your bucky.

Guys, take a moment to deal with this. We survived. It was a hell of a battle. Not the battle. High school.

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bucky, eyes narrowing: what the fuck your birthday isn’t until-

Tony, fiddling with something: Barnes just got tackled by Cap, because today is his actual birthday.

Bruce: How do you know?

this post is obviously inspired by @clextra​ and many other people i’ve seen sharing their experiences. they are such an interesting read and i thought i would say something too because its a good reflection tool and it could potentially help someone through their own feelings. so here goes.

“she has a lot of boy friends. uh oh, that’s a worry!”

i found my old baby journal and my mum wrote that when i was barely a toddler. its not pleasant to think about but the root of my compulsory heterosexuality was my mother’s attitudes when i was younger. she would repeatedly insist that i had crushes on every boy i met when i was little. the most prominent time was when i was six and my best friend was a boy called sean. both of our mothers thought we had crushes on each other. i was six and he was just my friend. mum said she could tell because she ‘knew these things’, and because i believed her, i grew up thinking that what i was feeling (friendship with a boy) was romantic love. meanwhile, i idolised and adored my first grade teacher (who was a lot like miss honey mind you) and i kissed girls on self appointed dares. but because i was little and they werent boys, i didnt question it.

“no dating til you’re 18!” “ok”

i am my parents’ first child and only daughter, and though it wasn’t said in so many words, it was a given that i would not be allowed to have a boyfriend until my parents said so. and i was okay with that. i coasted through primary school without crushes on boys. most of my friends were getting their first boyfriends and i was confused. like, ‘why would they want to do that?’. while my friends noticed boys for the first time, i noticed girls’ breasts and stared at my friends when they were getting changed. but because i was young and they weren’t boys, i didnt question it.

“they think you’re gay”

i was about two weeks into high school when a few girls spread a nasty rumour that i was a lesbian. i lost 90% of the female friends i’d made, girls would move away when i sat next to them. although it wasn’t the first time others thought i was gay, it was the first time it got really awful. i cried a lot and told me mum as soon as i got in the car. without missing a beat, my mum said, ‘well you’re not gay, so there’s nothing to worry about’, which calmed me down quickly. i went home and rewatched my avril lavigne dvd for the third time that week. but because i was young and she wasnt a boy, i didnt question it.

“eeny meeny miny moe”

it seems to be a common thing that baby wlw chose boys to have crushes on, but i took it to an extreme. in an effort to convince people that i was straight, i got out the class pictures and played eeny meeny miny moe to choose which boy i liked and what my backup options were. the boy i chose i had a crush on for about 2 years. he was barely my friend, we’d spoken about three times, but i was In Love TM with him. i watched how my friends talked about their crushes so i tried to copy them. they were obsessed with their crushes, so i became obsessed with making sure i acted obsessed enough. meanwhile, i had sex dreams about girls, but because i was young and they weren’t boys, i didn’t question it.

“you’re smiling, that means you like him!”

my friends insisted that i had a crush on one my best friends. he was the aforementioned ‘backup’ from a few years earlier, and because he was nice and i liked spending time with him because he was my friend, i assumed that i did have a crush on him. about a year later my friends about this and manipulated me into asking him out, which i didnt want to do at all. even though i liked him, i didn’t want to date him. i wasn’t heartbroken or even sad really when he said no, if anything i was relieved that my crush was over. but i was also embarrassed and i avoided him for a long time out of shame. meanwhile that same year i recognised i had a crush on a girl in my art class so i panicked and dropped the class. i rationalised that it was a one time thing and it didnt count. i was young and she wasn’t a boy, so i didn’t question it.

“i don’t get it”

after panicking about having a crush on a girl, i went straight back into the compulsive behaviour of obsessively choosing crushes but i would only like boys that were boring and way below my standards so i wouldn’t ever date them anyway. it was a safe way to keep my Heterosexual Identity while avoiding actually needing to date boys. however i did have my first and only boyfriend when i was 15. he asked me out and other girls liked him a lot, so i said yes. the ‘relationship’ lasted two weeks. i didn’t want to touch him at all, i didn’t even want to hold his hand, and because i didn’t see the point, i broke up with him. it was at this time that i first recognised that how other girls felt about boys was very different to how i did. at lunch my friends would talk about how hot their boyfriends were or and share stories about their sex lives. i spent a lot of time listening with a disgusted and disturbed look on my face. i didn’t get it. upon realising that i never wanted to have sex with boys, i came to the conclusion that i was not like other girls and that i was better than them (which was an awful way to think). i then delved into fiction. i wrote from boys pov to gush about how pretty girls were, i became very emotionally invested in brittany and santana from glee, and created oc’s who were questioning. bonus gay points because i envisioned the characters as phoebe tonkin, who i ‘admired’ so much i made an ultra gay video about how hot she was. but because she wasn’t a boy, i didn’t question it.

“oh shit??????”

(tmi coming up dudes) so i graduated high school and i was finally free from that toxic environment. not long later i discovered masturbation (years after everyone else had because i never even thought of doing it), and although i really made an effort to fantasise about whatever male celebrity i had a crush on, i would daze out and just focus on the feelings. christmas 2012 i saw clara oswald / jenna coleman’s face and i was suddenly Really Interested in doctor who and i plowed through seven seasons in a few weeks just to get to her two episodes. i counted down how many episodes i had to get through to finally get to clara. “thirty episodes until clara! ten episodes until clara! next episode is clara!” sometime in the middle of all this i started entertaining the idea that i wasn’t straight. i tried to see if i could masturbate thinking about clara, and oh yes i could.

“i am bi but with a really really really really really strong preference for women”

(just a preface that this is my personal experience and that bisexuality is a real orientation) i like boys, i like girls. that means i’m bi, right? i was ready to embrace that i wasn’t straight and for me that meant having an identifier. i jumped the gun and said i was bi before i was sure of it, because that had to be what i was. i didn’t even consider that i could be a lesbian. i went through my first years of uni developing crushes on a lot of girls who i knew, but never on guys. as i discovered what it felt like to like girls, men paled in comparison and i realised that i only found like two men in the whole world attractive, and they were unobtainable celebrities. i envisioned my future and it was always with a woman. i would fantasise about women all the time, but never about men. it didn’t cross my mind to anymore. i thought i was bi with a really strong preference for women until the beginning of last year, when a man hit on me. i walked home absolutely certain that i was a lesbian, because i realised that i never ever wanted to interact with men in a sexual/romantic way. and i’ve identified as a lesbian ever since.

IMDB plot summary: Two business rivals hate each other at the office but fall in love over the internet.

Is this an accurate plot summary? “At the office” is not even close to an accurate description for the characters’ jobs, but other than that, sure. 

And with this week, we complete the trinity of perfect Nora Ephron romcoms. Yes, she has other films, and yes, we should watch them all, but Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally, and You’ve Got Mail are the gold standard of romantic comedies. They set a high bar that, frankly, very few of the 30-something other romantic comedies I’ve watched this year can meet. And why is that? Well, we’ll get to it later. But for now, let’s recap the plot of this completely charming, completely 90s film. 

As the IMDB plot summary states, Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) and Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) are business rivals. Kathleen owns an impossibly lovely children’s bookstore that was originally her late mother’s. Joe Fox owns Fox Books, a Barnes and Noble-like behemoth chain that opens up right across the street from Kathleen’s shop, which is called…The Shop Around the Corner.

Yes, that’s right! As you may remember from waaaay back in week three of this project (Oh, were we ever so young? We hadn’t even suffered through Something Borrowed yet!), You’ve Got Mail is heavily inspired by the James Stewart film The Shop Around the Corner. But this time, the characters don’t exchange something so old-fashioned as letters. No, they’re living out the future by sending emails and instant messages and giving you weird flashbacks by playing those instantly recognizable AOL noises! 

So anyway, Joe and Kathleen are internet penpals who hate each other IRL. Kathleen lives in the biggest, most beautiful apartment in the world and is dating a bespectacled Greg Kinnear. Joe’s dating Parker Posey and his dad is Rich Businessman Dabney Coleman. On paper, they’re terrible for each other. But on AOL instant messager, they’re talking about movies and flirting up a storm. Things are going swimmingly until they decide to meet, at which point they recreate, almost exactly, a scene from The Shop Around the Corner, right down to the coworker/Dave Chappelle saying, “Well, if you don’t like Kathleen Kelly, then I can guarantee you won’t like this girl…because she is Kathleen Kelly.” 

Some amicable breakups happen (seriously, has there ever been a more pleasant breakup than the one between Kathleen and Greg Kinnear?). Kathleen’s bookstore closes. Joe has an existential crisis in an elevator. Eventually he realizes he has to get Kathleen to love him and, going against romcom tradition, he executes a series of small gestures (buying her stuff at the farmer’s market! Visiting her when she’s sick! Taking her to lunch!) instead of a grand gesture. And you know what? It works. Because by the end of this movie, if you’re not physically aching for Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan to kiss in a park with a golden retriever by their sides, then you might actually be missing a heart.

Because here’s the thing about You’ve Got Mail, and about all of the films in the Ephron/Ryan trio: it’s good. Like, really good. Like, significantly better than other romantic comedies. And, if I could basically repeat what I said in my posts on Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, that’s because Nora Ephron understood sadness. She understood heartbreak, defeat, and despair. And in You’ve Got Mail, perhaps even more than in Sleepless in Seattle, she showed that even when good things happen to us, life is just sad. Sometimes it really effing sucks. I mean, Meg Ryan loses her store, the one that belonged to her late mother. She misses her mother, viciously, throughout the entire film. And when she loses her store, it’s clearly a huge emotional blow for her. That scene where she sits in the children’s department at Fox Books and tearfully helps a woman find the “shoe books” is wrenching. It’s easy to just remember the bouquet of sharpened pencils and “don’t you just love New York in the Fall” and forget about the thread of sadness that runs through the whole movie, but it’s there, tying everything together. 

Kathleen’s sadness is so pervasive that the ending feels more than just earned; it feels like a giant victory. Because throughout all the crappy things that happen, Kathleen doesn’t give up. She has hope that things will get better, that she’ll be able to start over. That’s why I started crying during that first montage set to the Cranberries’ Dreams (the most hopeful song in the world) and kept going through the scene where she decorates the shop window for Christmas and continued when she talks about her life being small and finally ended up openly sobbing at “I wanted it to be you so badly.” I’m tearing up just typing those words. 

Nora Ephron understood, perhaps more than any other romcom writer, that love doesn’t fix everything. It can’t bring back wives or mothers, or resurrect failing businesses, or turn you into a different person. But what it can do is make it all worth it, despite all the pain and the heartbreak and the loneliness. What made Nora Ephron so, so special was that she never sugarcoated things. I’ve enjoyed plenty of romantic comedies this year that don’t come anywhere close to grappling with real sadness, and that’s fine. But Nora Ephron was never afraid to explore the darkness and show us why the light matters so much. She was never afraid to show us that hope can keep us afloat in a life that sometimes seems so much more than we can bear. 

Stray Thoughts:

-So last week, after watching The Giant Mechanical Man, I said that Chris Messina should be in every romantic comedy. And then, lo and behold, I remembered that he has a bit part in You’ve Got Mail. My Chris Messina prayers were answered and I’m grateful. 

-But Chris Messina is far from the only star in the supporting cast! Steve Zahn, Jean Stapleton, Parker Posey, Dave Chappelle, and the aforementioned Rich Businessman Dabney Coleman all show up. 

-Everything about this movie is cozy. The cast wears almost exclusively giant, beige clothing and Kathleen’s apartment is fantastically light-filled and beautiful. You get the beauty of New York in the Fall, of course, but you also get New York at Christmas and New York in the Spring, and guess what? None of those involve anything remotely dirty or dark. It’s just well-lit interiors and flower-filled parks. 

Romantic comedy cliches: Penpals, opposites attract, a guy with a dog, a houseboat (why is this a cliche, even? I have no idea), wacky coworkers, a wise old person who gives advice

Is this a good movie? This is the best movie.

Did I like this movie? It might be my favorite romantic comedy. 

Did this movie make me believe in love? What do you think? It made me sob no fewer than five times. 

Would I watch this movie again? I should just watch this movie on a weekly basis. I hate other movies for not being this movie. 

simon: I was closeted and not ready to come out and martin was threatening to out me to the entire school if I didn’t help him slightly inconvenience you

simon’s friends: okay but wHY

simon:

Simon, a clueless gay who had no idea she was in love with him:

simon, a gay with common sense and eyes: