The wildest understatement I've ever made in one of my blogs:
High school sucked.
If I had to choose between going back to high school and doing prison time, it would be a no-brainer. Lock my ass up. If I had to choose between going back to high school and having one of my legs amputated, I'd be upset…but fire up the saw. If I had to choose between going back to high school and spending a year living in Iowa…hmm. That's a tough one. Is suicide an option? No? Do they have the internet yet in Iowa? No? Fuck. Okay, Iowa, you win this time…
My ten year reunion was this past Saturday. Needless to say, I wasn't there. For me to go back to my high school reunion, I think, would be not terribly far off from a Holocaust survivor going to an Auschwitz concentration camp reunion. Not really a place I want to go back to. Mostly I'm just amazed it's been ten years already.
For this blog, I thought it would be fun (read: easy) to make a list of ten things I've learned in the ten years since high school. I brainstormed at work, could only come up with three things:
1) Every theatre in the world is haunted by a ghost. And not just any ghost, but the ghost of an actor that threw themselves from the catwalk onto the stage. And they all did this about 30-50 years ago. Apparently around this time there was a rash of actor/theatre suicides, and the spirits all decided to stick around. Go figure.
2) My self-esteem has made an almost unfathomable parabolic arc in the past ten years, and,
3) Making a list is hard.
We'll ignore the moderately interesting yet mostly useless facts 1 and 3, and instead focus on my favorite topic…ME! Me, me, me, me, me…
People that know me now would probably not even recognize me in high school. I hated myself. I daresay I hated myself more than anyone else hated me, and in fact I probably hated myself more than anyone hated ANYONE else. Why did I hate myself? Maybe because I'm the type of person to write "daresay" in a blog…I don't know. Why is irrelevant, the point is I left high school in shambles, and spent the next several years consciously and carefully rebuilding my own self-esteem.
Within half a dozen years I was able, through the collusion of happy accidental events and pure willpower, to transform myself from a self-loathing sad sack of soggy sod (alliteration is fun), into a cocky, egotistical, Prima Donna, jackass.
Awesome.
I think my self-esteem peaked approximately somewhere during my second year at Winona State. I remember I was jumping my rocket-cycle over a pair of sharks with laser eyes while screwing the blonde out of these two hot twin sisters I'd met at the library and eating a hamburger, and I said to myself, "Yeah…this is pretty cool." Also, I was firing a machine gun into the air for no particular reason.
That might not have happened exactly the way I remember it…but you get the point.
Since that shark-jumping, twin-screwing, machine-gun-firing instant, I have been on a slow and inevitable decline. The problem is, my self-esteem has always been based on three things…I call them "The Three Pillars of Tim's Awesomeness." (And yes, I am so cocky I actually refer to myself in the third person in my head. And at job interviews.)
THE THREE PILLARS OF TIM'S AWESOMENESS
(I've put them in bold to reinforce their "pillar-ness")
1- TIM IS NICE
2- TIM IS FUNNY
3- TIM IS RIDICULOUSLY ATTRACTIVE
But now, I'm just not sure that's enough anymore. Looks fade. I can't be funny all the time…some might argue I can't be funny ever. And being nice is WAY overrated. Nice is boring. Nice is the person you want to talk to after the beach bully kicked sand in your eye. Nice isn't who you want planning your bachelor party…with the strippers and the booze and the oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah…
Also, I'm having doubts about what I'm trying to accomplish with my life, and blah blah whatnot. I'd like to be a writer/actor, but the problem is, I TOTALLY just want to do those things because I enjoy them. I don't really think I have anything to add to the world with my writing or acting. And let's be honest here, folks…the world needs more writers or actors like it needs another hole in the ozone layer. So I'm not trying to improve the world with my writing or acting…I want the world to improve ME because I write and act. Me, me, me, me, me…
I'm basically, for all intents and purposes, useless.
Useless is a harsh word, and it's pretty brutal on your self-esteem. Just about as bad for it, I'd say, as shark jumping is good. So here I am, spiraling downward back to where I was when I left high school. Wondering who I am, what's wrong with me, and what I'm supposed to be doing. Meet 2007 Tim…same as 1997 Tim.
That's my high school reunion.
On an entirely unrelated note…
According to my sources…and by "sources" I mean Nikki W…some fundamentalist Christian preachers/media whores have been going on TV to claim that the I35 bridge collapse was a punishment from God because Minnesota doesn't have sodomy laws. Much like Jerry Falwell did following September 11th, these men of God are using a horrible tragedy to advance there argument against a lifestyle choice they disagree with.
And frankly, I have to admit they might have a point. I mean, if I were an all-powerful being, and I wanted to stop people from being gay, I'm pretty sure I would do it by having bridges fall down on people or crashing planes into buildings. I mean, I certainly wouldn't do it by causing gay people's genitals to explode when they had sex, or having an asteroid fall on a gay bar, or even just coming down from the fucking clouds and saying, "Yo, y'all stop being gay now, ya hear. I'm God, bitch."
Because that would be too obvious.
But though this argument seems logically sound, Nikki cleverly came up with another theory. Maybe God made the I35 bridge fall because he's punishing Minnesota for hosting the Republican National Convention next year. This theory seems much more likely to me, because everyone knows that Republicans love bridges. I mean, that's one of the tenets of their ideology. Those crazy conservative bastards are all about traveling from one place to a different place that isn't connected by land. They love it.
So I would like to open up this space for discussion on the Fundamentalist Christian/collapsing bridges/gay people/Republican National Convention issue. Leave your theories as to why God made the I35 bridge fall (because he clearly did), and perhaps ideas about other structures God can collapse to punish gay people for their horrible, dirty, sinfully arousing ways.
We need to get to the bottom of this.