this was a comment i wrote on someone else's blog, and it was so good i had to make it a post in its own right :)


"ah, the unmistakeable call of that bitch, nostalgia...hit me pretty good one time when i was about 12 - my parents were balding and going grey, me and my bro realised they were feeling pretty nostalgic about us growing up into adolescents too, getting hair in odd places and all, which only served to deepen the overwhelming feeling. to boot, it occurred to my lil' bro that we'll probably never see gramma again, because she was already very old and we werent expecting to go back to poland anytime soon. we had a good cry that night.
dude - are you really trying hard to be cool? (or hip, as the case may be.) i remember trying to be cool in highschool, maybe sometimes after that, but i figure most people stop trying hard to be cool before they're 20. i donno if its hormonal, or psychological as a result of a shift in social pressures, or something else, but it seems like it just happens. maybe it wasnt as much trying to be cool, as trying to fit in? maybe its trying to fit in first, and then trying to be cool, from the platform of teenage normalcy. maybe "a" platform - there's the skaters, the goth, the gangsta's (apostrophe is not to separate the "s" but is rather the last char of the word "gangsta'" (now, that doesnt make it much easier to notice, does it)), the geeks. actually, now that i think of it - the goth WERE the geeks - they were the ones playing rpg's [ :) ], etc. but i think also the more of a "computer geek" you were, the less goth you were, and viceversa. so where was i? trying to be cool. or hip, as the case may be. so were you really trying to be hip, or were you just doing what you wanted because u thought it was cool, or hip, without much regard of what it might look like to others? {i love changing tenses within one sentence :) actually, maybe i dont actually lurve it, but i do it for some reason, even when i realise i technically shouldnt. in this case i think the way i wrote it sounded more natural. or looked like it would've sounded more natural, were it actually spoken out loud, that is to say ;) }i wonder if highschool-aged kids tend to take criticism harder because of their hormones, but also tend to be harsher critics because of said hormones. i remember hearing highschool girls going on and on about hating this and hating that, but loving something else or another. no lukewarm feelings about anything at all. but thinking a little more about it all, i also remember kids who seemed innately "just cool". :))i remember this one guy in particular - chris - long mane of hair, surfer/stoner talk, loud, somewhat obnoxious, smoker, laughed loudly a lot, had a cool girlfriend, was funny - people just looked up to him in some ways, or had some kinda respect for him, even though he didnt do that great academically. he didnt seem to be affected by the whole 'trying to fit in' thing. that was junior high. he started piping down in senior high - chopped the hair, wasnt quite as loud anymore. then i saw him a year or 2 ago - he was just a plumber. (maybe the piping down was forshadowing :D) hehe, on the other hand i accidentally ran into one of the highschool geeks at a party a while back, and he'd just sold his roleplaying paraphernalia store and was going to england to blow his monies on bigger and better things. how things have changed :) but yet another twist - i asked said geek about another geek - saul - whom he knew, who was in a few of my classes. this guy was so intelligent, i thought for sure he musta by now got on some kind of UN committee, or is lecturing at some university, or works for some animation studio, since i knew he'd gotten a gov't grant to do a short animated film right after highschool. nope. he did his short film, it fell through the cracks, and that was his last achievement in that department. he now apparently works as some clerk somewhere or something. that just shocked me. he was one of the most intelligent and eloquent people i've ever seen, and i last heard him speak in grade 11, in like '94. just sad.hehe, this should be an entry on my blog, not a comment on yours. ah, whatev :)so where the fuck was i going with this..? i'm at like a tangent off a tangent off a tangent here...right - shenry said, or seemed to have implied he was trying to be hip, and also seemed to be down about it. what i think happened, is that shenry remembered all the good times he'd had at stella's, but then he started realising that those times are probably gone for good because he doesnt hang out with his peeps there like they used to, and the kind of peeps that hang out there now has changed, making even more remote the possibility of those good times ever returning, and it made him sad that he lost something that he cherished so much. people dont like to lose things. adding to those 'negative' or 'low' feelings was the realisation that the new crowd hanging out at stella's was comprised largely of these 30-something year-old yuppies - people who in shenry's subconscious were catalogued as intrinsically uncool, they werent 'real', they were suburbanites, with "real" jobs and money to blow, family people for christ's sakes, yet they were 'trying' to do, to awkwardly emulate, what was defacto reserved for people actually 'living' their lives - namely hanging out at cool spots such as stella's. they invaded it and blanded the shit out of it. then a chilling suspicion creeped into shenry's mind. he was there too, shoulder to shoulder with these, these people. some might even say he fits their demographic... shenry is kinda like, one of them... this probably got shenry into such a pit that his fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in and he bounced. will this episode cause a mid-life crisis type of reaction in shenry? or will he re-evaluate his old preconceptions about "these people" from his "seasoned" point of view, and start looking at them like people who are perhaps like himself in some ways...?
sorry about the "seasoned", dude - it was just right there, i couldnt help it :D
but i agree with ghost, dude - ur cool, and i hope u dont think u've lost something along the way, but rather built an even higher coolness off a platform that kids cant see yet ;)
unless i'm completely wrong and you were actually trying hard to be hip. and you didnt like that because trying hard is just not cool. would your near-obsessive work-out and diet routines, careful personal grooming, playing hackey-sack in public places, frequenting cafe's, bars and clubs which rate high on the rosicrucians' coolness lists, all be manifestations of the odious and repugnant drive towards ultimate hip-dom?
why does shenry do the things he does? and whatever his drives - are they evil? if he cuts, does he bleed..?
;) "