it's The Nothing!


I loved this movie when I was little. I had the biggest crush on the scrawny androgynous warrior dude, Atreyu. It was one of those kid crushes that have nothing to do with actual sex, and everything to do with raw, idolizing hero worship. I remember asking my mother why I couldn’t run around in a leather smock with my chest completely exposed.

“Because girls don’t do that,” she said.

“Then I don’t want to be a girl,” I said as I stood shirtless in front of the mirror and flexed my muscles.

“You don’t have a choice,” she said, laughing at me. Back then my tomboy-ness was a big joke in my family. So was the fact that I used to run around with a cardboard gun strapped to my shoulder, and that I’d roll make believe cigarettes out of gum wrappers and pencil shavings and draw sloppy tattoos on my arms and speak in a fake irish accent and tell people that they couldn’t sit in the seat next to me because John F. Kennedy was sitting there…

Needless to say, those jokes aren’t so funny anymore.