#lonely boy dion struggling to make friends hes to stressed and used to being a responsible older sibling 24/7

[brain-bumbler]

I sometimes think about how the endless travel of a traveling circus has likely made the Aquato kids social skills poor and made them very lonely

Ohhhh I love that idea! I know that most circuses are actually quite social- they have traveling schools, and families usually settle down for the off-season in the same cities or towns, so kids have both new and old friends.

But I don't think the Aquatos have the typical circus experience! I think their family moves mostly on its own, maybe frequently switching between circuses for larger performances, but never staying in one place. They have too many enemies. They can't go near the big top, and wherever they are they're always set apart, always different.

I think its just so open to interpretation depending on the plot! Maybe some or all of the kids are very socially adept from meeting so many people and keeping up long-distance friendships, maybe they can always fit into a new group because they work with such diverse people.

Or maybe they're more isolated, more nervous, always having a curse hanging over their heads that no one else would understand. They stick close to each other, drive each other crazy. But who else do they have?

I imagine having a boyfriend or girlfriend would be hard for the older teens, and I remember how hard it was to keep friends after moving. It makes me think of all the ways that interacting with the interns could go!

[love-heights]

From Kindergarten to Cancer, This Love Story Defies All of Life’s Struggles

“The soldier never forgot his childhood crush, and once they reunited, neither war nor illness would keep them apart.”

James Garish is no spelling bee champ—in fact, he dropped out of school at 14 and spent more than half a decade in dead-end jobs before enlisting in the Army in 2008. But Garish never forgot the tricky string of letters that added up to the last name of his kindergarten crush, Elizabeth Stipkovits. He also never forgot the girl behind the name, which is why he typed it into his laptop one lonely night in 2010 while serving in Iraq.

“I started wondering how life had turned out for her,” said Garish, 34. He found her still living in ­Mc­Keesport, Pennsylvania, the working-class city where they had grown up. So he sent a friend request on Facebook.

Stipkovits had no idea who he was. She was half a world away, a single mother raising her six-year-old daughter, Maleena. But her mother did recall a James Garish.

“She told me I was in kindergarten with him. Then I remembered,” Stipkovits said. “He was ‘Little Bad Jimmy,’ the class clown, the one always getting yelled at by the teacher.” That the onetime five-year-old handful remembered her and her hard-to-spell name stopped her in her tracks.

That was eight years ago. The relationship that unspooled from that friend request has bound together Garish and Stipkovits in a foxhole of brokenness, determination, and love.

In 2014, four years after they reconnected, 31-year-old Stipkovits received her first breast cancer diagnosis. The cancer returned twice and metastasized. At the end of 2017, she was being treated for cancer in her femur and lung. In January, it had spread to her brain. “Little Bad Jimmy,” now a super­visor at a ­McKeesport Rite-Aid, never left her side.

“Chemo has taken a lot of my memory,” said Stipkovits. “But he always reminds me he’s been in love with me since kindergarten.”

Garish had only six months left in his three years of active duty when he friended Stipkovits on Facebook. Her calls brought relief from his high-stakes job as an escort for explosive ordnance disposal specialists, the military experts who get rid of explosive weapons.

“We would go out on up to seven missions a day. It was stressful, and I was sleep-deprived. One of the things I looked forward to most was talking on the phone with Liz,” said Garish, who was deployed with the third infantry division out of Fort Stewart, Georgia.

Stipkovits knew how he felt, far away from friends and family. Her dad is a retired chief in the Navy and served in Kuwait. “Sometimes you just really need someone to vent to,” she said.

Stipkovits was delighted to be his someone. When Garish impulsively bought a plane ticket home for Christmas in 2010, she was even more delighted by the surprise of him on her front porch.

“It was dark out and he pulled me close, and it felt good,” Stipkovits said.

By the following summer, Garish had completed his service and moved back to McKeesport. He spent most of his time at Stipkovits’s house, coloring and playing games with ­Maleena while Stipkovits, then still healthy, worked as a medical secretary.

Reintegration to civilian life took time. “The neighborhood I lived in wasn’t the safest, and I had to give myself time to readjust to the point where I could be in groups of people and not freak out,” Garish said.

He had never been married and had no children, but Garish had shown an inclination to care for them. Before he and Stipkovits reunited in 2010, he’d donated much of his first Army paycheck, around $600, to Jamie’s Dream Team, a local charity. The money helped a six-year-old boy suffering from the genetic disorder Marfan syndrome go on a long-wished-for camping trip.

On August 20, 2017, three years after her first cancer diagnosis, Stipkovits was being fitted with a portable defibrillator at UPMC Shadyside Hospital in Pittsburgh. “I think we deserve something good to happen,” Garish said out of the blue. “Will you marry me?”

Stipkovits laughed. “It was just so funny,” she said. “I was in a hospital bed, dying. I looked at him and said, ‘You just want the insurance money.’”

But behind the laughter was elation. “I had the same wish every little girl does of a fairy-tale wedding, the crystals and the Cinderella ball gown. And I always told myself that if I found someone who bonded with my daughter in the manner he did, I would marry him.”

She said yes.

The fairy-tale fantasy, though, was far out of reach. The hospital bills were adding up, and Stipkovits had long been too sick to work.

But there are those around ­Mc­Keesport who believe in making dreams come true. Doctors had not told Stipkovits how long she could expect to keep fighting. But in late 2017, Lori McKown, an oncology social worker at the hospital, started contacting charities. A colleague told her about ­Jamie’s Dream Team. “Little did I know her fiancé had donated his first paycheck there,” she said.

Jamie Holmes, the founder of ­Jamie’s Dream Team, hadn’t forgotten Garish. “I was like, absolutely we’re going to put on a wedding for them,” she said.

On February 17, two months after Jamie’s Dream Team rallied more than a dozen Pittsburgh-area vendors to donate things such as flowers, a wedding cake, and a photo booth, Garish and Stipkovits were married before 200 guests at Old Stone Church in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.

Stipkovits, flanked by four bridesmaids and Maleena, her maid of honor, wore a full-length white dress sewn with Swarovski crystals provided by the Exquisite Bride in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. Her hair, full despite years of chemotherapy, was swept into a side ponytail. Garish, in a black tuxedo instead of his Army uniform, still wore a buzz cut.

The ceremony was punctuated by pauses so Stipkovits, who was on dialysis, could catch her breath and dab at her tears.

Guests didn’t seem worried at the reception when Stipkovits fell after Garish playfully pushed a piece of red velvet cake toward his new wife’s face. She quickly got up. Her father said, “This is the most energetic I’ve seen her in quite some time.”

Stipkovits and Garish had already endured more than most married couples. Before the wedding, Stip­kovits told Garish, “When we say our vows, the only thing we’ll have left to accomplish is till death do us part.”

A DJ played “Because You Loved Me” by Celine Dion for the first dance. The lyric “You were my strength when I was weak / You were my voice when I couldn’t speak” had onlookers in tears while Stipkovits and Garish held each other.

[topweeklyupdate]

TØP Weekly Update #23: The Title Picture Pretty Much Sums It Up (1/29/16)

The Emotional Roadshow kept on chugging this week, giving us plenty of news morsels to... chew on, I guess? Whatever, failed metaphor. Read on, we’ve got a lot to cover this week.

This Week’s TØPics:

New Festival Shows Announced

Emo Show Recaps- Interviews, Shenanigans, and Everything In Between

UPCOMING: Moline, Madison, Omaha, Wichita, Sioux Falls

Major News and Announcements:

The only major news from this week was the announcement of a few more summer festival headliners for our band. I predicted this was going to happen when the lonely Hangout Fest date was released a few weeks ago, and it’s nice to have my predictions feel validated every once and awhile.

The boys will be leading the lineup of Sasquatch Festival at the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Washington, a festival that they’ve played a couple of times in the past. The Memorial Day weekend event made minor news last year for its poor attendance numbers; only around 11,000 of the expected 25,000 guests showed up, which led to the festival being noticeably scaled back this year- it’s back to a three day length, and, besides the headliners, there aren’t too many a-list artists on the lineup. Still, if you’re in the Pacific Northwest, consider hopping by to support the festival and the artists- and, of course, Twenty One Pilots.

After that, we have the Firefly Festival in Dover, Delaware, another one that the band’s played before in a much smaller capacity that they are now headlining. The festival is set for the weekend of June 15, making it now the last known touring date of this cycle. Will it stay that way? Only time will tell, my young friends.

Performances, Interviews, and Other Shenanigans:

The performances have mostly been consistent(ly as awesome) with last week. At Allentown, Tyler’s cousin did the zorb run, and an attempted effort to run Mario Kart petered out and led to the contest winner and Tyler resorting to a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. Mario Kart instead made its successful return in Chicago later in the week, where it was Zack who made the ball run. Also, there’s a boy band dance number now. Tyler keeps mixing up his Trees Speech with continued promises to not go anywhere and to continue to make music, and, of course, plenty of expressions of gratitude to the the fans (the speech in Albany was particularly good).

Quite a few local and national papers have done features on some of the performances and on the band in general this week, but all of them are fairly generic, save for an Albany paper’s caustic review of the show, a Pittsburgh paper’s in-depth analysis of how small the arena rock scene has become, and, most interestingly for me, this article from Slate. “The Mood Swing Vote” is one of only a handful of intellectual/artistic looks at Twenty One Pilots that really looks at their musical and creative choices with a sharp critical eye and a mind for politics. I’d like to give a little consideration toward the ideas presented in this article, just because I find the ideas he has fascinating for various reasons.

"The Mood Swing Vote” goes very in-depth, covering a vast array of topics. The writer criticizes many aspects of the band’s sound, but not in the “it’s not real rock” way I’ve seen on so many message boards. Instead, when he has something to criticize, its mostly cultural/political: he perceives in some of their music problems with cultural appropriation (which he handles somewhat fairly- “I wasn’t raised in the hood” is probably the most objectively bad lyric Tyler’s written- but his accusations of the style being used for commercial reasons lacks much merit/evidence for me) as well as even some light misogyny (which is a freaking reach to say the least). He also makes many more reaches by associating the band’s popularity to the politics of today. This effort, like most political analyses of popular art, likely has some kernel of truth way down at its core but neglects the personal history and wider context in favor of tailoring the facts to present the narrative the writer wants to convey (I’m a history major, that’s kinda what I want to do for a living). For instance, he follows Rolling Stones’ lead in emphasizing the band’s Christianity more than they ever have, and even tries to read “Fairly Local” and “Hometown” as criticisms of Ohio for going to Trump nearly two years before the election even took place.

At the same time, the article is not the type of bashing I expected it to be- the author, if not a fan himself, definitely did his research into the band’s history and fandom. He regularly acknowledges Tyler and Josh’s real talents, and he definitely has a ton of respect for how much the band obviously cares about and for their fans struggling with mental illness. While the author, one Carl Wilson, may not reach the same conclusion... wait, this was written by Carl Wilson? *quick Google* Oh, I like this guy. He showed up on The Colbert Report years ago to discuss his efforts to try to account for taste by listening to Celine Dion for a year. He’s pretty darn good at getting to the heart of how people’s backgrounds influence the music they like. Check out some of his stuff if you never have it’s interest- oh, right, this is a Twenty One Pilots blog, moving on.

We only got a handful of radio interviews this week, but they were all pretty fun or interesting in their own ways. (There was also this one I missed from last week in Providence- not too much to say about it other than they talked about Tyler’s dodgeball b-day party.)

Charlottesville, Q94

Good talk about the Grammy acceptance speeches.

More discussion of the heaviness of trying to care for fans as individuals- Tyler again says how proud he is of the Clique for supporting each other when they can’t (apparently, some of those feelings are already being incorporated into the next album).

When asked what he would point his fans toward in order to do some good in the world, Tyler claims that he doesn’t have any charities or anything in mind primarily because he knows that his fanbase will follow them wherever they’re pointed with their dollars and he doesn’t want to risk misusing that power. Instead, he calls back to what he’s been saying since the video where they joined FBR- be others-minded, not just others-aware, because that makes the world better while also making you more happy with yourself. Good guy, that TyJo.

Allentown, Spin Radio 107.1

We don’t get many pranks like ‘Nana’d anymore mostly out of fear of escalation.

Tyler really loves architecture (not really), while Josh is trying to “take all the botanical goods and turn them into sustainable breathing”.

Albany, KISS 102.3

The interviewer’s... interesting. He tries a little comedy bit at the opening that doesn’t really play, but Tyler and Josh play it off by being just as awkward back and lowkey save the interview. There’s cuddling involved.

We now have Tyler on record saying “dick pic”, which is almost as good as Josh’s “penis-sized nipples”.

Peanut butter is better than the Internet. “Reese, you got nice pieces!”

Albany, 99.5 River

The interviewer goes for the rapid-fire mode, which never really works as planned with this band.

Tyler wishes he could have written either “Hey Jude” by the Beatles or “My House” by Flo Rida.

Tyler’s favorite movies are “Donny Darko” and “Signs” (big shock); Josh’s are “Fight Club” and “What About Bob?”

Tyler gets very sassy when the interviewer asks what song they’d like to never play again (guess he’s turned around on “Stressed Out”); Josh states truthfully that designing a setlist for the next album cycle’s going to be a pain because they have no idea what to cut.

Tyler’s TV guilty pleasure: “Friends”. Josh: “Family Guy”.

Their favorite talk show host is Seth Meyer, but “Jimmy [Fallon]’s cool”. They still have a grudge against Conan.

The next place they want to play? They both agree Egypt, because they’re twelve and want to play by the pyramids.

Albany, Fly 92.3:

Tyler gives a big “deep” explanation for why he shaved his head and Josh makes fun of him for it.

Tyler would be honored to take the stage with The Wiggles.

Albany, Pete Kelly Radio: Only one real highlight, but it’s a doozy: another“How They Met” story involving Tyler as a hot air balloon salesman trying to help out Josh and his terrible band, the Lumineers.

Upcoming Shows:

The next week of touring pushes the band further into America’s “heartland” than it’s been in quite some time. Let’s take a look at a couple of these shows and venues, some of which lie a bit off the beaten path.

Show 10: iWireless Center, Moline, Illinois, 1/29

Capacity: 12,000

Tonight’s stop is in one of the smaller urban markets in the United States. Moline is one of the Quad Cities, a grouping of small cities and towns on the Illinois-Iowa border that is perhaps most notable for being the home of the John Deere farm manufacturing company. Despite being a lesser known city nationally, nearly half a million people collectively live in the area, and the iWireless Center should be able to seat plenty of excited fans grateful that they won’t need to drive all the way to Chicago to see an A-list show. As far as I can tell, it’s the first time the band has played in the area, which should make the set extra special.

Show 11: Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum, Madison, Wisconsin, 1/31

Capacity: 10,000

The tour will then loop up north to the capital of Wisconsin. Our Midwestern boys have been playing shows in the state for awhile, with eleven total shows currently under their belt. However, Madison has often been neglected in favor of the bigger city of Milwaukee- this will only be the fourth show in the city and the first since 2014. No offense to any Milwaukee readers, you’re city’s great but I’ve got family in Madison, and I dig the college-town atmosphere (and all the lakes).

The Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum is part of the Alliant Energy Center, a larger entertainment complex. The venue itself has a history stretching back to the 1960s, though it’s become a little neglected since the University of Wisconsin-Madison teams got their own on-campus arena. It still seems like a pretty cool area to go see a show.

Show 12: CenturyLink Center, Omaha, Nebraska, 2/1

Capacity: 19,000

The tour buses will then loop back west to the far side of Iowa for their third show in the state of Nebraska. The band played just outside of Warren Buffet’s base of operations during the Blurryface Tour two years ago, but this will be the first time they will be playing directly in the city.

CenturyLink Center is a massive complex that hosts Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meetings, U.S. Olympic swim trials, and Creighton University basketball games. There’s going to be a lot of Nebraska and Iowa fans packed into this building. Should be a fun show, but every show is a fun show. I really gotta start coming up with better adjectives.

Show 13: Intrust Bank Arena, Wichita, Kansas, 2/3

Capacity: 15,000

The tour then veers further back down south to the largest city in Superman’s home state. The Air Capital of the World (and, indeed, the state of Kansas) has never directly hosted a concert from the band before- instead, they’ve always played in Oklahoma or the confusingly named Kansas City in the neighboring state of Missouri because geography. Anywho. Next!

Show 14: Denny Sanford Premier Center, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 2/4

Capacity: 12,000

The last show of this week falls in another oft-neglected part of the country. Sioux Falls is the largest city in South Dakota, accounting for nearly a third of the entire state’s population, and a lot of that population can fit in the new Premier Center. Show on the prairie should be a nice way to wrap up the week.

Community Spotlight:

I saw a lot of cool community stuff from this week, but what stuck out most to me in the last week was someone featured by Josh himself on his Twitter: this awesome eight-year-old drummer who has more talent in her pinkie finger at her age than I do in my entire body now. Petition for Milana Nigro to be the one to knock Tyler off his Mario Kart winning streak.

That’s all for this week. Power to the local dreamer.

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