"It just ain't fittin'."

Josh called and woke me up at 8:30 AM the morning after Spider-Man 3 was released. I thought he was calling that early to apologize first thing for being the Worst Gay Best Friend Ever, which I called him on the day before in contemporary cinema class.
“You never even said you liked my new dress!” I feigned resentment. “I could get myself a real boyfriend who holds the door open for me and pays when we go out if I wanted my clothing choices to be ignored.”
“I honestly didn’t notice!” Josh tugs at my hair, “I’m sorry!”
“Worst gay best friend ever!” I joke and he laughs as Ryan, the boy that both Josh and I are lusting after, strains his neck until his veins bulge to watch the commotion. I can’t tell if he’s looking at us because he heard me say Josh is gay and now he knows we’re just friends so he’s free to date me or because he heard me say Josh is gay so now he knows we’re just friends and he can date Josh. Ryan’s hair, perfectly tousled in that popular Queer-Eye for the Straight Guy kind of way, told me it could very well go either direction.
Josh notices Ryan eavesdropping and eyes me, sending me his thought bubble; Do you think he’s gay or straight?
I send him one back in the form of a shrug; He’s hot. I hope he’s straight.
I sure as hell hoped he was straight. I had dated three guys in my whole life and they all ended up being gay just months after we stopped seeing each other. Three was a tragically pathetic number anyway in the dating realm, and it was made only more embarrassing by the fact that none of these guys actually liked girls. Yet, they all dated me during their journey to Gay Town. I like to think it’s because I have really amazing hair and they just couldn’t resist. Josh turns towards me and leans in to whisper, “I just can’t tell!”
“Me either,” I say back, then add, “But if he’s gay, you can have him.”
“Oh, thank you for your permission.”
I give him a nod, “It’s what friends are for.”
“We need a way to find out!” he slaps his recycled wood pencil onto his desk, “And time is running out, our final is on Tuesday!” Josh whines with the lilt of someone who grew up Italian, which, he likes to remind me only every four minutes that he is, “just like the Coppolas!”
I roll my eyes and open up my notebook to a blank page before sliding it over to the questionable boy down the row. “Hey, Ryan?” I ask ever so casually in a very nonchalant manner, almost like I didn’t care, “Josh, Stacy, and I are having a study group for the final,” I throw my friend Stacy’s name in to make it seem less like we are trying to tag-team him and more like we might actually study. “If you want to give me your e-mail address, I’ll let you know when it is so that you can join us?”
“Oh, cool,” He answers and Josh shoots me a look of shame as Ryan fills out his contact information, “Thanks.”
“Mmmhmm,” I answer more to Josh than to Ryan.

After class, Josh grabs my notebook from me, “He has handwriting like a girl!” he squeals, “He’s gay! He must be gay! I can actually read this! And he’s left handed!” Josh adds, “It is a known fact that’s eighty percent of all gay people are left handed. I’m even left handed,” He skips a little through the hallway while holding onto his cloth purse that he fashioned himself out of some blue fabric, “ And I act pretty straight!”
I take back the notebook as he hops up and down in delight, “That doesn’t prove anything. You can’t base anything on which hand is dominant.”
“Fine,” Josh finally stops bouncing, “We’ll just have to look him up on Myspace.”

The next forty minutes were spent in the school library Googling this guy’s name and his e-mail address only to come up with a baseball player and an up and coming recording artist with the same name. “There has to be something!” I say when the search results came up empty. “Usually after five minutes I at least have an address, a phone number, and old LiveJournal account.”
Josh shakes his head, “Not even a Facebook. This guy seems to be living under a rock.”
“Maybe he’s hiding something?” I muse. “What a secretive, private, weird little feller,” I say more to myself than to Josh, “God, maybe I don’t want to date him after all. But he’s cute?”
Josh ignores me, “I’ll just e-mail him,” He shrugs.
Without thinking, I grab his hand away from the mouse, then drop it when I think about how if Josh only showers three times a week, I doubt he washes his hands regularly either, “You can’t! You can’t because he gave the address to me so he’ll think we’re stalking him, which we are, but he can’t know that!” I instinctively grab for the Purell inside my bag and smother it on. The familiar smell of rubbing alcohol comforts me.
Josh frowns, “Then, like,” he lets air escape his lips, “I just-I don’t know what else to do.”
I give in a little, “And I guess we DO need to figure out if he’s gay or not…”
Josh nods and begins to type, “I’ll make it sound not creepy. I’ll just invite him to go out to coffee with us tomorrow.”
I mimic Josh’s nods, “Make it sound like he should be our friend because we’re fun,” and as an afterthought I throw in, “And sexy.”

When Josh woke me up I at the very least expected some sort of answer regarding Ryan. “Did I wake you?” Josh wants to know.
“No, nope!” It’s obvious by the way the words croaked out of my throat that I was lying. I open one eye and clear my throat.
“You sure?”
“I don’t have class today,” I grumble as an excuse. “Did he write back?”
“Who?” Josh answers between crunches.
“Uh,” still foggy, I search for his name, “Ryan, that kid.”
“Oh, yeah, no, I don’t think he checks his e-mail.”
Crunch.
“What are you eating?”
“Doritos.”
“OK,” I curl up in my duvet and breathe in. I love the smell of my duvet. The woven jacquard ice blue cover smells like a cross between my grandmother and Tide laundry detergent. “What did you call to tell me then?” I ask.
“I saw Spider-Man 3 last night. I was calling to say that Venom was brilliant. And, I was wondering, hey, where are my super powers?” Josh is making reference to the fact that a rattlesnake bit him when he was eight and he wasn’t left with any super powers, much less even a scar. “I mean, seriously now.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“You have super powers. You can eat Doritos at 8:30 in the morning and not vomit,” I argue.
“Nah, I’ve just been up all night. I saw the midnight showing and decided it wasn’t worth going to sleep.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway,” he says, “Then I was thinking about it and decided that we should be Bonnie and Clyde for Halloween, because I’m pretty sure my friend Chris is having a Halloween party, and I think it’d be original. So, I’m like, reserving you in advance. Oh, and I’m talking about the film version of them though," he tells me, knowing how I strive to be historically accurate.
"OK," I say, quickly scraping all plans I had for us to go as TomKat, even though I’d been practicing my lazy Katie Holmes side grin since about November. "On one condition though: I get to be Bonnie."
Josh thinks for a moment, crunching on his Doritos. Finally, he lets out a sigh, "Fine, I guess."

Me: “What’s going on?”
Heath: “Not much, I just got off.”
Me: “That’s-what-she-said! ...Sorry.”
- Me to Heath after I ran into him at Target, where he works.

"That's just crazy."

Krista is pale, petite, and wearing a deadly shade of red lipstick that makes her look like she just sucked someone’s, probably her boyfriend’s, blood. I don’t judge her even though I exited the I-Vwahnt-To-Be-Alone Greta Garbo stage of my life roughly around the same time N*sync and Britney Spears became popular. Only through conversation do I realize that we went to high school together and had graduated in the same class and had friends in common except we never even crossed paths once until now.

“I knew, like, everyone,” she says, “I can’t believe I didn’t know you.”
I shrug at her incredulousness. It didn’t surprise me. I was barely at school, especially my senior year.

"I was on the school news," I offered. Referring to the in-house ‘news channel’ that offered school information like what was for lunch that day and what cheerleader was nominated for Homecoming queen.
She adjusts herself on her boyfriend's knee. John looks like Keanu Reeves except with eighty more piercings. Earlier that night, five minutes after I met him in the kitchen, I pulled him aside to tell him, "I think your fly is down."
John turns red and feels for the zipper on his jeans, "You think? There was only a fifty/fifty chance!" He's embarrassed. "A fifty/fifty chance!" he repeats then groans as he pulls his zipper up.
"I'm sorry," I whisper. "I was just doing what I would want someone else to do for me."
He laughs, "No, yeah, thank you for letting me know so I didn't walk around like for that the entire party." He dips his head down a little and checks out my jeans. "Your fly is fine, by the way."

"Were you the one who made fun of Stugo or something?" She asked, entwining her hand with John's.
Krista is referring to the news cast where I told student government to stop sending in tapes about upcoming fundraising events that were boring and ill produced. “At least make them interesting,” I had pleaded, “And then maybe more students will participate in Clown Day or whatever it is you want us to do so you can raise enough money to have senior prom at the zoo again.” The last remark was sarcastic since the year before I had gone to prom at the zoo and it had been disastrous. In addition to mud and stink, a Girl Scout troupe was holding their annual Sleep Over In the Zoo that night, too. Little girls in pajamas ran amok on the dance floor where juniors and seniors traipsed to the same three songs over and over again on a CD player since our DJ had canceled at last moment, taking his security deposit money with him.
“That was like, five Stugo car washes!” I remember Melissa, our class president, shrieking in a dress without a back or much of a front that must have been held taut against her skin by massive amounts of double stick tape.

"Yeah. That was me."
"I never saw you again after that."
"...Yeah."
Stugo wasn’t too happy about my rant.

Krista gave me dish about everyone I never cared about. She told me that this kid I hung out with for about an entire summer was an unstable, creepy stalker who slept outside of her best friend's porch when she was in middle school.
"I thought that was just a rumor?" I ask.
She laughs, "No, it totally happened." She goes on to tell me how he had to practically trick his high school girlfriend into dating him. I can't determine who is more pathetic, him for begging or her for giving in. Then I decide in the long run it’s me, since they were at least getting laid in high school and I wasn’t.

Apparently, I was known as the school bitch, "but everyone still agreed you were funny."
Hell yeah I was.
Am.

You can't really ask for more than that I guess.

Quote of the day:
Sam (3:27:30 AM): i lov e you stefanie spice
Sam (3:27:33 AM): i really wish
Sam (3:27:37 AM): that your lat name were really psice
Sam (3:27:49 AM): i'd seriousyl make outwith you if it were, no lie
Sam (3:28:01 AM): it is my dream to go out with a girl whose name is alliterative and ends in "spice"
Me (3:28:04 AM): you'd make out with me anyway because I am cute
Sam (3:28:09 AM): that's true
Sam (3:29:21 AM): i'm so drunk
Me (3:29:24 AM): I know
- Sam, instant messaging me, drunk.

"Didn't you see his ears perk up? He's GAY."

“What are you wearing to the concert?” Jane, my hairdresser’s assistant asks as she massages my head. She tilts my head forward and works on my neck. It is quite possibly the nicest feeling in the whole entire world, and I choose not to answer her until she’s done. The head massage is worth the price of the haircut alone. She begins to towel dry my tresses and my voice is muffled through the terry cloth.
“Uh, probably this new dress my mom bought me for my birthday,” I lie. Not about the new dress, that I do have, but I haven’t shaved my legs in about a month, and though I love Gwen Stefani, her concert wasn’t reason enough for me to bust out the four blade Gillete. Jeans and a cute top, what I already had on, seemed just fine to me.
“So cute!” Jane emphasizes the ‘cute’ like she was trying to resell the dress to me after I describe it to her with full girlie disclosure, being sure to use enough Project Runway jargon to sound like I mean it.

It’s not that I don’t like looking nice, but I never understood the twelve-year-olds, or twenty-year-olds for that matter, who glammed up for a dark concert where no one was looking at them. The theatre I understand dressing up for, or the opera, because it is more intimate, but a Britney Spears concert? Madonna? Gwen Stefani? In a big ass arena named after some website? In Arizona? I’m just not so into dressing up for pop concerts. Or the shouting that seems to be required. Or the wooing. I am a very subdued concert goer. As is my sister, so she makes for the perfect concert companion. We may not seem happy, standing with our arms folded across our chests and barely mouthing the words while our heads bob up and down ever so slightly, but we are. We really are. We would just rather listen to Gwen singing, not each other, so we won’t be shouting the words to any songs. It’s just not dignified and should be saved for car rides. We might tap our feet a little, we might sway our hands or clap when asked, but we most certainly will not dance. Not under any condition.

“Who knows what it’s like to live in the gheeeeeettttttttttttttttoooooooo?” Acorn or Akon, a rapper with a reggae vibe asks the audience. Two girls a row ahead of us begin to scream and jump up and down in their matching Juicy Couture sweat suits, a blur of bubblegum pink among the crowd. Akon begins to shout again, “If you know what it’s like to live in the ghetto, lemme hear you say, ‘I know what it’s like to live in the ghetto!’”
“I know what it’s like to live in the ghetto!” the girls scream like Acorn might hear them over everyone else. The two hug their L.A.M.B. bags, no doubt containing cherry flavored lip gloss, a dainty pink Bic lighter, and their Sidekicks so that they can text pictures of the concert to their less privileged girlfriends sitting at home watching The Hills. One girl throws her head back and lets out a cry like someone was stealing the sweat suit right off of her back. Or killing her. “I LOVE YOU!” she finishes the scream off, “YOU ARE SO HOT!” She then continues to sing every word of some song with lyrics about not being the first to die when you are in the ghetto hanging with whatever gang you belong to. My sister and I glare at each other, engaging in a very Jim-to-Camera moment. “I hate them,” my sister shouts into my ear over the music and I nod.

Even when I was like them, I was never like them. Let me put it to you this way; my first concert was The Cher Farewell Tour. Or Comeback tour. One of those. It was as if I grew up as a little gay boy, but I didn’t mind. I like Cher. Now I am the dorky twenty-year-old with earplugs realizing that the opening act –whom I’ve never heard of – for Gwen Stefani –whom I love- is the same guy who “sings” that song on the radio that I hate and change within the first three beats. A mother and I exchange glances and I dig into my purse and give her my extra pair of pink squishy earplugs. She lights up like one of those girls on My Super Sweet Sixteen when they receive the BMW their parents said they would never buy them but we all knew they’d get. It just wouldn’t be an episode of My Super Sweet Sixteen unless some spoiled little girl who didn’t have her license yet was gifted with a black SUV. The only difference between those girls and this woman is that she was ever so gracious when I gave her the earplugs and mouthed “thank you”, something I have never heard uttered on My Super Sweet Sixteen.

“I couldn’t get a girlfriend to save my life,” the rapper goes on to say. “I tried everything!”
“OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU SO EFFING MUCH!” The girls in front of us shout while their mother sits stone faced in her seat, looking quite ill. I can just smell the Republican on her. She reeks of McCaine for President donation checks. I wonder how she feels about her little girl being in love with a black man trying to save the Ghetto Lifestyle one luscious booty at a time? Her daughter screams at the top of her lungs toward the stage, “YOU ARE SO HOT!” because she’s been lonely too, and she knows what it’s been like to be lonely in the Ghetto of Life. I guess in that case, I have too.

In fact, I probably shouldn’t judge the girl. After all, I listen to DMX.

Quote of the day:
"Do you act any different on a Tuesday than a Friday? You should unless you're a binge drinker."
- My psych professor.

I dunno what I am going to do for quotes when that class is over. For reals. I'll have to go back to quoting myself.