(no subject)

I went to see Wreck-It Ralph alone today, because my parents didn't want to go last weekend (because opening weekend) and this weekend my mother planned to be too tired/busy, and I was like "but I'm bored NOW!" So I called the theater, asked when they were showing it in 2D since the internet didn't say, and away I went.

It was precisely the feel good movie I needed (I really don't have to tell you how good it is, the internet already knows, which is why I had to see it before the polish wore off). It hit a lot of my glee buttons and didn't stop. I guess it helps that John C. Reilly is one of those actors with a voice that burrows into the pathos center of the brain and hangs out being all likeable and stuff. Also, y'know. Jane Lynch.

What really stunned me about this outing had nothing to do with the movie. I went to the theater in a mall that's been an old haunt for me. I never go as an adult (pay to park? Pfffft) but I was there a lot when I was in middle/high school. It's a big, open air mall that's really pretty but crawling with teenagers, in a way that intimidated the shit out of me as a kid. I felt the cool/uncool/judged atmosphere that people discuss high school having almost universally, except I never once felt it at my school. I never ran the gauntlet of jocks and popular bullies and mean kids on my way to the locker, so the world that fills teenage fiction is as alien to me as Mars. So this mall? Is exactly what those books describe that I never felt. It was eerie, oppressive, and I would never go there alone as a teenager.

Ten years later, it was the same. Full of fashionable late teen girls that made me want to shrink in on myself and go "why did I wear this? God, I'm such an ugly schlub, I don't deserve to be here," and then I was like "what in the fresh hell? I am a grown woman with a DECADE on these kids!"

I realized that the part of my brain that was a teenage girl will always bee a teenage girl. Forever. And then I get mad because if I was given eternal youth I wanted the kind that made sure I didn't get wrinkles and could eat pizza for dinner every night, not the kind that compares itself to teens as some kind of warped peer group.

Then I saw middle schoolers wearing the exact same school jacket I had. I never, ever see kids from my school in the wild. It gave me the creeps because they were so little but I remember wearing that jacket and standing right there in front of the ticket counter....