"Happy birthday, Samantha. Make a wish. " ........"It already came true. "

I return to my blog with an ulterior motive. Backpacking Dad (http://backpackingdad.blogspot.com/) has a giveaway of 2 notebooks from John Hughes movies, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. Two of my favourite movies of all time, because I am nothing if not an 80s girl.

The challenge is to write about which character I would be. Which is a bit of a poser, because let's face it, as much as we love them, none of those characters is really how we would want to see ourselves. They all have serious flaws, and yet it's those flaws, rather exaggerated for dramatic effect, that make the characters so relatable.

In high school, I was probably most like Samantha from Sixteen Candles. Not because my family ignored me, I was essentially an only child (three much older half siblings aside) and I have nothing to complain of in that regard. But because I was neither cool kid nor uber-geek. I was a good student, with fun friends, but I didn't run with the most popular crowd (mind you, in a grad class of 21 students, 20 girls and 1 guy, there was not a huge distinction) and I didn't spend my time breeding fruit flys.

I suffered from typical teenage angst, I wanted so much to be noticed by guys, but I was really shy. There is no better example of this than my grade 11 year, when we attended the annual "Computer Dance" at a local boy's school. If you never went to one of these, you filled out a form and supposedly the computer matched you with a boy at the school. At the dance you spent some time talking and had a couple of dances with the guy in question, and this was intended to break the ice and get the party going at the first dance of the school year.

Imagine my horror and ecstasy when I was paired with my dream guy... gorgeous, popular, on the rugby team... and super nice as it turns out. He did his best to talk to me, but I was so paralyzed by shyness I could barely put a few words together. All in vain as it turns out, because he had a long term girlfriend from another girl's school. Sigh.

So I didn't get the guy, at least not that time. But in grade 12 I finally figured out what Samantha learns at the end of the movie, that guys are people too. And eventually I got a love life.
I guess what makes me like Samantha today is that although I have a great life, 2 gorgeous children and a great husband, I still sometimes see the "cool" people and wish I fit in there too.
The difference is that now I know that my few friends are really much more cool than the popular kids, and much better suited to my particular brand of nerdiness (I'm a literature / languages/ arts nerd) than those so-called cool people would be.

Many many years after I saw Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club for the first of many times, a wonderful man bought me all of the John Hughes movies on DVD for Christmas one year. He is the amazing sweet man I married and he is the father of my two beautiful children. Meeting him made all my wishes come true.