Z is for...

"Zip-Lock" by Lit

Oh man, this was lifetimes ago.  A friend and I were talking about bands like Lit, Third Eye Blind, Everclear and others, when she told me her first ever concert was Eve 6.  Her mom worked nights so it was easy to sneak out, but she had a pager, and unless she got calls from her kids every so often she knew something was wrong.  This meant that my friend had to keep going to a pay phone to page her mom and keep from her from getting suspicious.  Picture it: Eve 6, payphones, and beepers.  It was a different time.

As I said before, my first concert was Strung Out, but I had the full consent of my parents and my fourteen-year-older brother at my side.  Not so rebellious.

Anyway, I got a this Lit album from one of my friends back in Jr. High, and we thought it was so cool.  Everyone around us in our Christian school was listening to stuff like DC Talk, Newsboys, and this song by a band called Raze (I about lost my mind watching that music video just now.  What the hell is going on there?).  In an interesting parallel to my own life, I'm pretty sure she got this album from her brother, and allowed me to borrow it for a few weeks before burning me a copy.  However, the copy had that weird shattery noise in the background that some bad copies get so I ended up having to buy my own.

The friend who introduced me to Lit was one of my first real friends ever.  Up until that point I had been involved with kids who weren't very nice to me.  I was tall for my age and kind of chubby, so I basically looked like a giant until I was thirteen compared to my classmates (in my eyes, anyway).  Plus I was very shy and had a hard time making friends.  I was never teased very much, but other kids could tell I would do whatever they said in order to be considered their friend.  This meant I got pushed around a fair amount until around Jr. High.

Between the ages of thirteen and fourteen a lot of things happened: a lost a little bit of weight, and what weight I had shifted into more appealing places.  The other kids got bigger, too, so I blended in more, and our class size increased, so I had people to talk to who didn't know me as the plus-sized pushover.  This is when I met the first people I considered real friends, nice ones who didn't threaten to withdraw their friendship every time I disagreed with them or spoke my own opinion.  It was pretty awesome.

I've since lost touch with some of these people, the one who gave me the Lit album being one of them, but a couple of them are still in my life today.  Ten years later.  In any case, I'm glad I had all of them when I did, otherwise I don't know when I would have started trusting people again.

Wow, so this really isn't about Lit much at all, sorry.  But give me a break.  It's the last day.