Adventureland

I love movies like Adventureland. Movies like Breaking Away and Spanking the Monkey and The Last Picture Show. Coming-of-age movies. How could you not love coming-of-age movies? We're all coming of age. We all love movies. Fucking perfect formula right there.


I love the boys these coming-of-age movies are always about.

Not-a-boy-not-yet-a-man. Man-boys. With their smiles and their noses and their button-up shirts that they wear when they're trying to look nice.


But these movies, these coming-of-age movies make me sad because I know those boys like that, those boys that I like, that make me nice-way-squirm when they talk about their degrees in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies, about the novels they want to write and read, when they babble about video games and comic books and lofty hopes and dreams -- yeah, those boys would never fall for a girl like me.

If these kinds of movies showcase anything, it's the kind of girl that boys like that want and expect they'll never get.

But they get them.

Eventually.

Always.

Because those girls that they like, with their surprisingly good tastes in music, their surprisingly good senses of humor, their surprisingly deep thoughts under those shockingly beautiful physiques -- yeah, those girls realize how nice and cute and perfect those boys were all along. Those girls realize what girls like me have known from frame one, and that's all it takes. For them.

Acknowledgment.

And I wonder where I could ever fit into a story like this. Where a person like me could fit into Adventureland, a person who doesn't look like Kristen Stewart but would have Martin Starr over Ryan Reynolds any any any day of the week.

And it just doesn't and wouldn't work.

And it makes me sad, it makes me very sad, but I'm not, and I never will be a part of that sort of equation.

Probably because I'd be at home the whole time watching my surprisingly excellent collection of DVDs.