Ouch

Last night I watched a documentary called American Teen. The film followed five high school students (living, incidentally, in an Indiana town about twenty miles from where I grew up) as they completed their senior year. The kids were your typical John Hughes "types": All-American boy; poor, good-hearted jock who needs an athletic scholarship in order to go to college; bitchy popular girl with a painful secret; pimple-faced nerd; Alternagirl. Their stories made me cringe with the recognition of adolescent hell. Alternagirl gets dumped by her alternaboyfriend and almost flunks out of school from the ensuing depression and anxiety. Nerd Boy IMs a girl that he's crushing on: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you like me?" and then beams a greasy-faced grin when she responds "...6".

More than anything, though, watching this film reminded me what a little shit of a teenager I truly was. Like, there was this part in the movie where the bitchy popular girl gathered her friends together to go vandalize the home of a classmate she didn't like. They toilet-papered the house and its surrounding foliage, then spray-painted a penis and the word "f*g" onto the front windows. I was all outrage and fury, thinking "How humiliating for that kid! How horrible for that kid's parents!" -- until about three seconds later, when I remembered being seventeen years old, dressing all in black with three of my friends, buying about 20 cans of that fake snow that comes in a spray-can, driving in the middle of the night to the home of this girl, Andrea, who we didn't like for some reason or another, and covering her driveway with fake-snow "spray paint" spelling out things like "Go back to Germany, Nazi!" Because she had white-blond hair, see, and because we sucked. After that, we drove around stalking the Papa John's delivery guy for awhile, waiting until he left his car before we leapt out of ours to spray "YUM!" onto his rear window, and then we drove over to my ex-boyfriend's house and sprayed "Shaq Diesel" all over his beloved burgundy pick-up.

The girl in the movie was caught and punished; we were not. I don't remember us seeing a single consequence for any of the stuff we pulled: not for getting drunk and breaking into the middle school through a utility door on the roof, not for stealing all the "Home For Sale" signs we could find from yards all over town and re-planting them in a friend's front lawn while his family was on vacation, not for pulling the fire alarm two days in a row to get out of choir practice. All that shit had consequences for someone -- the middle school janitors who had to clean up the mess we left behind, the homeowners who had to get new signs -- but not for us. Is it a sign of Being Old that I am now feeling mortified? Remembering that feeling of being untouchable for what it really was: the security of knowing that someone else would always be responsible for your stupid decisions?

Oh, OH, and in the movie, when Alternagirl got dumped and spent a month skipping school to cry in her bedroom, and her dad tried to comfort her and get her back on track, and Alternagirl just wasn't having any of it? Remember that? I'm not asking do you remember it in the movie -- I'm saying do you remember that feeling, when your parents' attempts at giving love or help were just never going to cut it, because they didn't understand and they would never understand, and they were just so irrelevant to the situation anyway because this was your life? Ohhhh, I'm telling you, people, it is just blowing my mind to see this now from a parent's perspective. As in: back when I was about to turn sixteen and was reeling from my first break-up, and one of my best girlfriends had just been thrown this huge "sweet sixteen" party at which her boyfriend presented her with a dozen roses, and all I could think about was how no one was going to throw me a party, no one was going to dote on me, no one was going to give me flowers, and I was a total bitch to my mother, telling her she didn't care about me, and then on my birthday she still went out and got me this beautiful bouquet of pink roses and a card and an ice cream cake? And I barely glanced at the flowers before telling her I didn't like pink? When, had those flowers come from a boy or one of my friends or, really, anyone other than my parents, I would have been elated? Yeah. I'm guessing that stung.

For all that she drives me crazy with her temper tantrums and her demands and her middle of the night wake-ups, Cletus the Former Fetus currently A) is happy, B) has no self-confidence issues based on the opinions of peers who will grow up to be unsuccessful and lame, and C) thinks I walk on water. I realize that the fact that this will all change is not a revolutionary statement, but still. Damn.