Thoughts on Lead
It is November 20th today.
As you may or may not know (depending on how long you’ve followed my blog and/or how much attention you pay to past blogs), November 20th is the birthday of the person known as Lead.
Lead, for those of you who don’t know, is the nickname I use for the person that I had a massive, massive, massive crush on all throughout the end of elementary school, junior high, and high school (and it would have started earlier, I’m sure, except he didn’t come to Moscow until 5th grade).
I have long since ceased giving a single fart about this guy, but just the date “November 20th” brings him back into my memory because he was a serious part of my existence for about seven years of my teenage life.
Today, that also brings up something that I’ve come to realize about my mad obsession with this dude that I’ve never really shared. This is a realization I made a long while ago—like, 8th grade, maybe—but was one I kind of kept inside hoping that it wasn’t true, because that truth was more pathetic than frantically stalking a dude for the sake of true love.
(At least, that’s what my 14-year-old brain convinced me of).
This realization? I wasn’t obsessed with Lead because I was in love with him or was soul mates with him or any of that lovey nonsense. I was obsessed with him because I wanted to be him. He was everything I wish I was, especially in junior high and high school when I was so painfully apathetic about, well, pretty much everything but Lead.
The guy was popular. The guy was good-looking. The guy was athletic. And most of all? The guy was smart.
Like… S M A R T.
I don’t know if he actually had a genius-level IQ, but I’m 99% convinced of it. Super smart. He put everyone else at that garbage bag of a school to shame with what he could do with his mental prowess and how easily he seemed to do it. He got a full ride scholarship to some school in Montana after he graduated, but I’m sure if he didn’t take that he could have easily gone to MIT or Harvard or Oxford or something like that. And he would have blown those fuckers away at those schools.
That’s what I wanted. I wanted to be that smart. I probably could have faked my way through high school a lot better if I’d given a crap (I think my cumulative GPA at the end was like a 3.5), but it would have taken work. I would not have been able to do it with the ease he seemed to do everything.*
This is the Amateur Hour psych student in me, but I think I hid my jealousy of him with admiration. I thought, “hey, if I can’t be this guy, maybe I can get him to like me. If he likes me, that means I’m good enough to at least be liked by a dude of this caliber. So let’s do that!”
Anyway. I know, I know, stupid shit. But I figured I’d mention it now that I’m so far removed from him that I don’t even think we’re Facebook friends anymore. Or at least, I’m no longer obsessively checking his Facebook like I used to. Haha.
Pathetic.
*Yes, I know I might be wrong about this. He made it look like it was easy for him. Maybe it wasn’t. But goddamn, he sure made a convincing argument that getting through school was as easy for him as slicing butter with a hot knife.
Repressed sexual tension durng REM sleep? DON’T MIND IF I DO
Oh man, Freud would have a field day with this one. I dreamt about Lead last night, very vividly, for the first time in a long time. And if you don’t know the story behind the nickname/the person, then that’s because everything involving him happened before I even knew you. Yeah, it was that long ago.
Anyway.
So in this dream it’s like ten years into the future. I’m at some reunion/huge science conference somewhere in the U.S. Who do I see there but Lead. He’s some big shot scientist now—very fitting. He seems surprised to see me there, and asks me what I’m doing with my life. Apparently I work for the census bureau (also very fitting). He’s like, “oh, really? I never saw you in that sort of career, that’s really cool,” and we have this really pleasant, congenial discussion. I start to think he’s kinda coming on to me.
It’s then that I notice he’s got this huge pole of metal with him (here we go…). It’s like ten feet tall with all these weird elbow joints in it. I ask him what it is and apparently it’s one of the main components for a big research project he’s working on. Not ten seconds later, he asks me to “hold it” while he goes off and does something else. So he oh-so-metaphorically gives me his huge pole. And he’s gone.
And I lose the pole. Somewhere. Probably outside, because the dream shifts and I’m out in these dusty hills searching for it. Instead, I find a backpack with a gun in it. Even though I knew he was going to hate me for losing his pole, I was so excited to go back inside and talk to him that I gave the gun to a pair of kids wandering around outside (because without it, one of them said, their mother was going to have to “go back on welfare again”) and run back inside the building.
But my damn alarm goes off and I don’t get to talk to him again.
Ugh. Sometimes I wonder, you know? This was almost as weird as the “fruit suit” dream.
Where’s that fajita vendor?
Okay. Another dream. About you-know-who. So here it is:
I was walking around on campus, going to a marching band performance. I was walking in kind of a daze, and almost passed up the public bus. I only realized that I was at the bus stop when the bus opened its doors and people started getting on. I stayed on the bus for a while as it drove all around campus. Finally, we got to the music building, which, I realized, was only a block from the bus stop; I didn’t have to catch the bus at all, and I was hoping no one noticed this stupidity. All these different band members from different places and schools were beginning to pile up outside the music building. I went inside, where the U of I band was. Then I saw Lead*. Ugh. I said, “Hey!” He still seemed desperate to ignore me. I was running around inside the music building with just my socks on, among all these other band members who were in uniform, trying to impress him (sounds like the good old days). At some point I decided to make him some Easy Mac. “Easy” my butt. I totally screwed it up, and simultaneously realized I had screwed up any chances of getting his attention. So then I woke up.
So analyze this for me. What does the Easy Mac symbolize? What does my incompetent cooking symbolize? Can a macaroni noodle be considered a phallic symbol? Have I been reading too much about Freud?
*A nickname for a certain someone. Some of you know who they are.
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