Like the cool kids.

I wish I was more like the cool kids, cause all the cool kids, they seem to get it. This song sometimes plays on my car radio traveling to work in the morning. Funny how quick something can send us back, that is, back to a time when most of us felt awkward and out of place in the world. Back to a time when cool was spelt with a "c" and not kool, or I think now its kewl, how old I am beginning to feel these days. I like the way we can hear the pain in the singer's voice, the torture of being a teen is expressed and it makes me feel a little sad for the kids in that stage of life.................................. . There was that added bonus of being a gay teen, add a little tortured soul with an extra heap of confusion, anxiety and self loathing. Yes those were the good old days. I think one of the hardest things was when I would develop a crush on a guy, and realize that it was never going to happen. I hated being at a dance and seeing my male friends so interested in girls, it was foreign to me, I understood the why, I just hated not having the same feelings. .......................................... I have a strong image in my head of one particular dance, my Dad came to pick me up and as I got into the back seat, he got out of the car and went over to talk to another parent. While waiting for him, I noticed the wind blowing open the curtains of the school gym where the dance was. Inside I could see my friends, especially one certain guy I had a huge crush on, he was dancing with a girl, he hated dancing but was doing it to impress her. I remember feeling sick in my stomach, as if I caught him cheating on me. I wanted that to be me he was dancing with. Later that night, I was distraught, why had God, nature or whatever, played such a cruel joke on me. ............................. To cope I started to imagine a fantasy world, where people could date who they wanted, where one of my friends would walk up to me with a stupid grin and ask me to go to the prom, dance, dinner or date with him, where people didn't care who you dated as long as they were good to you. This world, in my head I felt, would never happen, things would never change that much. If only people would get to know us, they would see how normal we are, not some sort of sex fiend as some tried to make us out to be, is what I always felt. ................................... How odd that this memory comes flooding back, odd because it happens as one of my close friends is telling me about how excited her nephew was, it seems that the boy he really likes, said yes and went to the prom with him. How awesome was that last line I just wrote. This is now something quite common, there was even the news story about the straight boy asking his gay friend to the prom, so that he would have someone to take and not miss out. .......................................It hurts though, that I missed it by a generation or two, that the boy waiting inside the car had to live a separate, secret and very lonely adolescence, different from all his friends, when all he wanted was to be just like them. I think how strong a lot of us must have been to work through that garbage. I know there is no point in going back over the past, I am just in a reflective mood. It also has to do with where I want to take this blog, I want to change the purpose of it, so working out the bugs, well the bugs in my head that is.