i got a date with lindsay lohan™

[ Aaron Johnson ]
.remembers Halloween.

In 2004,

I came to three dramatic conclusions.

I shall never forget them.

(1)

C'est pas la C a lifornie, ici.

(2)

Gay guys don't l o ve.

They just can't.

(3)

My id e ntity cannot be defined

in terms of a single definition.

In 2006, I;

+ got my deferral. Proved my point that acting cute, dressing the part, wearing the appropriate concealer and playing it professional could get you anything. Even at McGill.
+ started my second semester without even getting over the previous one. It would later turn out to be my worst semester ever.
+ had a Friday the 13 th craze. Watched all the Jason’s in the preceeding week and decided that Part VI: ‘Jason Lives’ was my favorite. I also found it extremely entertaining that its theme song, “He’s Back (The Man Behind The Mask)”, is a pure 80’s synth-rock masterpiece performed by… Alice Cooper.
+ incidentally, went out that night, and it famously became the drunkest night of my life, ever! Even though I don’t remember anything, I ran on Saint-Laurent in front of the cars and yelled the now-legendary “C’EST JASON!!!”. I fell numerous times because of the icy weather (yet no one picked me up), spilled obnoxious secrets (some of which concerning penis sizes) and vomited in various places (including backstreets, metro stations, metro wagons and all over my friends’ kitchen floor where I spent the night. When asked to clean it, I replied ‘I feel way too nauseated, do it. Your cat won’t stop playing in it.’)
+ woke up the next day (after passing out, of course) with the worst hang-over of my life. Not only were my jeans really dirty, they were torn apart and bloody. I still keep them as a souvenir of this ultimate debauchery night.
+ skipped classes on a regular basis.
+ went to my org chem labs without understanding a thing of what I was doing (‘what the hell is reflux?’), paired with the most blasé girl on campus.
+ was extremely annoyed when accents disappeared on MySpace.
+ believed Harper’s election was one of Canada’s history’s darkest moments.
+ was glad the movie ‘Crash’ (my personal tearjerker) won ‘Best Picture’ at the Academy Awards. Even though I am gay, I don’t feel I have any moral obligations towards ‘Brokeback Mountain’. It plainly sucked.
+ watched ‘Valentine’ alone on Valentine’s Day. And ‘Passion of The Christ’ on Easter. That’s how thematic I am.
+ literally destroyed a local bowling when the Hochelag Crew invaded it for its sporty night. Human pyramids, bowling balls thrown all over the place and Alex Julien sliding in alleys led to funny quotes such as “Scusez Madame… Votre moustache est dans le dallo numéro 5.”
+ almost drowned in my friend’s spa after drinking too much. Don’t you love ameretto-cranberry?
+ asked too many questions when watching movies and split martinis on the couch.

+ suffered depression during the winter. I had no life, only went out to go to work, ate exclusively frozen dinners and sidekicks, went to bed so late it was early morning and spent my nights chatting with random people on MSN. Loft Story became the climax of my lonely days.
+ gained weight.
+ drank a lot of tea.
+ got extremely anxious about exams. Had three midterms in three days.
+ couldn’t stand anything anymore. I felt like my life had hit rock bottom.
+ cracked and called my parents crying at 5 AM.
+ went over to my ex’s place after failing a midterm. Acoustic guitar and delirious sleep lead to a disgusting rebound where circumcision, blowjobs and abstinence all collided to lead to the conclusion that it wasn’t going to work out.
+ survived, thanks to Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan.
+ went commando for a guy.
+ visited old friends in Arctic regions of Quebec, namely Rimouski.
+ met Alexandre Savard.
+ watched ‘Lords of Dogtown’ over and over again.
+ loved ‘I ♥ Huckabees’, even though falling asleep to its menu for too many consecutive days proved to stick a weird Jon Brion melody in myhead.
+ went to gay bars on my own to flirt with bisexual jocks, listening to Hilary Duff and drinking Bootlegger/apple juice/Red Bull mixes in the metro. Went out a lot. This lonely revisiting of the gay scene abruptly ended when Unity burned down.
+ met an annoying 16 year-old prick who entered my life with no invitation. Episodes of drama and backstabing ensued when my life became a real-life Dangerous Liaisons, full of a cruel mix of seduction, lust and mind games. Even though everyone called me Glenn, I felt like a paria in my own scene and was more an Annette than a Kathryn. Indeed, underage Michelle Pfeiffer turned out to be not so virtuous after all and stole my best gay friend.
+ deplored gay guys’ tendancy to lose all clothes, tan to a ridiculous extent and get into ‘serious’ relationships. He’ll be fucking someone else in less than a month, really.
+ got brought lower than I already was by this encounter with the disgusting side of the gay scene. Already depressed, I got caught in a swirl of shallowness and bitching. My body image suffered a lot from it, and I became obsessed with looks and started worshipping L’Oréal Men products. Didn’t feel good enough, felt like an outsider and felt disgustingly ugly.
+ subsequently, kept track of any calorie -and especially fat gram- that entered my body, traded sweet drinks for diet sangria, chewed my food and spit it out without swallowing, jogged everyday and jumped rope at 3 AM. Bulimia did change my life; I lost 15 pounds in 30 days, amazed at how easy it was to take control over my body.
+ walked a lot.
+ ate countless Sesame Snaps and followed soup diets.
+ had the hottest kiss of my life watching X-Men, but was terribly mistaken.
+ came over my friend’s house in the middle of the night to give her comfort after her rockstar fiancé dumped her.
+ went throught the most awful finals period of my life.
+ passed my BIOL 200 deferral in spite of all the horror stories you might have heard about that class.
+ embraced YouTube and Wikipedia.

+ chased tickets for Madonna’s concert in Montreal. After realizing the much talked about ‘bracelets’ I had gotten a hold of would not make me get the best seats, I got into a wild race against the clock that involved $40 taxi rides, lifts by strangers and countless cell calls. Tickets sold out in under 40 minutes and I was extremely disappointed. I transformed my flat into a real eBay tracker with a huge board keeping track of auctions. I finally got tickets, and sold them to get even better (yet quite expensive) ones. I felt like a drug dealer.
+ found myself in the middle of a crowded metro station where hyper fans were hysterically screaming “MA-DON-NA!!”. Loved the whole ‘Madonna’s in town’ hype.
+ went to the Madonna concert on June 21. It was amazing.
+ went to the VIP after-party for free, which coincidentally happened to be her ‘I’m Going To Tell You A Secret’ DVD release party.
+ turned 20. Although it was a traumatic experience, I eventually assumed it, realizing I was more mature and finally changed my eternally-18 age on MySpace.
+ had a Flashdance craze.
+ kissed a guy violently against a wall in a straight club. (He later turned out to be obsessed with our Rappazed, Nightlifed, Mile-Ended, Ipod-Battled Annie Q.)
+ housed a guy for two weeks as he came from France to visit Montreal. He fell in love with me and fucked a guy in my bed.
+ wore a tiara waiting for him at the airport.
+ drank in parks, went out a lot and was drunk 11 days out of 12.
+ worked at Jazz Fest (10 days of 16-hour shifts non-stop).
+ read Lolita Pille’s ‘Hell’.
+ went to the Outgames opening and closing ceremonies for free. This was a huge joke to me and I enjoyed Marie-Chandail Toutplein and Marjo reconciling on stage.
+ went to the Bal en Brun instead of the Gay Pride.
+ didn’t SexyBack.
+ was shocked that ‘Control Myself’ didn’t become the summer hit I expected it to be.
+ lost two years of my life when my computer’s hard disk overheated and crashed.
+ hated my fucking job.

+ started taking Propecia.
+ put Sun-In in my hair, leading to a fashion disaster.
+ played Katamari obsessively.
+ had a chronic gastro-enteritis which gave me terrible pain and a delirious feverish sleep where I thought I actually was a Katamari picking up imaginary pins in the bed. Lost a considerable amount of weight.
+ wondered, who the hell is Teddy Geiger? (and what the fuck is up with the photoshopped eyes?)
+ heard Rihanna’s ‘Unfaithful’ four times in 20 minutes while browsing the radio in my car.
+ realized all Cher songs evolved around guns, tears and heartbreaks. How emo. We started wearing gypsy accessories, sung ‘Half Breed’ all the time and walked the Dark Lady way.
+ had an epic dream set in Lavorian, a land where elves bathe in fountains while ‘Hide & Seek’ airs in the background.
+ Rod Stewart stopped returning our calls.
+ attended the ‘Snakes On A Plane’ premiere with our newly-renamed Homa Snakes street gang. Oh, we were ready for it!
+ bought the pink velvet ‘Sex And The City’ limited edition boxset and watched them all over the summer. It literally changed my life. I got addicted to Cosmopolitans, started three-word introducing myself to everyone and felt like some 30-something single nympho on the run. Caught myself flirting and making fish-hook faces and giving naughty looks to every guy around me.
+ passed out in the shower after a night where I drank one too many Cosmos.
+ went to Provincetown with my best friend. Cape Cod beaches and everday GayPride proved to be the perfect place to put in practice what Carrie Bradshaw taught us. I wondered, how dirty can this get?
+ worked on my fitness the slutty way with the Carmen Electra videos.
+ have been a terrible person: I forgot about my mom’s birthday while her mother was dying. To make it up, I invited her over for dinner in the following week. Etiquette guides, expensive wine and flamboyant bird-of-paradise flowers with guppies swimming in the vase made her forgive me after all.
+ faced my grandmother’s painful death.

+ started the fall semester the right way, actually attending classes and studying.
+ registered to a ‘Natural Disasters’ class in the nick of time, which turned out to be a huge joke consisting of videos about the Mississipi flood and term papers about tsunamis. Haha.
+ + got 93 in an org chem midterm after taking this class for the third time. Thank you Hanadi Sleiman.
+ withdrew from my insanely demanding physiophysic elective.
+ was shocked by the Dawson shooting. Even more when I realized I knew one of the victims.
+ almost got renamed to Emile Hamilton.
+ had a morbid passion for JonBenet.
+ followed Loft Story 3, like pretty much everyone I know. “Bin là… t’es pas venue à Loft Story pour mourir, crisse!”.
+ said “Ostie qu’Marie Plourde est LAIDE!” several times.
+ learned all about the 90’s.
+ learned all about Coke’s history. Love the ‘New Coke’ marketing disaster. Finding out ‘Coke Black’ was available in Montreal was ecstatic.
+ found out ‘Strike!’ wasn’t discontinued but available on DVD under the name ‘All I Wanna Do’.
+ was constantly moving between my friend’s place and mine because crazy roomates and crazy neighbours could not stand us watching countless movies all the time.
+ got addicted to RC-Cola (diet, of course).
+ enjoyed ‘A Public Affair’.
+ flirted with a cute and funny -yet hetero- jock through MySpace comments. Was glad I found myself a new ‘hétéro bourrin’ after Marc-André Guénette disappeared.
+ flirted with my ex. On a folk shows background, mixed feelings and misgivings lead to a tension build-up that made me feel I might be on the verge, up to when he disappeared before finals.
+ watched Les Bougon and Wonder Showzen in what looked like a clandestine communist dorm from some East-European country.
+ never got into decorating for Halloween as much as I did this year.
+ listened to an extensive Halloween playlist all October. Dead cats hanging from poles, I remember Halloween…
+ watched every possible Halloween movie, except the Halloween’s themselves.
+ loved ‘The Shining’.
+ realized Chucky’s Shitface scarily looks like Mylène Farmer in her ‘Désenchantée’ video.
+ wrote a midterm on Halloween night. How dramatic is that! I mean, who knew Org Chem would become the Grinch who stole Halloween!?
+ dressed up as Cher on Halloween, making girls jealous of my thighs.
+ got obsessed with Laura Dern when introducing my all-time favorite movie, Jurassic Park, to my friend.
+ thought Montreal was under attack twice.
+ said ‘Seigneur!’ way too much.
+ became L’Oréal Men’s new face.
+ didn’t figure what was more disturbing : the movie Slither or Britney Spears’ crotch?
+ attended the Montreal ‘Another Gay Movie’ premiere, where the entire gay scene had gotten together in a huge opera house. Having already seen it felt incredibly satisfying and refreshing.
+ got so broke I started looking for refundable cans in the garbage. At some point, there was only 3¢ left in my entire apartment.
+ flooded my third-floor flat.
+ broke hearts, again.
+ finished school early and well.
+ got attacked by an insane squirrel living in my roof.
+ survived an attack of the local scene. - 150 scene points!
+ was disappointed by both Thomas Lalonde and the Quebec version of Romeo & Juliet.
+ cooked a lot of banana bread over the holidays.
+ received a rolling pin for Christmas.
+ loved Nelly Furtado’s ‘Say It Right’ video.
+ decided Gnarl Barkley’s ‘Crazy’ was the best song of the year overall.