Viz wrote:I spent a lot of time at the local library when I was a kid. One time I was in there, when these three cool neighbourhood kids walked in. I wanted to impress them on "my turf" so I tried showing them where the "cool" books were like the Star Wars stuff and so on. They were actually kinda into it surprisingly, but we all got pretty loud and shit looking at these different cool books. The librarian of course came to where we were and told us to keep it down. Before she leaves, she smiles and looks at me and goes, "Hey Viz!". The other kids just stared and said, "She knows your name?"
Middle school, 1986. The Beastie Boys had just broke and there was a talent show coming up. My friends and I tried out as "The Loonie Boys". We learned the lyrics to Paul Revere, split up the parts, and tried out with that. We got into the talent show, but they told us we couldn't perform that song. We ended up writing a couple of originals and did those instead. The only one I remember was called "Old King Cole." The chorus was "Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he. The Loonie Boys, that's who we are. And the Loonie Boys we be." I had a whole outfit for this performance that I made my mom buy. I was Sean Ad-Rock, though I was dressed like Mike D. I wore that dumb hat everywhere. I was at an amusement park around that time, wearing that dumb hat, and I passed by some dudes and one of them said, "What are YOU supposed to be?"
The librarians at my local library not only knew me but would pick out books for me when I inevitably came in once a day over summer. I always won my age division for reading books over summer, which was a tower records gift certificate.
But I will forever be grateful to those librarians who pointed me in the direction of Margaret Atwood and Ray Bradbury and Ursula K Le Guin.
In seventh grade I pretended to like Barenaked Ladies and even asked my mom to buy me Stunt just so I’d fit in. I listened to it about 50 times in one week just in case one of the kids in my class decided to interrogate me about it. What a chore. Of course it was all pointless anyway because I had just transferred from public K-6 to Catholic middle school and those kids were poison.
This reminded me somehow of the time this cool and attractive girl in one of my class thought she needed to make a snide remark about my Pearl Jam t-shirt because she had been wearing the same for quite a while before i got mine and she scoffed and said something like "i bet you don't even know the lyrics to the songs" (this was when they only still had one record, Ten) and i was thinking "b, i could recite the whole record beginning to end right now which i doubt you could" but because i was ever meek i don't think i said anything and i just smiled stupidly and said nothing. The thing is i hadn't bought the shirt for this, i liked it and already listened to the band, BUT part of me had thought hey this cool girl will notice i have the same shirt and then maybe she'll see me differently and maybe she'll even talk to me but no, her take was that i was ruining what she liked by liking it too (or just trying to pretend i was cool), not that liking what she did made me cooler. Of course the fact that she reacted this way i now know means she wasn't cool at all.
I must insist on being a pessimist, I'm a loner in a catastrophic mind
Of course one of the painful realisation of life is when it occurs to you (in your twenties usually) that you were really probably one of the coolest person in school in hindsight but because people's idea of cool and their false perceptions of you, you were just deemed some sort of loser nerd. On the other hand it's kind of a nice boost to your ego to realise this. You know these people are just condemened to a life of being lame-os. While...YOU....uh.....sit there alone in your shit apartment at 40....claiming...you were cooler than them?........
I must insist on being a pessimist, I'm a loner in a catastrophic mind
The coolest outfit for guys at my middle school was wearing denim shorts with knee-high athletic socks that were then pushed down somewhat and bunched proportionately down your leg. The coolest guy in school, Lance Cooley, wore these and I mentally thought of them as "Cooley socks". Everybody wore them. I wore them. We were all cool. But then I moved across the state for the start of 8th grade and I had no conception that the fashion standards would change. I wore my Cooley socks to school the first week and noticed that nobody else was doing this. But rather than reassess I decided I was going to model the new cool look for the my classmates. This was a mistake, and the year ended with me attempting to wear Nine Inch Nails shirts and (unsuccessfully) fit in with the outcasts and burnouts in the school.
My mom bought me an all yellow outfit out of nowhere one day (my parents were perpetually broke so I wore dumb clothes most of the time) but like yellow shirt, yellow shorts, yellow socks and yellow Converse
I wore it and a bunch of kids said I looked cool so I spent 85% of that year looking like a fucking banana
Denise wrote:My mom bought me an all yellow outfit out of nowhere one day (my parents were perpetually broke so I wore dumb clothes most of the time) but like yellow shirt, yellow shorts, yellow socks and yellow Converse
I wore it and a bunch of kids said I looked cool so I spent 85% of that year looking like a fucking banana
I had the Vans TNT’s along with about two dozen others in my middle school. I had a CKY shirt and a CKY back pack that somehow backfired with this group of ill tempered bullies. It was all just punk rock from there until I got into trouble in high school and went through somewhat of an identity crisis. At one point I was just trying to look smart which in my head consisted of cardigan sweaters and button up shirts with dress pants. Someone said they liked my maroon cardigan once and I flipped them off because I still had an attitude I guess. After college I kinda had my first real breakdown and started dressing a lot like my dad. Haha.
This phenomenon was never more perfectly and painfully illustrated than when the real rabbits asked whether he had hind legs and the velveteen rabbit answered “I’m sitting on them.”
Denise wrote:My mom bought me an all yellow outfit out of nowhere one day (my parents were perpetually broke so I wore dumb clothes most of the time) but like yellow shirt, yellow shorts, yellow socks and yellow Converse
I wore it and a bunch of kids said I looked cool so I spent 85% of that year looking like a fucking banana