Serendipity

Music: John Mayer "Serendipity"


"If only my life was more like 1983", some of the lyrics heard in the song "Serendipity" by that kid with the "quarter life crisis", John Mayer. Most of us in our early to late twenties can identify with his lyrical poetry. He puts to music all of the fears and phobias that so annoyingly give us four years of stress or for some ten years of deadly anxiety. He defines with clarity the emotional rollercoaster we must all take to reach that dreaded destination we call "the real world". I can relate to exactly every brainwave he has manufactured. His music is like a satellite that sends out a radio signal to all who can sympathize with his ambiguity about the future. He creates an interesting question and one that I believe will never be correctly answered. "How do you know what you want to do 5 years, 10 years, even twenty years from now"? Hell, I don't even know what I want to be doing a day from now. Who can really blame him for romanticizing about the past. In 1983 I was five years old. When your five years old you could careless what you will be doing in twenty years. The ironic thing about childhood is that it is almost like living in a dream. You don't really have any control of your life as a child. It's almost that same feeling of having a dream and not being able to wake up or change what is happening until your 25th birthday when you realize your living a terrifying nightmare called reality. Toys play an integral part in what we decide to do with our lives. We are told as children by toy manufacturers that we can be or do anything when we grow up. Bride to be Barbie, Executive Barbie, Astronaut Barbie, and even the liberated presidential Barbie give us the illusion that it can all happen. All we have to do is be beautiful, have big breasts, and sport a ten inch waist and fuck the boss. For boys it's the same idea. They are given superheroe figurines, GI Joes, firetrucks, trains, and any other plaything that symbolizes masculinity. They are taught to be strong, unemotional men who rescue the damsel in distress only to break her heart and fuck her best friend. This all goes along with that generation x and y cycle theory I referred to earlier. At five years old I was singing and dancing and acting my little heart out only to be frou froued into another direction by giant monsters called adults who were unhappy in the land of Oz. "There is no sense in being curious about what's over the rainbow. You have everything you'll ever need right here in Kansas. Remember, There's no place like home my dear". You know, I had a big pink Barbie house when I was five. It was three stories high and had an elevator and everything. My parents decided that when I was eight I was getting to old for it and so they threw it in the garbage. Why didn't I have a say in that decision?