« What she said | Main | Futbol Fun! »
May 23, 2003
Spontaneity has its time and its place.
Pangs of guilt have been twitching through Girl-E lately. See, it's a widely known fact that since the age of eight, Girl-E has harbored an acute obsession with anything and everything related to John Cusack. Her life was forever altered upon seeing Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing in the theater in 1985, and there is not a day goes by that she doesn't feel the highest gratitude towards her parents for their lack of cinematic restriction. She actually wore through her first copy of the movie on VHS, and is now afraid to watch the second copy more than twice a year, for fear of killing it and then learning there is no DVD. Watching any Cusack film, even a crappy one, gives her a strange high that she's fairly sure no controlled substance could match; The Sure Thing was merely the steppingstone drug. To this day, friends from junior high will email her to say "you know, I heard 'In Your Eyes' this afternoon and I thought of you." It's part of her identity, as much as having blonde hair and an unusually low singing voice.
Which is where we get to the guilt. Having always considered herself John's Number One Fan, she acknowledges that she has been more than just a little negligent in her duties lately. Not only did someone else entirely come up with the Cusack For President campaign, but Girl-E has done nothing to speak of in her role as Block Captain. She even bagged out of the conference call last April to go to a (non-Cusack) movie. She hasn't seen Serendipity, and it was just three weeks ago that she rented Pushing Tin. Now, ask her about the 80s-early 90s Cusack filmography, and there's no truer soul. She can name even his cameo parts in Sixteen Candles and The Journey of Natty Gann. But from Con-Air on out, it's been a bit bumpy. She's even admitted that Jack Black and the film soundtrack share some small part of the credit for the greatness of High Fidelity. She isn't quite sure what happened, although she recalls the feelings of pain and betrayal that surfaced when during senior year in college, an article appeared in the weekly newspaper written by a girl who devoted a full-page spread to her own obsession with the Nicest Guy in Hollywood. Perhaps it was the internal screams of "That should be ME!" combined with the totally separate remorse of having ditched her ambitions in journalism that began to sour the whole thing.
Girl-E used to convince herself that pure animal attraction had nothing to do with the relationship, that there was a true cosmic joint between their souls. She has to backpedal on this a tad, for there is no denying that while Being John Malkovich is one of her favorite movies ever, this fact is due to many things wholly unrelated to Cusack's starring role. Because let's face it, he was butt-heinous in that film. But either way, John has a grip on Girl-E's being that no merely fantastic-looking star has ever managed. So the fact that she has not been substantively acting on these feelings as a truly devoted fan is causing some angst and regret.
One could argue that perhaps it is because she is a well-adjusted human being with an otherwise fulfilling life, and she should be happy that she doesn't waste her life stalking movie stars. But that doesn't really satisfy her; as a child, she was always grumpy and envious that she didn't have a Binky that she took everywhere, or a stuffed animal that she couldn't sleep without. She tried to be a needy child, but would end up forgetting about the Binky and leaving it on the playground, or chucking the stuffed animal across the room in the middle of the night. No amount of prattling on about her healthy level of self-esteem could cheer her up on this point.
So, if anyone has any ideas for how she can pull herself out of this rut and become the creepy, compulsive Cusack fan she knows she is deep-down, please let us know, and we'll slip her a message. Because the grief she is suffering from her indifference is becoming tiresome.
Posted by The Twins at May 23, 2003 09:09 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/33