Daughters

A John Mayer tune. He's a good guitar player, a decent singer & I do dig the way he writes. The song in question is cute, sad, just about bittersweet but still catchy. The subject is nothing new but the treatment is different than most songs of lost love. Boy meets girl. Boy falls for girl. Boy loses girl. Boy urges parents to not screw up their kids so they won't grow up to break someone's heart that really cares about them. The girl that's the focus of the song apparently has some abandonment/engulfment issues stemming from her father walking out on her when she was too young to deal with it (here are a few pages dealing with the subject & if you ignore the psycho-babble in some of them you may find some useful info). I'm afraid it's not that uncommon though it's not always the sole cause of such tales of woe. It's easy to overlook & sometimes the folks themselves don't realize it (I know I didn't) but when you lose a parent (or someone else very close) as a kid even if it's not their fault (i.e. death) it can cause trouble for the kid when they grow up & try to form healthy relationships. The real kicker is the abandonment doesn't have to be physical - it can be emotional - & even if there is a surrogate parental figure these things can still creep up. Sometimes it can directly cause the problems that lead to the dissolution of a relationship but I think most of the time it just makes things much harder than they should be which can lead to one or both folks giving up prematurely on what could have been a decent relationship. I doubt the song will change anything in the real world but it's nice to know that someone at least gets it. After all the reason we like many of the songs we do is because we can identify with them in some way. Besides, most people, male & female, spend some time trying to figure out why a relationship ended. Not that we ever figure it out but it's cool that Mayer's song reflects that part of the process. It’s cooler still that it’s not too hard to sing along with, though that’s probably not a good idea if you’re reading this at work. & there's a dual meaning to the song. According to this site Mayer also meant the song to be taken as a message that everything in our past effects who we are at present. (Take guitar pick from my palm & you may leave the temple grasshopper...)

Here's the vid. & here are the lyrics (& it was a hassle to find a page that had the right ones. The majority have the last line of the first verse as "maybe it's got nothing to do with me" when in actuality it’s "baby's got nothing to do with me". I mean if this was a Mick Jagger tune I could understand...)

Part of raising a daughter right (or a son for that matter) is of course teaching her proficiency with arms. But according to some the same techniques cannot be applied to both genders. Jennifer Freeman of The Liberty Belles has a book review on two volumes designed to help with the instruction of the ladies in your life. One is called Women Learning to Shoot: A Guide for Law Enforcement Officers by Diane Nicholl & Vicki Farnam. The other is titled Teaching Women to Shoot: A Law Enforcement Instructor's Guide by Vicki Farnam. I'm hoping they'll write another book soon that covers some of my personal experiences: Outshooting Men: How to Soothe What Remains of His Ego. :)

Posted by Publicola at December 7, 2006 05:59 AM | TrackBack