Jon's Ego (in print form!)

God damn I love this movie.

Y’know the funny thing? Lost in Translation always makes me think of Juan, the Mexican exchange student who went to my high school junior year.

My super cool friends and I were the dudes (and a couple of ladies) who went to the movies every single week because we didn’t have anything better to do. On weekend nights that we didn’t go to the movies, we went to parties. We were the guys who weren’t invited to the parties per se, but knew enough people that we our presence wasn’t unwelcome. We just had to hear about the parties second hand an hour or so after they started.

Anyway, the week Juan first arrived, he hadn’t made too many friends at first. We were going to the movies as usual, so I invited him to come.

The movie was Lost in Translation which, as a huge Bill Murray and Virgin Suicides fan (personally I like the book better but I think it’s really interesting how Jeffrey Eugenides focusses on the boys while Sophia Coppola told the same story from the girls’ perspective), I was incredibly excited about it.

My friends and I all loved it but Juan…he hated it.

“He’s so old!” he kept complaining during the movie. “Why would that hot chick ever like him?! Why hasn’t he fucked her?”

That’s actually the way he talked. Juan was an awesome dude but, seriously, he talked like a stereotypical foreign exchange student in a teen movie produced back when casual racism was still funny. He seriously used the phrase “American pussy” (pronounced “PU-say”) multiple times with me.

Anyway, Lost in Translation was the movie that helped Juan realize that we were not the friends who were going to help him get any pussy, American or otherwise. The next week, he quietly shuffled away from the dudes who were tolerated at big parties to the dudes who actually threw them.

Not that I didn’t throw the occasional party. In fact, I threw Juan’s going away party the next summer. Here’s a picture of the two of us from that night:

ps. Recently, I just started to realize that I look like a completely different person than I did in high school. Like I have a different shaped head. How the fuck did that happen?