Letter: F

CD Number: 20

Track Number: 15

Song: “Joe Rey” by Fountains of Wayne from the album Fountains of Wayne

Listen to it here

I don’t think Chris likes me very much. Which sucks. Because he seems pretty cool. Way cooler than me, in any case.

He just has it all together, you know. He’s got friends and you can tell they are all comfortable around each other the way they hang outside the north entrance before classes every day. Some days they are laughing and pushing each other. Some days, they are just kind of sitting around. Sometimes some of them smoke, sometimes not. You can just tell that Chris is…comfortable. And not worried about what anyone else thinks. God, I wish I could be like that.

I know that I’m new here and Christ grew up in this town and that’s part of it. I get it. But still…it gets tiring, you know? Being fascinating as the new guy, but no one knows you enough to invite you out? That’s where I am.

I complained about it once to Dad and he suggested maybe it’s ‘cause they think I’m a foreigner. I hope not. I don’t speak with an accent or anything. I was born in Spain, yeah, but only because my Dad was part of the diplomat corps there, not because I’m Spanish. I speak it, but I’m an American citizen.

He might be right though. A lot of the girls here seem to only want to talk about the fact that I lived in Spain. Ugh…I hope not.

Oh, and if it’s not the Spain thing, it’s the snow thing. I don’t even know where this thing got started. First of all, the whole “many words for snow” is kind of racist, right? It seems that way to mean, anyway. Like Intuits only have one thing to talk about, cold weather, so they have so many words for it? That doesn’t feel right to me.

Either way, though, I’m not Intuit. I’m less Intuit than I am Spanish. Even if there were 17 different words for snow, I don’t know them. I know like four. Snow, flurries, blizzard…maybe that’s it. So three. Or like six if you count foreign languages. Diane and I tried to make a joke out of it, but that just seemed to make people more convinced that I knew the words. I wonder if, when they ask me, they think I am being a snob or mysterious or a fraud or what?

New schools are friggin’ hard.

I come in on Mondays and everybody’s talking about this party or that movie or whatever and I’ve got nothing. Sometimes I go into the City and everyone seems really excited about that. Well, everybody buy Chris who just rolls his eyes at me when I mention it. But no one asks if they can come, too. Or asks me to go to one of those movies or parties or whatevers. I only go to the City because I don’t want to stay here by myself and feel like a loser. All I do there is get a bagel, maybe see a movie, go to a comic book store…nothing that interesting. Stuff I could do in this town, you know. If anybody thought of me once school was over on Friday.

But Chris…Chris has it made. It must be so easy to be him. Damn…I’d stop being Joe Rey from Spain who knows about snow and goes into the City in a heartbeat if I got to be as comfortable as Chris. In a heartbeat.

So, what do you think? Enjoy it? If so, feel free to follow me on Twitter (@UnGajje) for various bon mots and links directing you to the newest updates on this site as well as my other various writing gigs (Marvel, Complaint of the Week at the Living Room Times, and New Paris Press, set to debut shortly although information may be available before then here). If not it was not so enjoyable for you, feel free to tell me that too. And still check me out at all those things above. One of them you are bound to like more.

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