For most people, their sophomore year of high school was a time of sweet sixteen parties and the increased independence that came with learning how to drive. For me, it was the year I had no friends and watched Zoolander every weekend.
With all the talk of Zoolander 2 coming to theaters around fall 2012, I cannot help but think back to sophomore year. If I really stop to think about it, I can recall a few weekends when I gave Zoolander a rest. I was occasionally lucky enough to score an invite from my parents to go to a party or dinner with them and their friends. Unfortunately, not even my parents wanted to hang out with me every weekend and I was often left at home with my dog, Merriweather. A typical Friday night in my 16-year-old life included some Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, calling my 85-year-old grandparents—because they were the only people I could think of who would be home on a Friday night—and watching Zoolander.
When I regale my current friends (yes, I do have friends now) with high school stories, they don’t understand why, of all movies, I would watch Zoolander repeatedly. What they do not understand is that when you do not really have any friends, the last movie you want to watch is something like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, which does nothing more than remind you that you are sitting at home with your dog, rather than spending your weekend with your four best friends or your European boyfriend. So I settled on Zoolander, because, like me, Derek Zoolander was what most people would call a loser, and his ability to turn left and redeem himself in the modeling world gave me hope that one day I might be redeemed in the social world.
After sophomore year, school was better, but it was far from a John Hughes movie. I stopped thinking I would be happier at the Derek Zoolander School for Students Who Can’t Read Good than at the school I was currently attending, and by the end of junior year I even had a group of girls at school that I considered to be close friends. By the time I graduated, I had come to peace with the fact that my high school days were not my glory days, and I looked forward to being able to leave it all behind as I started at Georgetown.
At the start of freshman year at Georgetown, conversation with new friends often went back to stories and memories from high school, since college had just barely started. I was trying to make friends and avoid having Georgetown be anything like sophomore year, so when telling people about my high school days, I painted a generously rosy picture. I knew that starting college, I had to be better at making friends than I was in high school, especially since my parents would not be around to invite me to their parties, and the thought of watching Zoolander without even my dog around to keep me company was too much to bear. I feared that stories of my late nights with Derek Zoolander, Hansel, and Merriweather would not quite live up to the tales of raging house parties, so I kept it to myself.
Luckily, housing placed me in New South where, with one hundred people on a floor, it was difficult to not find people to be friends with. Moreover, the hallways on weekend nights proved too loud to watch movies. My Zoolander days finally seemed to be behind me. I started to laugh about those times and stopped caring about whether I was “cool” or not in high school, and quickly realized that no one else cared either. To my surprise, sharing my story with people did not kill conversation the way I thought it would, and during my freshman year I actually did watch Zoolander one night, but this time I was with other people.
Five years after sophomore year the release of Zoolander 2 looms large, and the way my social life has been trending, I might even have a friend or two who will want to go see it with me.
