Ninja Turtles

I loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but I never knew why. There was something about the pizza-loving that made them normal. There was something about their weapons that affirmed my masculinity. Despite all of this, I would often deny that I liked them at all. Since I was a kid in kindergarten, my goal has always been to defy stereotypes. To like a cartoon that talked about kung fu skills did not exactly help that. But now that the Ninja Turtle fan is trapped inside a college man's body and speech, I am beginning to make sense of it.

They were amphibians. In fact, their entire existence were amphibious. Instead of living in both land and in water, they struggled to find the balance to live between the sewers and the outside real world with humans. They spoke perfect English, like rock n' roll music, and even liked pepperoni music, but at the end of the day, they were still turtles. Adapting to various environments throughout their lives, they find acceptance. I am an amphibian. I go to Emory University, listen to Coldplay like everyone else, and I speak of "Chinese food" as if it isn't "normal food." At the end of the day, however, I am not you and you are not me. I do not celebrate Thanksgiving, and one of my family parties may be as different to you as the sewer was to April O' Niel.

White, redheaded, beautiful, and young reporter April O' Niel has an interesting friendship with the turtles. While being rescued by the turtles, the romance between a turtle and a beautiful human never seems to pan out. Instead, they are cordial and platonic, as April becomes the reporter that decreases the fear people have for the turtles over the media. Call me a sick and perverted bafoon, but something inside of me always wanted something to happen between Leonardo and April (Leonardo was my favorite turtle). I was always afraid to share this information since I was five because my parents didn't have money for psychiatry visits. But now, I understand that I have anthropomorphized Leonardo so that I could be him and April could be my Kelly Kapowski, my Kelly Taylor, my Marissa Cooper. As quickly as the television shut off, however, so did my false hopes. No matter how cool and radical Leonardo and Donatello were, they were no Zack Morris, Brandon Walsh or Luke Ward.

They were green. I distinctly remember a time when I was seven and my sister duped me into believing that somewhere in the islands off of the coast of Africa was a bunch of people whose skin color was blue. (I wound up convincing 24 students in my 2nd grade class that there were blue people out there). But green? That was just preposterous. In the world of television, I never saw anything outside of black and white. I am not saying my skin tone is green, but what I am saying is that my skin isn't black or white either. And for that one similarity, I celebrated. In the same way that the black community celebrated with Jesse Owens and Halle Berry, or the Hispanic community celebrated with Roberto Clemente and Ricky Martin, well maybe not Ricky Martin, I celebrated for the only people, I mean things I could celebrate with: green turtles. They were my heroes. They were me.

I am the teenage mutant ninja turtles. I am stuck beneath the floor in the dreary sewers where I play the same music, play the same games, sing the same songs, dance the same dances, like the same girls, and breathe the same air. This is the odd purgatory that I live, but isn't quite that serious. Other people look up to JFK, Reagan, Michael Jordan, and Lance Armstrong. I look up to a cartoon. Sad. The only thing I don't have is their martial arts abilities. But isn't that the only thing that makes them more than human, and more importantly, more than not human. So without that, what am I? Who am I?

This is why my parents told me not to watch TV. "It seriously will fuck you up," he used to say to me. It took me 12 years, but I believe him now.