unfortunately, something they never really grew out of over the next five years). It's pretty fair to say that at the time of the above picture, Gabe was pretty close to being a "nobody," as well — just some kid from Jersey playing pop-punk.



So what's the lesson learned from all of this? Well, for starters, never assume what you're doing now is what will end up defining you as a person for the rest of your life, because odds are, it won't. But at the same time, don't be discouraged if you're in a place in your life right now that you're not stoked about, because in a few years' time, your life may have completely flipped for the better. (Or maybe you'll end up playing bongos in Cobra Starship, which is sort of splitting the difference.)