I Wish I Was Special ...

Check out this kickawesome animation to the acoustic version of Radiohead's "Creep." HOLY RADNESS. I always seem to forget just how rad this song is. In "I Love the 90s Part Deux," one of our most bestest talking heads (Hal Sparks) quipped that the lyrics are basically the sentiment of every nerdy little guy lusting after someone way out of his league: "You're in my math class ... but you won't notice me." That sorta thing.

Speaking of being the nerdy little guy in math class, I've spent the better part of this week (two days so far) screening episodes of "My Coolest Years" to do a promo for an upcoming "My Coolest Years" marathon. The show, for those of you who missed the series when it aired this part summer, features various semi-celebs and c-listers and comedians talking about their high school lives. Each episode is about a particular subgenre of High School -- there's an episode about the Dirty Hippies, an epi about Jocks & Cheerleaders, and epi about Bad Girls, an epi about Metalheads -- you get the drift. And each show is broken into several "universal" topics about which all the Hippies and Jocks and Metalheads and Geeks and Sluts reminisce: the Cafeteria (and its hierarchical seating arrangements), the Prom, Partying, Romance.

And EVERYONE has all these memories about gettin' jiggy wit it when their parents were still at work, or stories about hoping to get some puddin' after the prom, or about all-night makeout sessions in tents on the beach, and I'm just like ... zug? I TOTALLY FUCKED UP MY ADOLESCENCE. No wonder I'm such a complete and utter mess of a grownup -- I never went through the whole romance thing of teenagerhood. Like in that line in Death Cab's song "We Looked Like Giants" when El Gibbard sings "And we'd learn how our bodies worked..." Well. I never did that whole learnin' about how bodies worked, yo. I didn't date anyone in high school, I went to the prom with friends (no puddin' hopes) and I didn't even date anyone in college. So combine my continued existence in The Celibacy Club (no one wanted to be a member!) with the fact that I was stone cold sober til I was 20 or so (when I went to London), and you get the fact that i was a BIG MOTHERCLUCKING LOSER who didn't party hearty, didn't make out with anybody, and never learned how to sustain a relationship.

I should add, however, that although I didn't drink, I did go to drinking parties. If the Cheerleaders and the Football Players were A-level popular, I probably hovered around B minus / C plus (until senior year, when I was probably on the D-list) and I went to parties and talked backwards to entertain the drunkards. One night, everyone was drinking in the Arboretum behind the swimming pool and the cops came out from behind the bushes, with sticks taped to their heads and camo paint on their faces. They were wearing bush costumes, and they were literally doing that "i'm hiding in the bushes and I will tiptoe forward a few inches at a time so's you don't realize that I am not really a bush but I am actually a cop merely pretending to be a bush" dance that they do in cartoons. It was rad.

I told Kristin about this and she remarked that we must have had a very safe town, if the cops had enough time on their hands to make bush costumes and hide in the bushes to bust teen drinkers. Teen drinkers in the Rock were pretty sneaky -- if there was a party going on, we'd all park at least four blocks away so that there was a perfectly formed ring of concentric circles emanating out from what was clearly ground zero -- party central. Genius. So the cops busted every single party. And so you'd have to run from the cops. Like, climbing over fences and shizzy. I'm not even sure why we continued with the ritual every single weekend, because at that point the Chief of Police was boffing the Captain of the Cheerleaders. In a squad car behind the CVS. AWWWWesome,

ANYHOODLES. My real point was that I wish I hadn't been such a total loser as a teen because I'd be better equipped to deal with grown-up hood. Like, last night? The squirrels found their acorns and I was really, really, really nervous about revealing this fact to the boy? And so, finally, I had to blurt out: "Um, I have my period -- AIIIIIEEEEEEEE!" And had a minor nervous breakdown, because I've never had to deal with the whole menstruation + boy situation before. I like to think of it as Learning How to Deal With Womanhood at Age 26. (Incidentally, I think "Learning How to Deal With Womanhood at Age 26" would make an excellent Death Cab song).