Tuesday, December 23, 2008

someone call nelly furtado because i'm like a -

I am back home for the week and have immediately reverted to my "Josh Who Doesn't Shave" persona. I take 3 hour naps in the middle of the afternoon because I can. I eat a lot of bagels. I wear one red sweatshirt all the time. And I always feel sort of sick.

I mostly stick to the confines of my room, the room I have called my own since the beginning of high school. Since I am not really home very much anymore, my room is basically this odd museum of artifacts, vestiges of High School Josh (so many Joshes floating around right now - try to bear with me through the madness here). Most of the time I am too busy doing nothing when I'm home to really pay much attention to how weird the things in my room are, but today after Facebooking some randos from my middle school for a good 20 minutes (look, you can relate to me!), I found something wonderful. Tacked on to the giant bulletin board next to my bed is a page ripped out of a page-a-day calendar. You know those weird assignments you used to get in 4th grade that were like "Bring in the one object you would use to represent you in a time capsule"? This is totally the object I would bring in.

Back in 11th grade, my French teacher called me up at the beginning of class and and handed this to me in front of everyone. "I saw this today," she announced, "And I knew I had to give it to you." At the time I was all flustered and sort of offended (Insecure 11th Grader Josh!). I sat down and whispered to my friend Marissa, "Wait, so does this mean I am like noticeably weird?" She laughed and didn't really respond.

Now that I am older and (kinda) more self-aware, I realize that Mme. Fandel knew me wayyyy better that I gave her credit for at the time. I am a funny bird, godammit. People spend so much time repressing the funny little birds itching to get out of the cages inside of them (nothing like a tired metaphor to make a cliched point!). The thing is, people give you things and say things and you don't want to hear them and they don't make sense at the time and you forget about them and then one day (like today) it snaps and you get it and you realize that they were right all along - you were just being stubborn - and that there's really nothing so bad about being a funny bird. It sometimes takes five years to realize it, but then you do and - let me tell you - being able to tell jokes while catching worms with your beak is pretty damn fly.

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