High School Musical

Ok, so think what you want about me because I’m just going to come straight out and say it. I like High School Musical. Yeah. I do. Commence ridiculing me now. Get that shiz out of your systems so we can get down to business here. I’ll wait. And while I do, I’m a-gonna listen some songs from HSM just to show you how much I care. I gotta go my own way, kiddies, y no me importan vuestras opiniones.

A’ight, you ready to roll with the rest this post? Nope? Ok, I’ll give you just a bit more time. *turns up “The Boys Are Back" and twiddles thumbs* Vale, now at this point I’m just going to rock the rest of this blog because I can’t even hear your laughter over the sound of Zac Efron’s and Corbin Bleu’s smooth voices. All right, maybe that was a bit much right there. My bad. Non-sequitur, let me take you into the journey behind how I became a fan of the HSM.

So High School Musical 3 just recently came out, and prior to this a couple girls here (Danielle and Laura) pretty much came to the conclusion that they HAD to see said película as they’re both basically super-fans of the series. For some crazy reason, they seem to enjoy my company and decided that I should join them in this venture of theirs. Now I’m a movie guy; I’ll watch any flick once, and heck, I’ll jump on any opportunity to chill with two peeps as cool as they be, so I was pretty much in. “¿Por qué no?” I say.

But just for the sake of those who are currently questioning my manhood and still don’t like the fact that I agreed to watch High School Musical out of my own free will, I ask that you enjoy the following imaginary conversation. *note* For those of you familiar with the old school TV series known as “The Wonder Years,” please read my mind’s parts with that voice and overall tone (and throw in some of Homer Simpson’s thoughts as well). For those of you unfamiliar with this show, please read said parts with the accent of a cracked-out Chris Rock :

[Danielle] So Laura and I have pretty much decided that you need to come see High School Musical 3 with us on Saturday.
[Aaron] Hold on a sec, Danielle, I gotta finish killing this dragon first to ensure the safety of our nation’s children. For as we all know, the children are our future. *Punches dragon in the face, thereby exploding it*
[Laura] All right, well done, Holmes. So what do you think?
[Aaron’s Mind] Really? They want me to see High School Musical 3 with them? There must be a way out of this. You got this, mind; think. Think!
[Aaron] I haven’t actually seen the first two, so yeah…
[Aaron’s Mind] Bravo. *clap clap*
[Danielle] That’s fine; we’ll catch you up before we go.
[Aaron’s Mind] Try again, broseph
[Aaron] When would we be gone? The earth’s core is scheduled to stop spinning at around noon-ish, so I have to go inside this crazy old world with some nukes and make sure that doesn’t happen.
[Laura] We’re not leaving until like 5 or so.
[Aaron’s Mind] Ok, you’re on your own now.
[Aaron] Shut up, brain, or I’ll stab you with a Q-tip.
[Laura] What’d you just say about your brain?
[Aaron’s Brain] Tool.
[Aaron] I said, “Do it up. I gotta train now, but let’s dab in youtube later.”

There we go, hopefully that makes y’all feel better. If not, here’s a pic of my being awesome that can hopefully get me back some of your respect.
So thus, last Tuesday after the awesomeness that was our weekly Salsa class (speaking of which, we be getting ready to ROCK the Fund’s talent show in a few weeks, so watch ya’selves and put on your excited hats for that), we meandered over into the Sala de Estar (or whatever the frigg that room is called where all the Puerto Ricans hang out) with Danielle’s laptop to chill and rep it up. Both the girls were pretty tired, so we only watched the first half of it, but I must say that I found myself enjoying it. And then of course we completed the film the next night at like 1:30 in the morning. Bueno.
So I was halfway to being caught up, and I was feeling pretty good about the whole situation. I caught myself several times singing “We’re Breaking Free” the next day, so you KNOW t’was mad-legit. I’m sure the entirety of this building was overjoyed to hear my fantastic voice singing the HSM soundtrack all day in the halls. Now you see what I did right there is an example of the humor technique known as “sarcasm.” My words in this situation fit the profile of this term in the manner that I (a) Don’t have the best voice and (b) the people of the Fundación actually probably weren’t thrilled to hear me. I swear sometimes that I’m a comedic genius :P
Moving on, so then on Thursday night (as opposed to going out like most do on this day) Danielle, Laura, and I stayed in to ver High School Musical 2. Again, very enjoyable film. Good songs. Good dances. Cute story. Yeah. Cute story. I said it. Step off. But wait, in our browsing of youtube after watching HSM 2, we stumbled upon a link to the third installment of the series. NO FRIGGIN’ WAY! We simply HAD to check that out.

Now I say this lightly, the quality was terrid. Yep, “terrid.” Pretty sure I made that word up. I figure that if “horrible” gets “horrid,” doesn’t it stand to reason that “terrible” should get “terrid”? And just like back home, in the interest of keeping things fair among siblings (which in my mind these two base words are), I have to give to each of them equally. Thus, I say “terrid.” Please enjoy this word and spread it to your neighbors if you so desire. Anyways, it was really tough to fully see what was going on in the movie. Extremely pixilated it was. The majority of the dialogue and songs could be heard, though, but there were defs several parts of not so much. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard someone’s phone ring over the sound of the movie at some point. So yeah, high quality. But nonetheless, we watched High School Musical 3. Hecks yeah, son! This was especially good because, you know, I’m in Spain. Thus the film would be in Spanish in the theaters. But now we’d have a much better idea of what was going down.
Even after this preliminary viewing of the flick, there was still much anticipation of seeing it in theaters. I mean, c’mon, theater > Danielle’s laptop. Slighty. So Saturday afternoon we assembled our crew and headed off to the bustop for what could only be good times and victory. Our normal ensemble of Danielle, Laura, and me was joined by Colleen and Wilmer on this day. Tight.

We jumped off the bus at 5:58 in the pm ready for some awesomeness. Problem, though. The movie was supposed to start a las 6. Wait, that’s not an issue, you statesiders say; there’s always like 20 minutes of previews before the movie starts. Falso. Spain doesn’t rep like that, the movies always start at their allotted times. Ok… so what does that mean for us and this story, you ask. It means we friggin’ run. Yeah, run to the theater to catch High School Musical 3. We bolted up the stairs to the cinema as Laura yelled, “What team?!” “Wildcats!” we retorted. Yep, that’s a reference to the series for those of you who haven’t caught the fever yet. We procured our tickets as quickly as possible and headed into the room of viewing.
We noticed right away that sadly we had missed the first scene of the movie, but whatevs, it was still all good as we were only a couple minutes late. We found our seats in the second row and plopped ourselves down do enjoy the rest of the movie. Ballin’. And disfrutarnos we did. The movie was mad-tight on the big screen. I was able to understand the vast majority of the whole Spanish thing that was going on, so it was all hood… or “casucha,” if you prefer. I must say, though, that it was kind of comical hearing all the characters speaking Spanish and then hearing the songs in English (as they weren’t translated), but I’m sure that only added to the experience as a whole.

We rolled out of the theater and back absolutely perfectly in time for dinner as well. Clearly this was a fantastic day. But I’m not going to lie you, my friends and well-wishers, I wanted more.

Apparently, the gangsta who is Laura felt the same way about this. We talked about the idea of seeing it again at breakfast the next day (Sunday), and then at lunch we made plans to go rep it that very day. Noice. This time it was just going to be her, me, and the third maliante here in Lily.
The movie was to start at 3:50, but it became quite obvious to us at about 3:25 as we stood at the bustop that we weren’t going to be able to make it. So we headed back for home, grabbed some snack-age and Laura’s I-pod (fresh off downloading the HSM 3 soundtrack) and then slowly made our way to the mall in Poligono. Like yesterday, the showing didn’t start until 6, so once got there we had plenty of time to just chill, eat some ice cream, take some pics, and just basically live the dream.

I will say that the Sunday movie-going crowd is a bit different than the Saturday one. Whereas the previous night’s group was pretty chill for the most part, Sunday’s was full of screaming girls. And I’m pretty sure that I was the only male in my age range there as well. Whatevs, let them have fun, I say. It’s HSM 3; it’s supposed to be cheerable.

Turns out the movie’s just as good the third time around as the first as not surprisingly, we all quite enjoyed ourselves. As such, the high of awesomeness from just having seen this movie combined with the fact that Laura had the soundtrack on her I-pod basically could only mean one thing: dance party at the bustop afterwards (one might even say that we were “gangstando”). Sometimes it’s easy to see why the rest of the world hates Americans. I mean frigg, we sing and dance in what I’m sure is an obnoxious manner without a care in the world at the bustop in a foreign country. But as stated, I didn’t have a care in the world at the point, so break yourself, Spain! It was quite funny, though, when the occupants of one car yelled something that I’m sure wasn’t too supportive of our endeavor as they drove past. Even funnier was the response that Lily yelled back to them. Now since my grandma might actually read this post, I’m not going to repeat what was said. Instead I’m just going to treat you to this cute little picture. Quite possibly the highlight of the night, though, for me occurred on our walk back to our place of eat/sleep/study/err’thing. This complete stoner looking individual passed us by and asked something in Spanish that I didn’t really understand. He looked like a less-than-reputable individual, so I just gave him the old standby of “I don’t speak Spanish.” Of course then he switched over to broken English, but it didn’t matter as Lily (who’s Puerto Rican and thus understands the language) denied whatever his request was. She then turned to me and explained (in Spanish, so I might be off here, but I’m pretty sure this is the gist of what she said) that the guy wanted some paper so he could roll some joints. Huh, turns out he WAS a stoner. Now I don’t know why, but for some reason I like the fact that some dude asked me if I could hook him up with such an item. Now y’all know that there’s no way that I’d ever do weed, but the whole thing just makes me smile and giggle in manner that’s reminiscent of Laura watching Troy Bolton sing and dance with Gabriella Montez in the rain on the roof of their school; bust out the Crayolas and color me “Tickled Pink.”
One would imagine that this would now be the end of my High School Musical 3 journey, but alas, you’d be incorrect on that front. Danielle, Laura, and I spent a couple hours together later that night (still Sunday, broheims) youtubing and listening to related items. And after Danielle went off to sleep for the night, Laura and I started trying to rock some of the dances from the threequel. Pretty much impossible to get that shiz down over youtube. Thankfully, she’s a former danceliner, so she’s got skillz (with a “z,” mind you, so you KNOW she’s good), so it’s going to be on her to get the choreography down and then teach me. A daunting task, indeed, but if anybody can pull that off, it’s Laura as she’s the most gangsta person I know. And yeah, it’s possible to be gangsta and enjoy HSM. It seems like a contradiction, but believe you me, it’s possible.

So yeah with that being said, I’m going to maintain my man-card as gangsta and High School Musical CAN go together hand-in-hand. And honestly, if I could sing I would’ve done musicals in high school, but seeing as how I can’t, I was relegated to just rocking the One Act Play (which was AWESOME, btw), and err’body know how I like to awkwardly dance, so it’s just good stuff for mis intereses. And most importantly, as Laura so wisely pointed out last night, singing one of these songs to someone of the opposite gender would basically make any girl putty in my hands, so yeah with that :P Here’s a little sample for ye from “Can I Have This Dance”:

Take my hand, I'll take the lead

And every turn will be safe with me

Don't be afraid, afraid to fall

You know I'll catch you through it all

Yeah, that’s four lines of dinero en el banco. And a secure bank at that. Given today’s economy, you can’t really always be sure, but with this you can be. So yep, if anything I’m actually MORE of a man for being a fan of High School Musical.