Struggle With Cylons

Okay, I will be the first to admit it. I have never ever ever been cool. My only pair of skinny jeans I bought at Old Navy for 15 dollars and I wear them because they fit really well into boots. I literally just heard the Circus album for the first time, like, 6 days ago. When the Harry Potter books came out the Hermione Granger references were on the lips of everyone I had ever met. If kids where like chocolate I would have been that awkward coconut one that is always left half eaten. And that's okay, you know, you come to terms, you eat lunch alone or with the kindly librarians and you learn to own that awkward nerdiness, you channel it into something productive, like, you know, getting into a school like not-Yale. And then you start to become a person and you realize, as Nick Hornby said, that it's not what you like but what you're like that matters. Nevertheless, shallow and absurd as the human race is we still tend to see the cool kids in the cafeteria and the sad strange ones eating alone and muttering about dungeons and dragons. It helps that they look like they just knocked over a Hot Topic.

Now, one of the best things about college, apart from the handles of Dubra and the discovery that someone else in the world has read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is that you get to be a whole new person and nobody is going to fact check you. Unless you go to college with your entire extended family and circle of friends accompanying you, you will get to be someone totally different then you have been for your past 18 years. More if you take some time off or are Canadian. So all of a sudden your conception of yourself as a mathlete or a choir geek or whatever you've had to be for the last four years of high school and beyond has been demolished and you can finally be that chain-smoking hipster you've always dreamed of. Or whatever. Yes, yes, it's exciting and heady, the sense of power, the ability to change who and what you are. No one knows about your collection of antique dolls or your regular trips to the Renaissance Fair. (Though you should TELL them because Renaissance Fairs are AWESOME. ) Yes, finally, finally, you can be exactly who you tell people you are, and nothing more. Right? Right.

Wrong. Sadly, as The Merchant of Venice warns us, "The truth will out". For example, I'm a huge geek who just referenced The Merchant of Venice in a blog post. Even at the old age of 21 I'm a big dorky struggle and I don't see myself getting any better any time soon. I really enjoy some deeply pathetic and/or terribly nerdy things. But, frankly, so do you. And if the process of becoming a person, becoming a person, (because I secretly believe that's all living really is, is figuring out how to be a person), is about exploring the length and breadth of yourself, then shouldn't we all allow those parts of ourselves to come out and breathe every once in a while? Screw it, I'm starting now. So for your amusement and mockery I'm putting the crazy out there right now and giving you several of the things that make me so uncool I could have my picture placed next to the definition in the OED. Uncool has to be in there, right? I mean, bootylicious made it in there.

Some of the many reasons I could never achieve the elevated status of hipster:
1. I watch Battlestar Galactica. And so should you. It's amazing. It's so crazy and awesome and full of cylons and now I am super worried that everyone around me is a cylon, that is, a robot disguised as a human and attempting to end the human race, and it's great.
2. I really enjoy fairly terrible action/archeology movies. Sahara, National Treasure, The Mummy (and the Mummy Returns. And The Rock as the Scorpion King). I even saw Fool's Gold. Seriously.
3. I adore museums. Every time I go anywhere, any kind of vacation, that's the first thing I go. I went to visit my friends Benjamin and Jonathan this past summer who were staying in Washington D.C. and Benjamin was like, hey guys, want to go to the National Gallery? There's an exhibit on the ancient art of Iraq. And we were like, oh my god, why are we still standing here?
4. This morning I woke up and read Hedda Gabbler.
5. I still haven't heard " I am....Sasha Fierce" I have, however, heard " A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All". And I loved it.

So that's me. I'm out of high school, to be fair, but really, is high school ever really over? If it never really ends then, well, hell, I'm just going to own how much of a struggle I really am. Now, if you will excuse me, I have some Battlestar Galactica to catch up on.