I was bullied in high school. I hear ya—who wasn’t? In my personal experience, I’ve learned that the tiny percentage of people who say they weren’t bullied in high school had either mastered the art of invisibly, were blessed by the divine hand of God or were such a big bully themselves that no one dared bully them back.
I was ready to hate Season 4 until the whole thing managed to turn around in the last 5 minutes of the final episode. An epic end to a “meh” season, the finale managed to almost completely erase all my feelings of “I’m not coming back for Season 5.” Now I’m all like “EFF YEAH SEASON 5. BRING IT, BEE-ATCH!”
Live the first 18 years of your life rather innocuously. Get bullied in high school. Develop an eating disorder. Be too scared to overachieve at things you actually enjoy, like drama, because you’re too obsessed with your feeble attempts to fit in with the ‘cool’ kids. Never fit in with the ‘cool’ kids, even though you get really skinny and dye your hair like Christina’s in “Come On Over”…
Is there anything more torturous than the first “I love you” in the context of a relationship? I mean, I’ve never done anal, so I can’t be entirely sure. Nevertheless, when you realize you’re in love with the person you’ve been dating, not only do you have a Jekyll and Hyde style fight to not flip the crazy switch, your life also begins to resemble a violent and strategic war game (at this point COD aficionados may rejoice), usually against no one but yourself.
The most wonderful thing about Paul Simon’s songwriting is that it’s deeply contextual and yet completely context-less in the sense that it’s culturally weighty enough to exist permanently within its moment and yet semantically ambiguous enough that it can be easily reappropriated to inform an infinite spectrum of collective and personal situations. But that’s not to say his words are ambivalent—quite the opposite, they are designed so as to belong to anyone and everyone.
And then I realize—if a fart comes out of my ass and I’m listening to my iPod and can’t hear it, it doesn’t mean that the people squished against me in the peak hour commute can’t either. In other words, although I am deaf to it, my tree fell in a forest heavily populated by people with healthy aural capacity.
I woke without opening my eyes. I was small, I don’t know, maybe 7 years old? Do you still even lose teeth when you’re 7? No matter—all that I know is that I was small, smaller than I am now, that it was dark and quiet, and that I had been woken up but my eyes were still closed and I had lost a tooth the day before.
My dad is my hero, like Gerard Depardieu in that movie. He says a lot of things; not all of them are right, but it doesn’t stop him from saying them.
Nothing gives you perspective quite like some serious melodrama. Breaking up? Turn up the volume on the cheesiest of cheese (and what better decade than the 90s) and use the intensity to giggle at yourself and your over wrought sobbing. It’s going to be OK. If Toni made it through the crying in the shower scene, you can too.
Sure my phone can’t contact to the Internet. Sure all I can do is call and text (GASP!). Sure it doesn’t have a camera. I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering how I haven’t died, and sometimes I wonder the same thing.