Music

     When I was around 18 or 19 years old, I discovered an insane amount of love I never realized I had for the Beatles. For some reason, their music really made everything awesome and I started really noticing it playing everywhere. The obsession started when I bought a "Best of the Beatles" album, which had a lot of their most popular songs, and I added them all to my mp3 player and literally listened to them on loop until I knew all the songs. I wanted to write about a lot of special things here, and music is definitely up there with tabletop gaming and altogether abnormality.
     I think a big thing that kind of shaped me as a person is the fact that I grew up around music. When my siblings and I were really young, like in the 2-10 age range, Mom had an old record player and a lot of music from the 60's, 70's, and 80's. I was only 2 or so, but one of the things I remember clearly was the music that always played when I was that young.
    The thing is, I bought the Beatles album, and it made a very clear and perfect memory surface. I was listening to the normal ones, like Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields, and Across the Universe, and then Come Together came on, and I had to pause the CD for a second, because I was singing along and couldn't remember hearing the song before. I tried to figure out when and where I heard this song, and it hit me. I wasn't even old enough to sit at the table without a high chair yet, but I was in the kitchen and my mom was dancing around listening to Come Together, singing to me and cooking. I specifically remember "I know you, you know me..one thing I can tell you is you got to be free."
      I think it's cool how one of my first memories is of a band that I didn't even remember hearing until after I listened to it again over a decade later. The human brain is cool like that. I think that's probably why listening to the Beatles and other old bands like that is a kind of carefree and fun thing for me to do when I want to calm down after a Hard Day's Night. 

I posted this a few days ago

First, a backstory:

     There is an online community called Geek and Sundry. On their page, there is a web series called Tabletop, which is hosted/co created by Wil Wheaton. In it, he teaches/plays a variety of Tabletop board games, and it's spawned something amazing.

     It now has a tumblr, which is called seenontabletop. This tumblr page is full of stories related to gaming and the web series. I posted my story to this tumblr, and out of a lot of posts on the site, mine was reblogged by Wil Wheaton himself. I'm honored, for real. Wow..just....wow.

     You can still see it on the top of his blog, but I'll post it here for those of you who don't want to go on tumblr and get trapped there forever. (For real, it will happen)

Abnormality

     So here we go. Write what you know. That's always been a common phrase, right? Well, I know myself a bit, so that's the best place to start. My name is Katie Beach, and when I was little, we used to play a game where we ran away from normal people. Instead of monsters, we ran from "normals", because if they touched you, you'd become like them. Nothing was worse than being normal.

     Being normal was considered weird when I was a kid. One of us would be a "normal person" in our bastardized game of tag. The others would be running away from the "normals", and if they tagged you, you had to be a "normal" next. My siblings and I used to run around the park while our babysitter would shout:

"Run away, it's the normals!!!"

Other people must have thought I was the weirdest five-year-old ever.

     Now, a decade and some years from being five years old and weird, I still wonder what life would have been like without that babysitter who taught us how lame normalcy was. I would probably be a sane, upstanding member of society, playing a sportsgame and liking boys and cheerleading and whatnot. That would have been boring, right? Instead of playing a sportsgame or cheerleading or churchgoing, I'm awake at 5:30 AM waiting on the new episode of a cartoon I like a lot. I'm 23. Normal 23-year-olds think cartoons are lame and childish, but not me. I think cartoons are awesome.

     I feel like my whole life has been spent repeating that mantra: "Run away, it's the normals", but now that same abnormality I used to strive for is getting..normal. I started back at my small-town community college this fall, and people are wearing shirts with things they like on them like always. This time, though, people like the stuff I like. I have seen internet references, comic references, and TV show references that make me want to hug people and propose and all those creepy things we do on Tumblr when we want to show we think someone else is cool.

     The problem is, now that abnormality is normal, I can't figure out who was originally abnormal and who is just going along with the "geek" fad. I'm at a loss. I'm having no trouble still being me, but I'm having trouble figuring out who is being themselves and who is just trying to fit in. This is all so confusing. I kind of want to be abnormal again.