How Movies Ruined High School

I was born in 1992. My parents were loving, but I remember spending more time with my teenage babysitter, Jackie. Put these two facts together, and it should be easy to assume that a fair amount of my childhood weekends were filled with trips to Blockbuster and visits from Pizza Hut. I welcomed the greasy, sinful heart failure delivered in the form of a PZone and sat happily watching films like 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s All That.

It's no wonder I turned out gay.

Kids of my generation should share my bitterness with the movie industry. How were we supposed to know that high school parties aren’t really like the one that we saw in Can’t Hardly Wait? Was it too much to ask if we could share the hallways with the pseudo-intellectuals from Clueless? Why couldn’t we all have fallen in love with our neighbors/classmates like those definitely-not-eighteen-year-olds from Whatever it Takes or Drive Me Crazy? There isn’t a way to show how sad it makes me to say that there are no answers to these questions. We were lied to.

I like to think of myself as an adaptable person. You could compare me to a chameleon, if you’d like. As a matter of fact, do that. Why not just think of a non-athletic 18-year-old’s body and swap the human head with a chameleon’s head. There. That’s me. “He’s an adaptable freak,” you may say, but that would not be the case for my experience with high school.  The main problem is that my adaptability is conflicted by the occasional surprise visit from stubbornness. So now this chameleon-headed freak is pitted against a menstrual donkey. I wanted to “Macarena,” but was told to “Crank Dat.” I was expecting "Genie In a Bottle," but was given "Disturbia." The donkey stomped Chameleon Boy into a pulp. I was heartbroken, and I couldn’t adapt through the despair. I was anticipating what had been hammered into my head by those asshole producers, but was unfortunately given what a new batch of asshole producers had to offer: Channing Tatum and Ke$ha. Woe is me.

_GaDing