Responsibly Wild Blog

It's late on a mid-October 2015 night and I am struggling with whether I should buy a $1,200 last-minute ticket to California to be with my family for my mother's emergency brain surgery. A week prior everyone was together in my house for an adventurous weekend climbing a wind turbine and celebrating my grandmother's 90th birthday, now we are on the eve of my mom going under the gamma knife for emergency brain surgery. Turns out she has a size-able tumor growing on the surface of her brain.   It's a bit of miracle that the tumor was discovered in the first place as my mom's routine cancer screenings didn't usually include brain scans; however, she had been complaining of blurry vision and balance issues, plus she had become quite irritable having been pushed to take FMLA from work to deal with what she thought was post-cancer "brain fog." Thankfully her doctor had the good sense to add it all up and include her brain in her next cancer scan. Sure enou...

I distinctly remember Tuesday, February 23, 1999. I was still living in Iowa and immediately after school let out I road with a friend to Best Buy so he could pick up Eminem's freshly released second album. Always down for a hang, I road along as there was one album I had read about and wanted to see if it was in stores. That album was Jimmy Eat World's Clarity . On the ride home I didn't bother asking to put in my purchase as my friend was not a rock fan. So for the next hour or so of cruising we blasted Slim Shady at painful volumes. For those uninitiated, this was the "Hi! My name is (ticka ticka) Slim Shady" album. I was indifferent to rap so it got a little long and tiresome by roughly the third time through the album. When I finally listened to Clarity it underwhelmed. Nothing on the album is lyrically hook centered on kinetically riff focused like later Jimmy Eat World releases. For a 16 year-old ska and pop punk super fan, Clarity go...