i remember being five or six and always making sure that any jacket i wore was zipped all the way up. this meant that the collar would be turned up and my wind breaker would look like a dorky turtleneck. i don’t remember it if did, but i imagine it also chafed a bit. it was a small price to pay, however. there’s no way i wanted to be thought of as cool.

now i was pretty young and i didn’t know much about being cool. but i knew this. fonzie always wore his jacket partly zipped up. and he was cool. so my zipper had to go straight to the top. i prolly didn’t need to worry much though. i mean, i had glasses and a wicked obvious cowlick.

maybe nothing’s changed.

i still don’t know much about being cool and am still kinda uncomfortable about doing cool things. namely, these sideburns that i’ve now got. jenny has tried on and off to convince me to grow out some sideburns. i came back from my trip looking like grizzly adams having not cut my hair or shaven. so i figured i’d let her do what she willed. and now i feel all awkward.

a friend of mine wears a button that says, “i was uncool before being uncool was cool.” maybe i’m guilty of that kind of sentiment. lamenting my struggle with coolness and hoping to dupe people with reverse psychology. but. i do know that i have a history of not doing what’s expected of me.

before my anti-fonzie activism days my grandmother tried to teach me how to tie my shoes. i was quite a little prick and ended up tying my laces in as many knots as it would take for her to give up trying to teach me.

later on, in middle school, after having secured the scrawniest kid award i joined the wrestling team. i was actually fairly good for a while. but as soon as my body started catching up with everyone else and i was no longer two years older than everyone in my weight class, i wasn’t. my resolve to carve my own path lessened with each body slam.

which is the thing. for every story about me standing apart i could prolly think of another story where i backed down from my convictions in the face of either pain or, more probably, disapproval (from girls).

and so it goes. now i have sideburns. why? to impress a girl. not quite so anti-cool after all.

i’ve been back from my trip for nearly a week now. since i’ve been home my priorities have been to watch as many movies as possible and to update my journal with the final entries of my trip and photos. the journal is done. the photo album is up.

and. i’ve watched well over a dozen movies (the first one was spies like us). most of them are movies that i’ve seen before. namely crumb.

now. everyone has an “i’ve seen this movie a hundred times, but this is the first time that i noticed …” story. well, this is the first time that i’ve noticed the comma in the phrase, “how perfectly goddamned delightful it all is, to be sure.” i don’t know shit about grammar and especially punctuation, but i’m pretty sure that that comma makes the sentence mean something completely different from what i had always thought. i thought that what charles meant was that to be sure, or certain, about something must be perfectly goddammed delightful. instead, with the comma, i guess it means that he’s sure that everything is perfectly goddamned delightful.

not such a little misunderstanding. i mean, it’s prolly my most favorite quote. and i suppose i should be really embarrassed because, since i first heard it, i’ve relied on that phrase when things are really uncertain with me. which is pretty often.

but fuck it. i got out of it what i suppose i really wanted to.

i’m also the person responsible for mishearing “on a tour of one night stands” in simon and garfunkel’s homeward bound on amiright.com. i thought it was “auditor of one night stands”. oops.

last night my roommate told me this story about a time he was crossing a one-way street in milwaukee and almost got flattened by a driving granny going the wrong way. the experience changed his life. “jim, i don’t care what kinda street it is. i always look both ways from now on. always.” he ain’t kidding either. he looks both ways coming out of the bathroom into the hallway. sometimes even up.

my near car smashing experience was a little more odd. i was living in pasadena. a group of us were walking along colorado blvd., i think on our way to see pulp fiction. i had just moved there and was making new friends. everything was going swimmingly until we were crossing lake st. i was walking slightly ahead of the group and was looking slightly backwards at them when one of my new friends yanked me back. we all looked at this car making a left off of colorado onto lake and zooming inches away from me. fast cars making illegal lefts are not a curiosity in la. but. everyone attests that at first glance the only thing they saw in the driver’s seat was a dog. i mean it had its paws on the steering wheel and everything. as it passed a bit further we all saw a person sitting underneath the dog. presumably operating the pedals. we didn’t resume crossing the street until mikey said, “shit jim, you were almost killed by lassie.”

a friend of mine from back in pasadena would occasionally tear into a rant about american movie titles. he was particularly displeased with the apparent string of “american ” movies at the time. he was also quite particularly annoyed by movies that had titles with verbs in whatever tense verbs are in when they end with “ing”. it was hilarious. the shit that came out of his mouth when he talked about “good will hunting”.

so. this weekend i watched “killing zoe”. it was prolly the 800th time i’ve seen the movie, but the last time was at least 4 years ago. in my opinion, eric stoltz does quite the nice job in this movie. even though i’ve seen this movie so many times i still get nervous for zed hoping that eric won’t kill him. but. the acting wasn’t enough for pat who strongly asserted a number of times that this was “not a movie to watch drunk.” i don’t think i can watch any movie while drunk. unless it’s two minutes long.

two nights ago i finished the classroom portion of my scuba training. that got me pretty psyched to attend my first pool session last night. however. i couldn’t find the place.

3. Continue on a local road 0.0

thanks yahoo maps! in yahoo’s defense wayland, ma could do with a few (lot) more street signs. in any case, i was quite put off by the whole ordeal.

so. i ended up meeting up with a bunch of friends and a bunch of bass at a local bar. after the juke box played “watch out now” and “ever fallen in love?”, 2 of the best songs from 2 of the best ‘b’ groups, right after each other i had completely forgotten about scuba.

but. this morning i was reminded of something else. i was a bit hungover and had a bit of a headache and i recalled a spectacular hangover headache i had this past summer. i woke up and my head felt like a large, cracked sheet of thick glass. like an inch thick and about as big as my bed. when i moved my head very slightly i could feel the glass creaking. the sensation was so real that i could feel the edges of my glass head bumping into the wall next to my bed, a couple feet from my actual, not-so-glass head. i was really intrigued by this and tried to make the feeling last, but the glass disappeared along with my headache after a few seconds.

i was thinking about that on my way to the t stop this morning about where i came across that demolition site. here’s what i think is cool about that picture. it has a nice blue sky. it has a wrecking ball. it has a guy brandishing a fire hose like a 3 foot long ding-ding.