Friday March 29th, 2024
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Waste Not...

So the bitch has a heart. Sally Sampson finds that Glee's tribute episode for the deceased Cory Monteith gets her more emotional than strictly necessary and she can't help but think what a waste.

Staff Writer

There are a couple of things people find out when they take the time to get to know me. Firstly, they discover that I have an uncanny and somewhat supernatural ability for saying the most inappropriate things at the strangest of times, even though my heart is (mostly) in the right place. Secondly, they clock that I have bizarre mood-swings that aren’t just regulated by my “time of the month.” Thirdly, they learn that I am (contrary to popular opinion) an unshakeable optimist and, lastly, they witness that I am the closest thing to an Egyptian Rachel Berry that they’re ever going to encounter.

Yes, I am talking about Rachel Berry from the hit TV show Glee and people that know me know that I am a totally, unchangeably and hopelessly pathetic fan of the show. So much so that I think its creator, Ryan Murphy, and I must’ve been conjoined twins or a Brangelina equivalent in another lifetime or something.

(FYI, I never refer to the show as just ‘Glee’…for me, it’s always the hit TV show Glee, which probably doesn’t give me any popularity brownie points, but hey, it is what it is.)

I should point out that my devotion to Gleek-dom, if you will, is partly because the show is based somewhere between the life that I’ve lived in my head for the last quarter of a century and my actual life experiences as a more-than-slightly offbeat drama queen in a world overflowing with people who often don’t fully understand what the fuck is going on around them, much less in my fantastical world of fairy dust!!! (And no, I’m not gay, if that’s what you were wondering…)

Now hold the slushies and everything else that you might imagine hurling at my head right now because, even though I don’t expect to win the People’s Choice Award tomorrow for being the coolest BITCH in town, I’m not nearly as stuck-up or as caught up in my own shit as I would have you believe.

Truthfully, aside from the inexplicable high that I get whenever I watch the series, I believe the reason behind my attachment to the hit TV show Glee is that I have never walked away from an episode, without feeling like I’ve learnt something new. Whether it’s a new song or a life-lesson in tolerance, I can’t deny that I’ve been hooked from the get-go!

And, I’m not just randomly declaring my love for the hit TV show Glee here, by the way, in case you’re questioning why I’m about five years too late in expressing how amazing a show I think it is...

If you’ve been keeping an eye out on celebrity news over the past couple of months, you’ll know that Cory Monteith, the actor who played Finn Hudson, one of the original and central characters on the show, passed away a couple of months ago from a drug overdose. And you might also know that this weekend, Glee, in its fifth season, aired its tribute episode to the actor, and allowed Gleeks worldwide to say goodbye to the character, Finn.

I just watched THAT particular episode and I literally feel like my eye-balls are going to pop out of their sockets and on to my keyboard because of how hard I’ve been crying (don’t judge me… and no, this isn’t part of my hormonal mood-swings either).  As Oprah would put it, I’ve been doing the ugly cry. Not just the ugly cry; the fugly cry!!! The ‘damn girl, your fake eyelashes are coming off’ cry!!!

 Now aside from the obvious tragedy of someone so young being cut down in their prime, (after all, this isn’t something new…it’s happens time and time again, every day all over the world) I think what has devastated me so beyond the point of no return is the realisation of just how much we take our own mortality for granted!

I’m not going to get all preach-y, and give you all that ‘live in the moment’ clichéd, cheesy horseshit that we’ve all grown tired of. And I’m not saying we should all be morbid and sit around waiting for death to knock on our doors, like Ebenezer Scrooge waiting around for the ghost of Jacob Marley to rattle his chains. I’m just saying that perhaps if we just acknowledged the timer that we are all on every once in a while, we might actually make our lives count for something, and stop being so reckless and wasteful with each day that we are gifted with (Okay so I couldn’t help but be a little clichéd and cheesy!).

Cory Monteith was a young, successful actor, with legions of fans and a whole world of possibility ahead of him. And then he did some dumb shit with heroin and alcohol and ended up dying because he thought that another chance to sort himself out was around the corner. He didn’t realise his timer was up and that another chance wasn’t on its way.

Look, I’m not in the habit of judging people or defining a whole person’s life by one isolated incident; I think that’s wrong, ignorant and just plain dumb. I’m also not downplaying Cory’s addiction, because he struggled with it for many years and he did try to get his life back on track months before he died. I’m just restating and agreeing with what his co-star Jane Lynch (who plays Sue Sylvester) has said in the media about his passing:

“It feels like such a waste…”

So many think that living in the moment means living life pissed beyond reckoning, fucking everything in sight, driving recklessly, never saying ‘no’ to anything, trying everything (and I mean EVERYTHING!) once etc.

And I think someone really needs to stand up and emphatically point out what a fucking load of Bohemian bull’s balls that is!!!

Because living in the moment doesn’t relinquish responsibility! It relinquishes neither the responsibility you have towards yourself nor the responsibility towards others around you. And that, in turn, means that having a sense of discernment and plain old common sense is integral to making every moment count.

Like I said, I’m not looking to be preach-y. At least not today. So I’ll just let others do it:

 “Death never comes at the right time, despite what mortals believe. Death always comes like a thief.” ― Christopher Pike

 “We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever; the goal is to create something that will!”- Chuck Palahniuk

I just think that it would be such a shame if we didn’t learn from those who paid the price of recklessness and folly with their lives…

Because, what a fucking waste!!

RIP Cory Monteith. From the Egyptian Rachel Berry. x