The only constant...

I want to start a clothing company called Norma Jeans, your friendly neighborhood fashion boutique for the trendy and retarded. I'll sell jean skirts for guys (because girlpants are SO 2003), bandannas (specially cut to accommodate your back pocket or to be wrapped around your knee), and those temporary tattoos of wrist-slashes I've always been talking about.

I have a job now, and I work more-or-less full time, from five to midnight. I never see the sun -=[ It's all chill though, I'm (supposedly) making mad cash, which is nice. I'm also living after midnight, which is annoying. So that's why I'm never around, in case you were wondering. (You weren't.)

Friday was probably one of the weirdest nights of my life, partly because I went to a show at the hangout and it was fucking lame. I saw a kid with shaved legs wearing boyshorts. I saw a bunch of people, retardedly dressed, trying to pretend they're so into music when half of them didn't even pay to go in; They stood outside, earning precious scene points. A few kids asked me to buy cigarettes. I told one kid he loved pole, and got called an asshole for doing so. Seriously though - Was I like this when I went to shows?

I always used to be afraid that some day, I'd be "too old" or whatever to keep hanging out with my friends at all-ages punk shows. As it turns out, though, I guess I'm growing out of it. I guess the bar band scene is my new best friend. It just seems so stupid now to go to shows and stand around in girlpants, watching people argue about being straightedge or trying to impress everyone with their sweet moshing skills or smoking a bunch of cigarettes to seem cool (funny how you can tell these kids haven't been smoking long, funny how you can tell most kids ARE doing it to be cool.) or whatever other bullshit we used to do.

I mean, it's the same thing, go hang out with your friends at the show, see some rad bands, whatever. I think everything has this sort of artificial finish to it now. Everyone wants to "be scene" and take retarded myspace pictures and make out with boys because they're so unique and different and in touch with their feminine side. I thought music was all about, "fuck everyone, I'm gonna be myself and hang out with people who appreciate that" and not "Man, I'd sure like to be a scene kid, how can I be more emo?"

It's funny, 'cus I used to be the same way, I guess. Everyone wants to try to be something, to see what fits. The problem is, you can't find out who you are by trial and error. Or you can. I dunno. It seems like a lot of people spend High School (myself included, though everyone's mileage varies here) thinking that if they can "be" a certain image, then they'll find their place. I think younger people have this goal as to who they want to be, and they try to meet that, but as we get older, we start to see everything coming together. We start to see who we were all along - and that we don't need to be anything else.

I think MySpace is interesting because it lets people show you how they see themselves. It's always weird when there's a huge difference between how they see themselves and how you see them. Maybe you'll see some poetry in someone's blog, someone you thought was just another ditzy highschool kid. You'd think, "Holy shit, this is decent, I should give so-and-so more credit." Or sometimes you'll see someone's About Me and how they're describing themselves and think, "Fuck that so much dude, you're not like that at all."

I started this post thinking about how fucking gay the scene is and wondering if it's really THAT lame, or if I just grew out of it. It's probably a combination of both. All of the same basic elements are there, it's just more artificial now than it used to be - and it WAS pretty superficial. The point, though, is that once you know yourself - when you realize what you like, how you act, how people perceive you, what you want to do with your life - you've got pretty much everything figured out. As I've said before, you find what you want to do, and you do it. If you're trying to be something else, trying to be scene or preppy or whatever, it's always gonna hold you back. But hey, when people get older, they grow out of acting like assholes*, and that's way rad.

*most of the time