2 Uncool 2B 4-Real

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When you were a little kid, what did you want to be? My earliest memory of having an ambition was wanting to be a cartoonist. I would draw, draw, draw all day long without having any increase in my ability whatsoever. If I would have “stuck with it” I just would have ended up drawing indistinct, squiggly-looking shit with scathing commentary in the dialogue bubbles above. I suppose there’s a market for that though.

Then I wanted to be a comedian. We had Career Day at our school, and all the other little girls were running around with stethoscopes or severe make-up and briefcases.

“What are you?” they said. They looked over what I was wearing, which is what I wore everyday–pastel stirrup pants and two pairs of socks that matched the colors of my outfit, topped with what my Dago aunt called a Dago tee and a wildly patterned (pastel) shirt.

‘I’m a comedian!” I said, in what I presumed was a humorous manner. I carried nothing but a notepad and pencil to jot down every vaguely hilarious thought.

“Huh,” they said, not getting it. I have had this problem my whole life. The year all the girls were “punkers” (hookers) for Halloween, I was an alien. The year everyone was a goddam Ninja Turtle, I was dressed as a bag of garbage.

When I hit high school and embraced the more lesbionic side of my nature, I was convinced I was going to be a truck driver. Hell, I had the flannel-wearing, jeans-hitching part down already. I could talk trash, and spit, and take a bunch of pills to drive straight through to New Jersey. Then I really went through The Change and my bladder became the size of a walnut. To this day, I don’t know how to pee into a bottle, so truck driving is still out.

I digress: when grunge came into fashion, to the point where my friend and I walked into Sears and there was a huge sign that said “GRUNGE” above the teen section, my mom was pretty happily unaware of what the foo was “happening with the youths.” I started buying dirt cheap flannel at thrift stores and wearing them everywhere, even in the summer (tied around my waist, of course). I was riding in the backseat one day and out of the blue she glances at me in the rearview mirror and says, “What, are you trying to look like a lesbian?” Ho ho ho, the irony is too much for one person to bear.

After that, I guess I figured I’d just end up being a stripper or something, because I sure as hell knew I wasn’t going to see any of that college money that had been put aside for me, even before I started disappointing Them.

I got a whole line of record store jobs until I got married, and then I aspired to the highest calling of all aimless girls who can’t stop fucking with their own hair: Beauty School. I honestly thought that’s where I belonged, that I couldn’t do any better than that.

Sometimes I worry that they’re going to find me out for the intellectual fraud that I am and boot me out. But in the meantime I am becoming very interested in cataloguing issues (for this five minutes anyway).

But when I get very tired of reading, I really am working on a plan to become one of those dirty female rappers who can rhyme “carpet burn” with “butt plug.” I too will wear nothing but a pastie shell over one of my boobs like Lil Kim.

boobs.jpg

In Other News

Dear Beef Farmers of America,

I see that you have created a new “sub-tle” campaign to encourage teen girls to eat red meat, specifically beef. Why is this page so damn creepy? Don’t most lil girls see right through this shit? I mean, it’s on the Internet, for christ’s sake. They probably got to this page from a link on a Korean porno site.

Don’t worry, Beef Farmers of America. You will get the elusive 11-17 set back when they grow out of being anorexic, or on nights when no one will be home for hours and they are binging.

From the “Smart Snackin” page: “I make sure I eat a healthy diet sometimes by listing down what I eat each day or remembering what I eat. I’m always careful.” –Judy, age 12.

Any twelve-year-old girl that’s being this “careful” is not eating beef, I’ll tell you that much. Creepy!

Love, SJ

19 thoughts on “2 Uncool 2B 4-Real”

  3. First thing this morning I’m dealing with the whole “dubya “y’all got one week, ya hear” and now THIS…

    uuuhhhggggggg….

    Remind me again why I got up this morning?

    I read websites like that and say “See people of Afganistan…we’re not that different!”

  4. Very early in life, at the age of 8, I had decided that I wanted to be a TV weatherman. In fact, I WAS a weatherman, if only for a brief time, at the Santa Clara County State Fair at the age of 11. KNTV Channel 11 (funny that), the local ABC affiliate, had a stage set up for various talent. And my mother schlepped me up on stage.

    Early on, my little brain was trying to make mischief. When asked who my favorite weatherman was, I replied that my favorite weatherman was the guy on Channel 5. I also declared the most ominous forecast imaginable: thunderstorms, flash floods, the entire fair flooded with the wrath of God. The crowd loved it.

    Was nervous as hell, but it was the second incident in my life in which I realized I could draw a crowd. Some guy approached my mother and asked if “this hilarious little guy” would audition for him, nothing came of it.

    The first time I drew a crowd was when I had a soprano voice and I sung “When I Was A Lad” from HMS Pinafore at an elementary school musical show. The voice, needless to say, was destroyed at the onset of puberty and is now reserved for Bread songs and the kitschiest, most obscure stuff (tunes that no one would sing) I can find in karaoke songbooks.

    But only a few years later, I discovered video cameras and my interests changed to filmmaking.

    Every now and then, however, I am recruited by a friend to be a bad guy in an independent film short or to portray some other strange character. (My film freak friends know that I will do almost anything for them, as well as perform as just about any character. At one point, I came close to shaving my head and appearing in the buff for a friend because he needed a religious psycho. His film folded right when I was about to get the buzz.)

    The strange thing is that my talents and aspirations have always involved things that are far from profitable. But I still love doing them and, every now and then, I am able to make a few bucks from some of these things. But if there was a way that I could do this 24/7, rather than compromise four days of the week towards a day job that I am extremely overqualified for, I’d do it.

  6. What I recall the most was the utter conviction that I was fully in charge of my destiny (why do adults foist this lie on children by asking them ‘what they want to be when they grow up’?) And very unaware of my own bad character traits…in fact…I don’t think I had these back then! Where did they come from.

    Now sometimes I am simply glad I survived my own idiocy…although there is still more idiocy to go–I swear–the greatest thing in my life is that I have a really excellent living room even though I sleep in a cave.

    How our standards do slip.

  8. I think we’re all behaving ourselves in this comment area Shauny, right everyone? (everyone nods)

    …now back to your own page with you!

  9. Hee hee, I was just freaking about my last post, where I was drunk and making typos and such, and someone was needling me. I hate it when people can’t see past the typos to how strongly I feel about something.

  10. oohhh and don’t ever misspell or say “your” when you mean “you’re” in SHAUNNY’s comment area. They chew you up and spit you out itellyouwhat.

    I’ve always believed that people who belittle poor spelling and typos live in a very very small world. Which is fine, because I’d hate to take a wrong turn and wind up there.

  11. Since I was a little kid my basic requirement of any future vocation was that I got to be the hero. The guy who really helped people. Who really made a difference. First I wanted to be a firefighter. Then I wanted to be a teacher. Then I wanted to be the guy who assassinated the president.
    Now I do stupid paperwork stuff for a nonprofit. I help people. But I’m not the hero.
    I guess if things keep going like they are, there’s still an outside chance I might get to be the guy who assassinated the president. Though I’d have to figure out a way to nail Cheney too. That fucker scares me.

  14. I actually hate bad spelling. I know everyone does it, me especially, but when a site’s constantly badly spelled (see rat-bag.net/blog ) I find it so hard to see past the awful spelling and into what whoever it is is trying to say.

    I know it’s nit-picky, but that’s how I feel. So nyer.

    DRUNK spelling is a completely different thing. Drunk spelling is great, and everyone should do it at least twice a month.

    SJ’s site is great. SJ rocks and anyone who says different can deal with ME.

  19. When I grow up, I want to be an astronaut. Well, that was what I wanted to be when I was, say, six or seven. Even earlier, I think, I wanted to be a train driver, but that doesn’t really count, does it? After all, when you’re three or four, the answer to the question of what you want to be when you grow up is as much a matter of giving what you think would be the right answer as anything else.

    Anyway, being an astronaut looked unlikely from fairly early on. But there was science fiction, Doctor Who on telly, and Blake’s Seven, and, of course, Star Trek. Computers were never too far away in such things, so I started to develop a bit of an interest in them. This grew over the years, and I ended up wanting to have a career somewhere in the further, future development of computers and computing. So, um, computers became ‘my thing’.

    But now I want to become a professional philosopher.

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