We’re all just songs in the end. If we are lucky.

300: step pyramid built 450: Great Pyramid at Giza built 815: Pepi II dies and civil war breaks out 950: Egypt re-unified 1350: Middle Kingdom ends 1450: New Kingdom begins 1520: Hatshepsut is on the throne 1650: Ahkenaten switches to monotheistic religion and builds a new city 1680: Tutankhamun dies 1720: Ramesses II ‘the great’ ascends to the throne 1740: World’s first peace treaty signed 1790: Ramesses II dies leaving way too many children 1920: Egypt breaks into 2 states again And now we get to ~~~~the future~~~~. If we started at 1AD all of this stuff hasn’t happened yet 2050: Briefly re-united as a single state 2180: Civil war 2250: Nubian kings take over 2335: Assyrian conquest 2665: Alexander the Great conquers Egypt 2930: Cleopatra VII born 2970: Cleopatra VII dies. Egypt falls to Rome. Fin.

anyway i go in to see paul one week in the summer of 2016, and i’m doing my usual bullshit which consists of me talking shit about myself, and paul is staring at me, and then he cuts me off and says that he’s got a new tool for helping people recognize when they’re using negative language, and gets up and goes over to his desk

and i’m like alright hit me with that sweet sweet self-help article my man, because i’m a linguistic learner and whenever paul’s like here i have a tool for you to use it’s pretty much always an article or a book or something

paul opens a drawer, takes something out, and turns back around. i stare.

i say, paul.

is that a nerf gun.

yeah, says paul.

i say, are you gonna shoot me with a nerf gun in this professional setting.

he happily informs me that that’s really up to me, isn’t it. and sits back down. and gestures, like, go ahead, what were you saying?

and i squint suspiciously and start back up about how i’m having too much anxiety to leave the house to run errands, like it was a miracle to even get here, like i’ve forgone getting groceries for the past week and that’s so stupid, what a stupid issue, i’m an idiot, how could i–

a foam dart hits me in the leg.

i go, hey! because my therapist just shot me in the leg. paul blinks at me placidly and raises an eyebrow. i squint again.

i say, slowly, it’s– not a stupid issue, i’m not stupid, but it’s frustrating me and i don’t want it to be a problem i’m having.

no dart this time. okay. sweet.

so the rest of the hour passes with me intermittently getting nailed with tiny foam darts and then swearing and then fixing my language and, wouldn’t you know it, i start liking myself a little more by the end of the session, which is mildly infuriating because paul can tell and he’s very smug about it 

Now getting to the point, do you know how many top 100 hits Maroon 5 has had? A lot. They’re even on billboards top 100 artists of all time (ALL TIME). And it’s understandable, because pretty much every song they put out is fucking awesome. Sugar, Don’t Wanna Know, Moves Like Jagger, Payphone, This Love, She Will Be Loved, Cold, Animals, Maps, Misery, Harder to Breathe, Never Gonna Leave This Bed… to name a FEW.

These shitheads have been popping out jams since I was a little kid. Well over a decade worth of killer music. Every other song I hear on the radio is Maroon 5. It’s always Maroon 5. And I fucking love it. I love all their songs. Everyone does, they’re awesome.

But here’s the thing. They’re never the top selling artists. On the top 100 list, they’re only in the 40s. They very rarely have a number 1 hit. They’re considered good, I suppose….. but not great. Not the best.

How many people have you heard say Maroon 5 is their favorite band? For me it’s zero. For many of you, it’s zero. If you’re thinking to yourself “what? No I love them, they’re my fave!” Are you sure? Are you really sure? They’re your absolute complete FAVORITE band ever??? I doubt it. You’re just saying that because the band is on your mind now. If I asked you your fave band any other time you’d come up with another answer. Everyone always does.

But they SHOULD be everyone favorites. Look at all of those songs. They’ve got so many top hits. Everyone loves their music. Everyone sings along and knows the songs. They should be my favorite band, I think I like more of their songs than of my actual favorite artist. But they are not my favorite. They are no ones favorite.

I think they made a deal with someone. Satan? God? A dude down an alleyway? Who knows. But I believe they made a deal to ensure everyone would love their music. And we do. It’s great music.

But the twist is that they’ll never truly be recognized as one of the best. Sure, their songs will play on the radio and everyone will sing along. They’ll have sold out concerts. Plenty of fans. But not enough. They’ll be just good. Never great. Never the best. Even if they should be our favorite, they never will be. They’ll never sell enough albums or have their songs reach as high on the billboards as they should. Everyone loves their music, per the agreement. But no one loves them.

when I was 17, five months after my dad had died in a house fire and I lost my home and we nearly ended up homeless, I was lucky enough to go on a school trip to the bahamas to study the reefs. This was my Ultimate Dream, as an aspiring marine biologist, and I couldn’t believe it was coming true. It was the only good thing to happen to me since the fire, the only thing I’d genuinely looked forward to.

But I had ADHD and could be too loud (by then I was good at not talking out in class so I was only loud when we were ALLOWED to be) and a little whacky. My humor was “weird,” I had asthma, and to top it off, I wasn’t pretty.

When we got there, the outpost where we were staying was run by college students, probably getting their graduate degrees, all aged about 22-26. And they saw us all as their age, even though some of them nearly had a decade on us.

And since they saw us as peers rather than children, they felt comfortable making judgements about us, and they decided I was weird and annoying.

And they were mean to me. They made fun of me, deliberately made me feel excluded and odd in front of each other and my own peers, and sometimes when I’d say something in class they’d make a face, say “Ohhhkaaaayyyy,” and look at each other knowingly while they pretended they were even trying to hold back laughing at me. They avoided calling on me during classes, didn’t want me participating, and generally made it obvious how annoying I was to them.

I even noticed that another person in my class was just as weird, if not more, than I was, but she was gorgeous. And to people looking at us as adults instead of children, that mattered.

And it ruined everything.

Another adult on the trip started paying attention and thinking perhaps there was a reason the people in charge didn’t like me. After all, what kind of adult is mean to a kid for no reason? So one night at a festival when she saw me take apart my inhaler, she misunderstood what it was and told the teacher in charge of our trip she’d seen me using drugs. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere alone for the rest of the trip, not even the bathroom at the airport, despite my friends and a few other peers defending me.

I was mortified and ashamed and ended up lying there in bed every night, wondering how something I’d looked forward to so much could end up so terrible. I wanted nothing more as a child than to be good and win adult approval, and somehow I’d made all the adults there dislike me. I thought it was my fault.

I’d love to see all of these people again now, as an adult myself, and tell them what I was going through.

Tell them, “did you know, when you made fun of me all week back then, when you made me feel untrustworthy and called me a liar, I was grieving the loss of my father. I went away to try to stop thinking about him and the fire and losing my home and everything else, just for a week, and you stole that from me? You ruined that for me?”

30 days of Doctor Who | 22 day. Favourite episode from season 2

and it’s… fine. The prince is great! They’re in love, he’s very sweet and passionate, writing her poems and songs, giving her anything she wants. The time she spends with her husband is great.

but cinderella is not royalty, her family was noble but she never spent time in those circles. She’s used to being busy, she’s used to cooking and cleaning and mending. There are hours, days, where she has nothing to do.

time passes. cinderella learns the fancy lady type of needlework. Learns to ride horses. Reads a lot.

as is normal for royalty at the time, they travel and are hosted by nobles or stay at castles owned by the king. But even that variety begins to become routine. The prince is distracted, there’s a lot of young women living and working on their route. Daughters of nobles. Younger and prettier with soft hands that have never done a day’s work.

cinderella needs something to spend her time on, and there’s a part of her thinking a couple-only trip might get her husband’s attention again, so she suggests making an old castle that’s fallen into disrepair their “project.” It was built in the time when castles were made to be defensible, so it’s quite sturdy, but it’s overgrown and secluded. The prince doesn’t know why his family stopped living there either. A hundred years ago it was their summer home.

so they go. And they work. And for a while it’s great! But when they leave for winter cinderella’s husband forgets her once again. cinderella resolves to make the best of her life and stop worrying about a man who has gotten what he wanted from her.

summer comes again and this time cinderella goes alone to the old castle (minus staff, of course, but cinderella manages to narrow it down to only repair workers and one maid). She can cook and clean and mend again, but this time it’s her own choice. She is happy.

this summer they make more progress on repairs. The workers say that most of it can be salvaged, except one tower that’s been completely overgrown with vines and briars. It will have to come down, eventually, but for now it can be safely ignored.

cinderella has more free time now. The old castle has a surprisingly untouched library, though time and moisture have damaged many of the books. Behind a collection of greek poetry cinderella finds an old diary. Very old, in fact, at least a hundred years. It’s rude to read a diary, of course, but whoever wrote this is long dead, and cinderella is bored, so…

from the description of activities the author looks to have been nobility. Maybe even a princess. She’s sensitive and sweet and smarter than she seems to realize. If circumstances had been different cinderella wishes they could have been friends…

after the summer ends cinderella returns to her husband. He’s spending a lot of time with a young musician and cinderella can’t even work up the energy to care. She does some research about the castle and the family she’s married into, finds out the name of the princess who wrote the diary.

aurora. Cursed and forgotten. She died young, they say, in a plague that also took out the castle staff and her own parents. Luckily they avoided a succession crisis, but not so lucky for the dead.

time passes. cinderella goes to the old castle again and again, even out of season. Soon enough all that remains to be done is the old tower, and the builders say they should tear it down and fill the gaps before it gets cold.

one night cinderella is restless. The princess from the diary had been fond of that tower, and cinderella is far more attached to a dead woman than she ought to be. She gets out of bed, reads by candlelight, and finally goes to walk the empty halls.

she finds herself going to the tower. Pushing past the vines that don’t seem so troublesome really. They almost part before her. The stairs are perfectly intact, the door at the top is already cracked open. As if she should have done this years ago, cinderella steps into aurora’s bedroom.

she’s as beautiful as the stories say. And sitting under her hands, crossed across her stomach as it rises and falls, is a book of greek poetry.

years later, people will tell the story of cinderella as a cautionary one. Don’t seek above your station. Don’t marry for prestige. After all, a girl who grew up as a servant once married the crown prince, and disappeared after only three years. She ran away, they say, she couldn’t handle the lifestyle.

two old women who run a bookshop together agree with the lesson. Marrying for the wrong reasons never ends well. It’s best to wait for someone you have things in common with, shared interests.

or, failing that, the more linguistic of the two says, wait a decade or ten for someone to fall in love with you from your diary.