Where Everybody Knows I'm Cool

"I'm sick of summer and this waiting around.
Man, it's September and I'm skipping this town.
Hey, it's no mystery;
there's nothing her for me now!"

I've watched the first part of Harry Potter the Musical over and over again and, this afternoon, took to singing the chorus ("I've got to get back to Hogwarts") with "Hofstra" in place of "Hogwarts."

It's that kind of day.

I've been pondering that little, secret knowledge that we all have, that secret fear that the people around us who claim to like us couldn't possibly if they actually knew all of us, the good parts and those ugly, dark shadows that lurk deep in the locked boudoir of our souls.

Deep down, everyone just knows that the dark parts are our True Selves, that if anyone glimpsed those bits they'd run screaming. We can never fully open our insides because we are all certain that our insides are ugly, twisted monsters, whereas everyone else is lined with lovely pink satin. We can't get too close to anyone because we're afraid that they'll See us on accident.

I remember making a comment about fat people to a boy I was seeing, then using our mutual friend as an example. In the moment that I realized the friend in question was mutual, I could tell from the look on his face that he had just seen something very ugly in me. I scrambled to close up again, but even if it worked for him I couldn't escape what I was sure had happened myself and this fear that he had seen too much of me too close and too fast grew until the only way to recover myself was to cut my losses.

But why should I have recovered myself at all? What was the recover? The great illusion of this True Selves thing is that idea that we are the only people who are ugly on the inside and, even more so, that we are hiding it at all. We feel like the one monster walking disguised among humans and we believe that if we can keep it up long enough someday it will be true and we really will deserve everything we want. We don't try as hard as we should; we don't go for what we really want; we stay with the people who hurt us because deep, deep down inside of us we know that we don't deserve any better, that we're not as good as everyone else, that the reason we are unhappy is because we don't deserve to be happy.

But the truth is that the parts we think we're hiding, the parts that want more than they should and hate anyone else to have nice things if we can't, the parts that get jealous of our friends' successes and cheer at their failures, the parts that are spiteful and cruel, the parts that come out late at night when you've had too much red wine and feel like calling your ex-boyfriend, again; these things are in everyone, and none of us are hiding them very well. The people who really, truly love you can see it all, and they love you just the same, and the parts of you that aren't ugly, the goodness in you and the imagination and love, those things are just as you as the ugly bits. It's just hard to see them sometimes when you're focusing too hard on the shadows.



And that's the word.

Just a typical day in my life...

Mom: (Running around to get her stuff together for school) I left a cookie lying around here somewhere but now I don't know where it is... so if you see a cookie...
Me: Okay.
Mom: (Spots something) AHA! I found it, nevermind.
Dad: MY COOKIE!
Mom: (With cookie in her mouth) COOKIE!
Me: ...Ohmygod.
Mom: (Her mouth still full of cookie as she leaves) The future is BLEAK!

It is 11:40 and I have been awake for 7 hours.

Holy Fandom, Guys!

I guess I took April off.

Apparently while I was gone, I acquired two new followers. Awesome! Hello, new followers!

I want to write a little bit about fandom.

I was geeking out about Harry Potter with my friend Taylor yesterday. She's writing a fanfiction and I was helping her pick out names for some original characters, and it made me start thinking about my own dabblings in that fandom and others, and why we get so attached to these worlds that don't exist and why that's important, because I feel like it is, even though I still haven't figured it out, exactly.

I was deeply entrenched in the Harry Potter fandom from the release of Book 5 to the release of Book 6 so... *checking Wikipedia* from June 2003 to July 2005. I joined livejournal communites and roleplay forums, and was briefly a mod in one. I drew pictures. I read and reviewed fanfiction. I dressed up for book and movie releases alike and Wizard Rock concerts. I even started a very inconsistently drawn webcomic. A real life friend of mine who was similarly obsessed spent an entire day with me trying to figure out an anagram for a contest whose prize was a picture of a trophy.

A page from my inconsistently drawn webcomic.
(Click to enlarge.)

Mostly, however, what I did was write a lot of very, very bad fanfiction. My magnum opus was a 93,944 word long Draco/Hermione story called "A Perfect Day to Elope" that makes me throw up in my mouth a little every time I look at it, now, but it was sort of my life for two years.

I remember starting the first chapter sitting in athletic study hall my freshman year (I wasn't athletic in the least but I did have walking pneumonia which apparently was incompatible with gym). It was supposed to be a four chapter farce around England featuring those crazy Harry Potter kids. Then it sort of... exploded. Somehow, I was still writing it two years and thirty-five chapters later and by that point, in Chapter 35, I could barely even remember what had happened seven chapters earlier let alone at the beginning of the story. There was a lot of inconsistency, a lot of slapstick comedy, and a lot of unneccesary detours into flashbacks.

In Chapter One, a twenty-three-year-old Hermione received a necklace as a birthday present from Ron, and in Chapter Twenty-Four we are told she hasn't seen or heard from him in five years.
There was a whole scene where the joke was that Hermione's make-up was running. This scene took TWO CHAPTERS of set up to wedge in.
There was an entire CHAPTER devoted to Ginny dancing around in the kitchen singing Britney Spears. Seriously.

When I look back at the me who spent her freshman, sophomore and (part of her) junior years of high school writing a hugely overlong story and didn't even bother to have it make sense most of the time, I wonder where her friends came from. Who hung out with that person? Why did anyone like her?

Half-Blood Prince killed my interest in fanfiction. When I saw JK Rowling portraying Malfoy as a complex character in his own right but a character deeply different from the Malfoy of my story (who was a card carrying Draco in Leather Pants if ever one existed), I had no interest in having anything to do with my Draco anymore. He hadn't ever existed and I felt, for some reason, that it was rude to treat Jo Rowling's characters the way I had been.

Me + Friends on Deathly Hallows release night.
That is me sitting in the front in the purple shirt wearing what I was pathetically calling a Ginny costume.

But since then I have had other encounters with fandom and I have to admit I sort of love it, as an entity. Last summer I was briefly but passionately sucked into the Twilight fandom, largely fueled by my fury that Jacob would not be bursting into Edward and Bella's wedding and sweeping her away on a motorcycle, as I had hoped. (In fact, I arrived in that fandom pretty much just in time for the Sparkledammerung drama, which was fun.) and recently I've come to wish that the True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse fandom was less terrifying as I would certainly like to throw my hat into that arena (but they are still fueled by hormones and nightmares so I still can't. Woe.).

What is it that makes us get sucked into these things? As Fandom Wank will prove, while fandoms may start off as places where people come together to talk about a shared love of a book/movie/band/person/vampire, what they grow into over time can have nothing to do with that original shared interested. The ingroup lingo that grows up in one fandom and then moves over to another as if by mitosis, the fighting, the squealing, oh God, the drama. Why does anyone do it? Why are we not content to like what we like in lonely peace?

The answer probably has something to do with the power of fiction, but I'm just gonna say this about screaming: in any series (and they are mostly series) there are going to be things that make you want to scream, and I suppose we all feel a little less crazy screaming with someone else, loudly and in all capital letters.

And there's also the fanfic.

(tl;dr: Fandom is crazy, but I love it.)

Questions, Questions

I saw on my facebook newsfeed, a few days ago, an old friend (though this is, as a descriptor of him, misleading in many ways. He is both more and less than an "old friend.") asking in his status what year I would re-live, if I could.

To which I respond:
Am I re-living this year because it was so wonderful and vibrant that I wish to jump back into its arms, or am I doing it over again, wiser, to correct the mistakes that lead to me left, at the end, a worse and more broken person than I started it?

If the former: 2008.
And if the latter: 2008.

You were potential embodied, dear. And I, I cannot sleep.

2008. It was a weird one.

Can you tell...

...that I've quit the 20 for 20?

"The feature is dead, Angela! Don't bring it up again!"

In its stead, Eartha Kitt:

More Complicated

Standing in line for dinner today, I heard the dulcet tones of Songs I Loved in Junior High, as usual. Today it was Avril Lavigne's "Complicated". Since I wasn't that close to the speakers, for a second it sounded like some of it was being sung by a man, and after a moment of thought I got really excited, because "Complicated", as it stands, is sort of a really dumb song, and it would STILL be a dumb song as a duet, but its awesome would be improved through making whatever relationship is being sung about even MORE complicated, which is why I would call this awesome duet "More Complicated".

I'm thinking Avril would sing the lady parts, and a tenor with a funny haircut could sing for the dudes. Someone like, I don't know, the guy from Metro Station. Any of them. They all have appropriately ridiculous hair.

And since this is my blog, and I have the power (MWAHAHAHA!), you get to watch me figuring out how the lyrics would best break up. Chill, yes? Not really, but what else am I supposed to do when I have a lot of homework to do?

"More Complicated"
as performed by Avril Lavigne and One-of-the-Guys-from-Metro-Station-It-Doesn't-Matter-Which

LADY:
Uh huh
Life's like this
Uh huh, uh huh
That's the way it is
'Cause life's like this
Uh huh, uh huh
That's the way it is

DUDE:
Chill out, what you yellin' for?
Lay back, it's all been done before
And if, you could only let it be
You will see

LADY:
I like, you the way you are
When we're drivin' in your car
And you're, talkin' to me one on one
But you become

BOTH:
Somebody else
'Round everyone else

DUDE:
Your watchin' your back
Like you can't relax

LADY:
You tryin' to be cool
You look like a fool to me
Tell me

BOTH:
Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?

LADY:
I see the way you're

BOTH:
actin' like you're somebody else
Gets me frustrated

DUDE:
Life's like this you

BOTH:
You fall and you crawl and you break
And you take what you get, and you turn it into

DUDE:
Honesty, and promise me
I'm never gonna find you fakin'

BOTH:
No no no

DUDE:
You come over unannounced
Dressed up, like you're somethin' else
But you are aren't where it's at you see
You're makin' me

LADY:
Laugh out, when you strike a pose
Take off, all your preppy clothes
You know, you're not foolin' anyone

BOTH:
When you become

LADY:
Somebody else

DUDE:
'Round everyone else

LADY:
Your watchin' your back

DUDE:
Like you can't relax

LADY:
You're tryin' to be cool

BOTH:
You look like a fool to me

LADY:
Tell me

BOTH:
Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?

LADY:
I see the way you're

BOTH:
actin' like you're somebody else
Gets me frustrated
Life's like this you

LADY:
You fall

DUDE:
and you crawl

LADY:
and you break

DUDE:
And you take

LADY:
what you get,

BOTH:
and you turn it into

DUDE:
Honesty, and promise me
I'm never gonna find you fakin'

LADY:
No no no

DUDE:
No

(REPEAT x5)

LADY:
Ooh, chill out,

DUDE:
what you yellin' for?

LADY:
Lay back,

DUDE:
it's all been done before

LADY:
And if you could only let it be
You will see

BOTH:
Somebody else
'Round everyone else
Your watchin' your back
Like you can't relax
You tryin' to be cool
You look like a fool to me

LADY:
Tell me

BOTH:
Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?

LADY:
I see the way you're

BOTH:
actin' like you're somebody else
Gets me frustrated

DUDE:
Life's like this you

BOTH:
You fall and you crawl and you break
And you take what you get, and you turn it into
Honesty, and promise me
I'm never gonna find you fakin'

No no

(REPEAT CHORUS)



The logical question now is: "Johanna, you seriously don't have ANYTHING better to do with your time?" and the answer is: "I may be turning terrible old songs into duets that will never be sung, but you're reading it."

"Pretty mystical!"

I slept all day today. It was beautiful.

Also, I saw Role Models in the Student Center. At the end, when Paul Rudd is singing "Beth" to Elizabeth Banks, I was inordinately pleased with myself. I knew he was going to end up singing to her at the end of the movie, because of that very subtle foreshadowing at the beginning with the karaoke, and when the other dude was really into KISS and her character's name was Beth, well... it was only math. I thought they'd all probably end up in costume by the end, too.

I was pleasantly correct.

The movie was awesome, go see it, but it all reminded me of this other movie, KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, and specifically this scene, where they sing "Beth" by their mystical pool to a girl who isn't even named Beth.

KISS. Really.

10 - "Pretty mystical!"

I saw KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park because my BFF Kate (who will be referred to as Star Child from now on) has this awesome sister who is dating this guy, who I guess is also my friend now, who runs a really cool record label (including this band) and, more importantly, is really, really into KISS.

And this one time, we were all hanging out in his apartment and I believe the topic of KISS came up, and he started talking about this horrible TV movie they made and OMG I love horrible movies. A really horrible movie can be more enjoyable than a mediocre one, in my opinion, and so obviously we had to watch it. It was even more wonderful than I expected.

As the internet says, "KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park, is a preposterous, embarrassing turkey of a film."

Well said, internet.

It includes such wonderful things as Paul Stanley shooting star-shaped lasers out of his eye, Gene Simmons breathing fire, and the entire band sitting by the pool on lifeguard-height chairs in chainmail cloaks, for some reason. This is because, apparently, KISS has super powers, and the powers are attached to talisman which they keep in a secret box in their sort-of-awesome-but-really-not-at-all rock pad.

And for some reason Gene Simmons is a T-Rex and Davros is trying to build a robot KISS. Look, I don't know.

Just watch the clip. Every line is quotable.


"Gene's brother was an only child."

"Easy, Cat Man, these guys are serious!" "And he's got a gun!"

"A little star power doesn't hurt, either!"

"Pretty mystical."

Seriously, someone wrote this.
I am so glad.