One Day I'll Be Cool

Every single stinking morning when I wake up I turn my head and look at my alarm clock which says “STILL SINGLE” and I think about how I can’t stop thinking about Zooey Deschanel. It’s been three weeks since my viewing of “500 Days of Summer” and I still want to talk about her. Forget what I said about Campbell Brown. It’s all about Zooey now. She spends her days flipping through indie albums at record stores and she wears summer dresses and it’s just – those eyes, man. Yo check it: if she had 36D’s in her possession I wouldn’t even glance at them because I’d be staring at her eyes. That’s love, man.

Remember that epic storyline from the GI Joe animated series in the ‘80s where COBRA extracts DNA from history’s greatest rulers – Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Genghis Khan, to name a few – and then genetically recombines the DNA to create a perfectly efficient, ruthless leader named Serpentor (who would supplant Cobra Commander)? Remember that? That’s Zooey, looking like the combination of a half dozen Hollywood starlets, like a group of scientists plucked Anna Faris’ pluckiness and spliced it together with Ingrid Bergman’s elegance and combined it with Kim Deal’s coolness, and so on, all neatly bundled within a Katy Perry framework.

Could I possibly ever make her forget about the lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie and coax her into falling in love with me? I could. I could move to Los Angeles and diligently put up flyers all over the city to get her attention – these would be Xeroxed photos of just my face, done like a lolcat picture, complete with white Impact font and a caption that read, “OH NOES!! I IZ IN LUV WIT ZOOEY!”

But, that “500 Days of Summer” movie had an interesting theory: that those who interpret the ending of “The Graduate” as a happy one are romantics, and those who correctly interpret the ending as a bittersweet one are realists. Although it’s been at least ten years since I’ve watched “The Graduate,” I honestly can’t remember it being anything but happy towards the end – Dustin Hoffman stops the wedding and runs off with the bride and they giddily hop onto a bus and ride off into the sunset while Simon & Garfunkel play, right? – so if I’m incapable of seeing what I’m supposed to see in this Rorschach inkblot test of a movie then maybe I’m not as smart as I thought I was. Maybe I’m just being silly for constantly thinking about Zooey, because she actually makes me think about a chick from years before, a real life one, one who got me driving with too much Jack Daniel’s in my system one crazy night in the dead of winter, surrounded by snow-covered cornfields in the middle of nowhere while singing, no, screaming along to my cassette tape playing Elvis Costello’s “No Dancing,” on full blast from the weak speakers of my rusty but trusty Toyota Corolla that unfortunately had nonfunctioning defrosters so I had to awkwardly duck my head to peer through the only two-inch circle on the windshield that wasn’t covered in frost, constantly blowing my hot alcoholic breath onto that spot so that it wouldn’t close up from the freezing temperatures outside and cause me to blindly slam into a telephone pole, and even though I’ve come to terms with what happened a long time ago, my disgusting fear is that one day I’ll be staring at her picture on my iPhone until the batteries run out while in bed with my acceptable yet inferior future wife and OH NOES I GOT SUM MAJOR ISHOOZ! HALP!