This is a song rooted in the wry pleasure of hindsight; from the very first "there I was", an image is created of the narrator considering their younger self as that self once considered the art, or the teacher. There's a sort of benevolence, the kind of affection you can only feel for yourself given the distance of years - oh, I was so young, so naive. I was just a girl then. Isn't it sweet? But the narrator is, at the same time, allowing their past self and that self's feelings legitimacy: "never have I loved since then." They are someone who loves, genuinely loves, their teenaged self in all their awestruck solipsistic glory, and it is deeply affecting to imagine that as a real conversation; to imagine the narrator's hand on their own shoulder, comforting, reassuring, to imagine them saying, you're right. You'll never feel quite like this ever again, not about anybody. You'll never forget it. I understand. I love you. I forgive you. I love you.
There's a moment there where the narrator slips, almost, and forgets that they're not really there at the Metropolitan Museum, considering the Rubens and Rembrandts with their long-ago classmates, when the teacher asks what their favourites are. It's almost tangible, how hard it is for the younger narrator to suppress their knee-jerk reaction, so cheesy and ridiculous it can only be the most painful kind of honesty: sir, but you are. Though the narrator muses that they "wish I could tell him", it's impossible not to remember the gulf of years, the fact that these events are immovably fixed. They never told him then, and the narrator, sadly, has to accept that there's no way now to make it so that they did. They correct themselves: oh I wish I could have told him.
The art teacher of whom the narrator thinks, in the final lines of the second verse, is not, you get the feeling, the very real man, "not that much older than I was", who is almost certainly somewhere out there, still alive and perhaps even still teaching. The narrator is thinking of the art teacher as they knew him then, at that exact moment in the museum. Young and vital and passionate, a half-silhouetted figure whose construction is only partly grounded in reality. No wonder we can believe them when they tell us they've never loved any other man; how can anything compare to the awful raw-edged earnest way we fall in love, at sixteen or seventeen, with the people we've mythologised?
Thursday, 10 January 2019
Monday, 26 November 2018
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change
One of the vanishingly few experiences I've had with organised religion over the course of my life happened when I was ten or eleven, attending a friend's congregation and Sunday school because I'd slept over Saturday night and my parents couldn't pick me up until the afternoon. I think their church was Baptist. I know that this happened just after spring equinox, because of what the sermon was about.
(At least I think that's what the speech bit was called. You'll have to forgive me for getting any of this wrong. Like I said, this story is about one of, like, four times I've set foot in a church in a non-sightseeing capacity my entire life.)
Anyway, in the sermon the lady talked about the changing of the seasons and weather, something something nature something something Jesus, everything's as it's meant to be. And then she said something that's stayed lodged in my brain for probably eight years now: she said that the reason we have any of this, the reason we have sunsets that change times as the year goes on and seasons that are hot and seasons that are cold and solstices and equinoxes and so on and so forth, is that God in his wisdom made the earth and set it on an angle of 23.5° and that's how it's meant to be.
I don't think I had, at eleven, any deep reaction to this, other than maybe vaguely scornful surprise at someone trying to spin a billion-year-old geographical fuckup into part of some divine plan - what are they on about? Why would God have made a world that didn't spin on a perfectly vertical axis, what kind of crappy design is that? But evidently something did resonate, because I still remember sitting with my friend on a beanbag (this was a very liberal, modern church, one that cared less about traditional formality than it did about people showing up and listening) on the hall's carpeted floor, as a spring rainstorm lashed at the windows and someone rustled around behind the podium setting up an old-fashioned light projector for the hymns that were about to happen and a woman I'd never met before told me that everything about the creation of our planet went exactly as it was meant to.
And I'm not - I'm not religious at all, much as I've tried to be over the years in various ways (I wasn't raised in religion and I haven't had any serious crises with which faith could help, and essentially I've reached the conclusion that I've ended up just too damn cynical to really believe in any higher power), but there's something about that sentiment that's just ineffably flat-out lovely to me. The idea that there is some aspect of intelligent design to our universe, to our planet, and that whatever intelligence was designing it beheld the earth and thought hang on, it's missing a little something and tipped it over a bit, just so, twenty three point five degrees exactly, and in doing so gave us daylight savings and Yuletide and month-long nights at either extreme and small talk about how cold it is for this time of year, I thought my fingers were going to freeze and drop off on the way to work this morning, bloody weird for November isn't it? and sat back, satisfied, and thought: there. Perfect.
I no longer remember what the painting was or whose hand painted it, but in the notes I took while I was travelling, of things I couldn't really take a picture of but didn't want to forget nonetheless, there's a quote I found in an art museum somewhere, in the little explanation for one of the pieces. We're a relatively young, largely untamed country, us, and as such a fair chunk of our art history is made up of depictions of wild places unseen by the European eye until that moment. (Now I think about it, the painting might have been a waterfall?) I think I'm going to close out with that quote, because it articulates how I feel about that sermon I heard eight years ago much more clearly than I ever could. Suffice it to say I'm not a believer, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I might just believe in this.
"I serve my God in studying nature," he wrote, and every brushstroke in this painting is fired by the romantic faith that nature is the canvas of God. It is a painting about being overwhelmed by nature, by God and by art, which for him were one and the same.
(At least I think that's what the speech bit was called. You'll have to forgive me for getting any of this wrong. Like I said, this story is about one of, like, four times I've set foot in a church in a non-sightseeing capacity my entire life.)
Anyway, in the sermon the lady talked about the changing of the seasons and weather, something something nature something something Jesus, everything's as it's meant to be. And then she said something that's stayed lodged in my brain for probably eight years now: she said that the reason we have any of this, the reason we have sunsets that change times as the year goes on and seasons that are hot and seasons that are cold and solstices and equinoxes and so on and so forth, is that God in his wisdom made the earth and set it on an angle of 23.5° and that's how it's meant to be.
I don't think I had, at eleven, any deep reaction to this, other than maybe vaguely scornful surprise at someone trying to spin a billion-year-old geographical fuckup into part of some divine plan - what are they on about? Why would God have made a world that didn't spin on a perfectly vertical axis, what kind of crappy design is that? But evidently something did resonate, because I still remember sitting with my friend on a beanbag (this was a very liberal, modern church, one that cared less about traditional formality than it did about people showing up and listening) on the hall's carpeted floor, as a spring rainstorm lashed at the windows and someone rustled around behind the podium setting up an old-fashioned light projector for the hymns that were about to happen and a woman I'd never met before told me that everything about the creation of our planet went exactly as it was meant to.
And I'm not - I'm not religious at all, much as I've tried to be over the years in various ways (I wasn't raised in religion and I haven't had any serious crises with which faith could help, and essentially I've reached the conclusion that I've ended up just too damn cynical to really believe in any higher power), but there's something about that sentiment that's just ineffably flat-out lovely to me. The idea that there is some aspect of intelligent design to our universe, to our planet, and that whatever intelligence was designing it beheld the earth and thought hang on, it's missing a little something and tipped it over a bit, just so, twenty three point five degrees exactly, and in doing so gave us daylight savings and Yuletide and month-long nights at either extreme and small talk about how cold it is for this time of year, I thought my fingers were going to freeze and drop off on the way to work this morning, bloody weird for November isn't it? and sat back, satisfied, and thought: there. Perfect.
I no longer remember what the painting was or whose hand painted it, but in the notes I took while I was travelling, of things I couldn't really take a picture of but didn't want to forget nonetheless, there's a quote I found in an art museum somewhere, in the little explanation for one of the pieces. We're a relatively young, largely untamed country, us, and as such a fair chunk of our art history is made up of depictions of wild places unseen by the European eye until that moment. (Now I think about it, the painting might have been a waterfall?) I think I'm going to close out with that quote, because it articulates how I feel about that sermon I heard eight years ago much more clearly than I ever could. Suffice it to say I'm not a believer, not by any stretch of the imagination, but I might just believe in this.
"I serve my God in studying nature," he wrote, and every brushstroke in this painting is fired by the romantic faith that nature is the canvas of God. It is a painting about being overwhelmed by nature, by God and by art, which for him were one and the same.
Saturday, 17 November 2018
these hot days is the mad blood stirring
Something I've been trying to figure out over the last little while is why I have such a Thing about summertime.
Because... I really do. I'm not quite sure exactly how to explain it, but summer makes a shape, or a set of symbols, or something happen inside my head, a very specific but also somehow formless mythology of hot weather and long days and temporary freedom. I bought a graphic novel a couple years ago called "This One Summer", mostly because of the title, and now inexplicably I'm in love with that phrase and any like it. That last summer. The summer of love. Summer without end. The first summer of the rest of our lives, which is the private internal name I had for my friends' and my first summer out of high school. Summertime, summertime, summertime, and I can't figure out why I'm like this.
It's not like I've had a lot of extremely memorable summers, or any single particularly spectacular one. My summer breaks have, for most of my life, consisted of get out of school > spend most of December and all of January doing absolutely nothing > get struck down with existential panic the night before school goes back > go back to school while the weather's still boiling, because our school year calendar is designed around the holidays rather than around nature or common sense. I've had a vaguely full-time job for the last two summers (three, counting the one we're currently at the threshold of), which means that of late the December/January stage of the above has turned into more of a balance between doing as little as possible and spending eight hours at a time making coffee very fast.
Or - alright, maybe I do know why I'm like this. The summer I was sixteen (see, there's another one of those lovely phrases!) was the last one before I got a job, and six weeks or so of it between Thanksgiving-ish and New Year were spent on a family holiday on the other side of the world, the part where it's not hot in December and January. It's cold as shit, and I don't know why that had the impact it did on me, but I was weirdly despondent, especially at the prospect of spending New Year's Eve in winter. As far as I was concerned, the changeover between one year and the next was meant to be hot and restless, barely four hours either way to sunlight, a proper blurring of the edges. I didn't know how to reconcile any of that with the reality of the opposite solstice.
Our flight home the next week got in very early in the morning, and I sat in my living room and watched the sun rise at five-thirty the way it's meant to in January and felt like things were - right, again, somehow.
So does that even come close to explaining it? I missed half a season three years ago and now I've got a goddamn complex about it. No, that can't be right. I had the thing about summertime long before that holiday, even if I didn't have the same awareness of it, and besides I think it gave me a thing about winter more than anything else.
Besides, I can barely explain the summertime thing outside of a too-short list of things that have been known to bring it on: late sunsets; certain Bastille songs; the way grass scratches your legs when they're bare; fireworks; sleeping without the covers; candlesmoke, sunburnt cheekbones, a very specific sort of unearned exhaustion. Trying to be specific about what, exactly, all those things make me feel is an exercise in pointlessness. All I can say is that it makes something big and shivery and right well up inside me. I don't think I've got seasonal affective disorder as such, but I'm sure as hell affected by the season.
Because... I really do. I'm not quite sure exactly how to explain it, but summer makes a shape, or a set of symbols, or something happen inside my head, a very specific but also somehow formless mythology of hot weather and long days and temporary freedom. I bought a graphic novel a couple years ago called "This One Summer", mostly because of the title, and now inexplicably I'm in love with that phrase and any like it. That last summer. The summer of love. Summer without end. The first summer of the rest of our lives, which is the private internal name I had for my friends' and my first summer out of high school. Summertime, summertime, summertime, and I can't figure out why I'm like this.
It's not like I've had a lot of extremely memorable summers, or any single particularly spectacular one. My summer breaks have, for most of my life, consisted of get out of school > spend most of December and all of January doing absolutely nothing > get struck down with existential panic the night before school goes back > go back to school while the weather's still boiling, because our school year calendar is designed around the holidays rather than around nature or common sense. I've had a vaguely full-time job for the last two summers (three, counting the one we're currently at the threshold of), which means that of late the December/January stage of the above has turned into more of a balance between doing as little as possible and spending eight hours at a time making coffee very fast.
Or - alright, maybe I do know why I'm like this. The summer I was sixteen (see, there's another one of those lovely phrases!) was the last one before I got a job, and six weeks or so of it between Thanksgiving-ish and New Year were spent on a family holiday on the other side of the world, the part where it's not hot in December and January. It's cold as shit, and I don't know why that had the impact it did on me, but I was weirdly despondent, especially at the prospect of spending New Year's Eve in winter. As far as I was concerned, the changeover between one year and the next was meant to be hot and restless, barely four hours either way to sunlight, a proper blurring of the edges. I didn't know how to reconcile any of that with the reality of the opposite solstice.
Our flight home the next week got in very early in the morning, and I sat in my living room and watched the sun rise at five-thirty the way it's meant to in January and felt like things were - right, again, somehow.
So does that even come close to explaining it? I missed half a season three years ago and now I've got a goddamn complex about it. No, that can't be right. I had the thing about summertime long before that holiday, even if I didn't have the same awareness of it, and besides I think it gave me a thing about winter more than anything else.
Besides, I can barely explain the summertime thing outside of a too-short list of things that have been known to bring it on: late sunsets; certain Bastille songs; the way grass scratches your legs when they're bare; fireworks; sleeping without the covers; candlesmoke, sunburnt cheekbones, a very specific sort of unearned exhaustion. Trying to be specific about what, exactly, all those things make me feel is an exercise in pointlessness. All I can say is that it makes something big and shivery and right well up inside me. I don't think I've got seasonal affective disorder as such, but I'm sure as hell affected by the season.
Wednesday, 17 October 2018
there is no way I'm lookin for a scene
One of my favourite things about writing is the way it creates, whether you mean it to or not, a sort of time capsule of you and your anxieties at the time. Like, you know the old joke about "my god, the whole book's actually about my mother"? You think you're above it. You're definitely not.
The reason I'm thinking about this is because I recently reread a piece I wrote this past autumn, right at the end of April, that's basically about a character living alone for the first time in years and finding it hard to deal with. It's an outline that makes sense in the... wider context (yes, okay, I may as well admit it now, the piece was fanfiction), and that I think makes sense for the character. But it is - and I can't believe it took me so long to properly see it - actually about a weird depressive episode I had last winter.
See, what happened last winter is that my parents came into a bit of cash and decided to finally take the trip to Japan they'd been promising each other for years and years (they lived there for a while before I was born), and since the kids are finally old enough to be home alone, why not do it now? May's a lovely time of year in Japan, apparently. All the usual jokes were made about crazy teen-movie-style housewrecking parties, but in the end, my brother and I are both so boring that they decided we didn't even need a babysitter, just some family friends' numbers and the neighbours keeping an eye out, and we'd be on our own for a whole fortnight. I was thrilled, quite frankly. Senior year of high school, with a part-time job, various extracurriculars, finally something resembling a social life - and now the ultimate test of adultness, a whole household to run myself for two weeks. I felt like a right proper grownup.
But the thing that nobody tells you about running all your own shit, especially as a seventeen-year-old girl with a family history of brains that default to the Bad Place in times of hardship, is that it's goddamn exhausting. That first week my parents were out of the country, I worked sixteen hours and had two rehearsals that required me to leave the house while it was still dark, a lacrosse game, several assignments due, and a minor heart attack when my parents called me saying that the school had called them saying that my brother wasn't in class and that's how I found out he'd gotten sick and decided to stay home without telling anyone. I was so, so tired. To be fair, that would have been a pretty rough week anyway, but having to get home and think about cooking and cleaning and all that stuff definitely compounded the problem.
What's weirdest is that while it was all happening, I actually thought I was doing okay. Sure, I'm crawling by on five hours of sleep a night and keep catching myself dreaming about a quick break from existing altogether and I nearly had a crying breakdown in class the other day, but I'm still, like, upright, yeah? I'm still making it to class every day and turning up to all my shifts. None of this can be that bad, right?
Whereas now if I so much as listen to some of the music I had on repeat that fortnight (music has a similar but distinct time-capsule effect on me to writing) I'm knocked flat by this overwhelming sense-memory of just being too cold and lonely and exhausted to function, of thinking that if I fell asleep and didn't wake back up, that wouldn't be so bad, would it? It got a little better once my parents returned and I didn't have to think about everything all the time, but really, I didn't make it out of the Bad Place those two weeks knocked me into until graduation was in sight.
It was never going to have a satisfying that's that ending, though, because the thing about seasons is that they keep coming back around. And the thing about this winter, the one that's just now ending where I live, was that I was going solo travelling, which involved - who'da thunk - being alone all the time and having to take responsibility for all your own shit. What was to say, I asked myself this past autumn, that I wouldn't fall back into an identical Bad Place, and this time without the structure of school and work or the support of my friends, let alone a cushy two-week finish line? How was I going to survive that?
And at the same time I was writing this piece, about this character separated from her team after a horrible knock-down-drag-out traumatic event and having to readjust to life alone and not coping all too well with the whole thing but, crucially, never actually having a proper breakdown - this piece whose last two hundred words or so I forced out of myself the night before I left, as though I'd never be able to write again after this - and it's taken me six whole months to read through it again and go: huh. I was goddamn terrified of what my own brain would do to me this past winter, wasn't I.
I don't think it's a terror that's going to go away, either. I just accepted an offer of study from a university in a different city, halls of residence and everything, which means I'm going to be spending next winter - you guessed it! - largely alone, with study and probably work to take care of, and nobody to lean on but myself. (I'm still pretty thrilled about it, though, so if history wants to repeat itself it can go suck on a beehive honestly.)
I don't know. I don't think there's a point to this other than that author's intent, contrary to what many English teachers will tell you, is often bewilderingly accidental, and that I can't wait to read over the stuff I'm working on right now in six months' time and go my god, the whole book's actually about -
The reason I'm thinking about this is because I recently reread a piece I wrote this past autumn, right at the end of April, that's basically about a character living alone for the first time in years and finding it hard to deal with. It's an outline that makes sense in the... wider context (yes, okay, I may as well admit it now, the piece was fanfiction), and that I think makes sense for the character. But it is - and I can't believe it took me so long to properly see it - actually about a weird depressive episode I had last winter.
See, what happened last winter is that my parents came into a bit of cash and decided to finally take the trip to Japan they'd been promising each other for years and years (they lived there for a while before I was born), and since the kids are finally old enough to be home alone, why not do it now? May's a lovely time of year in Japan, apparently. All the usual jokes were made about crazy teen-movie-style housewrecking parties, but in the end, my brother and I are both so boring that they decided we didn't even need a babysitter, just some family friends' numbers and the neighbours keeping an eye out, and we'd be on our own for a whole fortnight. I was thrilled, quite frankly. Senior year of high school, with a part-time job, various extracurriculars, finally something resembling a social life - and now the ultimate test of adultness, a whole household to run myself for two weeks. I felt like a right proper grownup.
But the thing that nobody tells you about running all your own shit, especially as a seventeen-year-old girl with a family history of brains that default to the Bad Place in times of hardship, is that it's goddamn exhausting. That first week my parents were out of the country, I worked sixteen hours and had two rehearsals that required me to leave the house while it was still dark, a lacrosse game, several assignments due, and a minor heart attack when my parents called me saying that the school had called them saying that my brother wasn't in class and that's how I found out he'd gotten sick and decided to stay home without telling anyone. I was so, so tired. To be fair, that would have been a pretty rough week anyway, but having to get home and think about cooking and cleaning and all that stuff definitely compounded the problem.
What's weirdest is that while it was all happening, I actually thought I was doing okay. Sure, I'm crawling by on five hours of sleep a night and keep catching myself dreaming about a quick break from existing altogether and I nearly had a crying breakdown in class the other day, but I'm still, like, upright, yeah? I'm still making it to class every day and turning up to all my shifts. None of this can be that bad, right?
Whereas now if I so much as listen to some of the music I had on repeat that fortnight (music has a similar but distinct time-capsule effect on me to writing) I'm knocked flat by this overwhelming sense-memory of just being too cold and lonely and exhausted to function, of thinking that if I fell asleep and didn't wake back up, that wouldn't be so bad, would it? It got a little better once my parents returned and I didn't have to think about everything all the time, but really, I didn't make it out of the Bad Place those two weeks knocked me into until graduation was in sight.
It was never going to have a satisfying that's that ending, though, because the thing about seasons is that they keep coming back around. And the thing about this winter, the one that's just now ending where I live, was that I was going solo travelling, which involved - who'da thunk - being alone all the time and having to take responsibility for all your own shit. What was to say, I asked myself this past autumn, that I wouldn't fall back into an identical Bad Place, and this time without the structure of school and work or the support of my friends, let alone a cushy two-week finish line? How was I going to survive that?
And at the same time I was writing this piece, about this character separated from her team after a horrible knock-down-drag-out traumatic event and having to readjust to life alone and not coping all too well with the whole thing but, crucially, never actually having a proper breakdown - this piece whose last two hundred words or so I forced out of myself the night before I left, as though I'd never be able to write again after this - and it's taken me six whole months to read through it again and go: huh. I was goddamn terrified of what my own brain would do to me this past winter, wasn't I.
I don't think it's a terror that's going to go away, either. I just accepted an offer of study from a university in a different city, halls of residence and everything, which means I'm going to be spending next winter - you guessed it! - largely alone, with study and probably work to take care of, and nobody to lean on but myself. (I'm still pretty thrilled about it, though, so if history wants to repeat itself it can go suck on a beehive honestly.)
I don't know. I don't think there's a point to this other than that author's intent, contrary to what many English teachers will tell you, is often bewilderingly accidental, and that I can't wait to read over the stuff I'm working on right now in six months' time and go my god, the whole book's actually about -
Thursday, 20 September 2018
he's my witness (ooOOoh)
Since I got back from travelling four or five weeks ago, I've started going to the gym, for the first time in my life. And I... don't hate it as much as I thought I would! I'm actually really enjoying it for the most part. I don't think I've had any noticeable weight loss since I started, since I'm not doing a whole heap of cardio and I'm still eating about the same (also, I straight up haven't owned scales since like 2014, so I don't actually know how much I weigh), but I'm sleeping better and my body feels like it's mine again and I can do more than three pushups in a row, so I'm counting this as a positive.
Anyway, on my walk to the gym every second day (yeah, yeah, I'm working up to it) I go past my old work, where several of my friends still work, and if they're there and they notice me we wave at each other and if they're there and they don't I take a really zoomed in picture of the back of their head and send it to the group chat like "look behind u". Normal teenager shit, y'know. The other day my friend... let's call her Bella, managed to turn the tables and get a photo of me in all my gross post-workout splendor going past, which was actually pretty funny, and the group chat got talking about going to the gym. The group chat in question is basically composed of me and the girls I go clubbing with, most of whom I've known in some way for most of high school.
And like... guys. I'm not an idiot, I have eyes and ears and I'm on social media and I watch the news occasionally. I'm well aware of how fucking much this world hates women. But somehow I've wound up in this little bubble where most of the time I can forget how badly many women end up hating themselves, and I like to think my friends are pretty well-adjusted people, but sometimes shit just gets driven home. Like learning that last year Bella had a bad breakup on the same week as her hockey tournament and lost three kilos in under a week by playing every game on an empty stomach. Or that the fastest Aditi says she's ever lost weight was when she got her wisdom teeth out and survived on liquids for a fortnight.
Wait, I think I phrased that last bit slightly wrong. Those things, the breakup and the wisdom teeth, are only mildly fucked up in and of themselves. What's really fucked up is that both of them view those as good things and want the results those things gave them back.
Which is just - terrible, it's terrible, and I don't know why my friends are so desperate to look good ("good", ha, we all know that just means skinny but with an ass) that they'd view straight up starvation as a semi-viable option. Well, yes, I do know why, it's because our culture teaches women that our greatest asset is how we appear to others and we should aim to be attractive above all else at any cost, but I don't get it. How have I avoided (for the most part; there was a pretty sketchy month or so before the school ball last year when I went the less-dinner-get-thinner route) the part of womanhood where you see your body as constantly under construction and never good enough?
It's all tied up in club bathroom compliment culture, which is what I call that thing where no matter how endless the list of stuff you hate about your own body is, you'd never, ever talk about another girl's body that way. What this means in the context of my friends is that even though I'm easily the fattest out of us all (and I don't even mean that in a self-deprecating way! I've never been strict about diet or exercise and I have a hormonal disorder that makes me more susceptible to weight gain and that's just how it is!) they all seem determined to make sure I don't feel bad about how I look. For example, if I'm feeling unsure about a particular outfit because it makes my pudge show a bit, they're reassuring me that nobody'll even notice it, or if I'm complaining about how inconvenient big boobs are someone's telling me that they're a B on a good day and they'd kill for what I've got, and let's not even get into when I tried to talk to them about body neutrality (maybe more on that another time) and was met with a full set of genuinely confused "but you are beautiful"s.
But then Bella tells us she's not going out on the town again until she's lost more weight, or Aditi announces she's seriously considering a nose job, and all I can think is when did we lose the second half of do unto others? We've all gotten stunningly good at saying nice things about other people; we just can't manage to say them about ourselves, most of the time.
I don't know what the answer is. I don't know if there even is an answer. All I know is that if my time at the gym does nothing to shift the fat on my stomach, I won't really care, as long as it makes my body feel like it's mine, like it's good and strong and useful, and not something mainly to look at.
Anyway, on my walk to the gym every second day (yeah, yeah, I'm working up to it) I go past my old work, where several of my friends still work, and if they're there and they notice me we wave at each other and if they're there and they don't I take a really zoomed in picture of the back of their head and send it to the group chat like "look behind u". Normal teenager shit, y'know. The other day my friend... let's call her Bella, managed to turn the tables and get a photo of me in all my gross post-workout splendor going past, which was actually pretty funny, and the group chat got talking about going to the gym. The group chat in question is basically composed of me and the girls I go clubbing with, most of whom I've known in some way for most of high school.
And like... guys. I'm not an idiot, I have eyes and ears and I'm on social media and I watch the news occasionally. I'm well aware of how fucking much this world hates women. But somehow I've wound up in this little bubble where most of the time I can forget how badly many women end up hating themselves, and I like to think my friends are pretty well-adjusted people, but sometimes shit just gets driven home. Like learning that last year Bella had a bad breakup on the same week as her hockey tournament and lost three kilos in under a week by playing every game on an empty stomach. Or that the fastest Aditi says she's ever lost weight was when she got her wisdom teeth out and survived on liquids for a fortnight.
Wait, I think I phrased that last bit slightly wrong. Those things, the breakup and the wisdom teeth, are only mildly fucked up in and of themselves. What's really fucked up is that both of them view those as good things and want the results those things gave them back.
Which is just - terrible, it's terrible, and I don't know why my friends are so desperate to look good ("good", ha, we all know that just means skinny but with an ass) that they'd view straight up starvation as a semi-viable option. Well, yes, I do know why, it's because our culture teaches women that our greatest asset is how we appear to others and we should aim to be attractive above all else at any cost, but I don't get it. How have I avoided (for the most part; there was a pretty sketchy month or so before the school ball last year when I went the less-dinner-get-thinner route) the part of womanhood where you see your body as constantly under construction and never good enough?
It's all tied up in club bathroom compliment culture, which is what I call that thing where no matter how endless the list of stuff you hate about your own body is, you'd never, ever talk about another girl's body that way. What this means in the context of my friends is that even though I'm easily the fattest out of us all (and I don't even mean that in a self-deprecating way! I've never been strict about diet or exercise and I have a hormonal disorder that makes me more susceptible to weight gain and that's just how it is!) they all seem determined to make sure I don't feel bad about how I look. For example, if I'm feeling unsure about a particular outfit because it makes my pudge show a bit, they're reassuring me that nobody'll even notice it, or if I'm complaining about how inconvenient big boobs are someone's telling me that they're a B on a good day and they'd kill for what I've got, and let's not even get into when I tried to talk to them about body neutrality (maybe more on that another time) and was met with a full set of genuinely confused "but you are beautiful"s.
But then Bella tells us she's not going out on the town again until she's lost more weight, or Aditi announces she's seriously considering a nose job, and all I can think is when did we lose the second half of do unto others? We've all gotten stunningly good at saying nice things about other people; we just can't manage to say them about ourselves, most of the time.
I don't know what the answer is. I don't know if there even is an answer. All I know is that if my time at the gym does nothing to shift the fat on my stomach, I won't really care, as long as it makes my body feel like it's mine, like it's good and strong and useful, and not something mainly to look at.
Thursday, 30 August 2018
I already love myself, Donna (or: pros and cons of other-touristing for fun and profit)
So! Anyway! I'm just going to pretend like it isn't totally weird to abandon a blog for three and a half years and then post again like nothing's come between. I have, after all, still got a fair few words inside me.
I just got back from a three-month stint backpacking around my own country, during which I spent about a fortnight hanging around and (to no avail) trying to get a seasonal hospo job in our most notorious - no, that's not right - infamous is more like it - party town. We're a small country; it was pretty tame. But at eighteen, fresh out of a highschool experience spent following all the rules and watching the in-crowd from afar, it was like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Or: Alice approaching the rabbit hole with eager caution, intrigued by its mysterious depths, only to find the edges a little less stable than expected.
Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's back up a bit. I spent my first week there doing pretty wholesome touristy stuff: went hiking, did the gondolas, ate some nice food, took a metric fuckton of photos. I spent the evenings sending in resumes and reading and listening to podcasts, and turned in at the respectable grandma hour of about 10. This was all probably influenced by the hostel in which I was staying. It was very tidy and respectable, the sort of place you'd book for a school trip or your parents, and about ten minutes' walk from the centre of town ("town"). Everyone there was very busy keeping to themselves, which is pleasant at first but begins to get boring after a while. It took me a while to figure out that I had other options, and plenty of them, and at the end of the first week I packed up my stuff and moved to another hostel, this one considerably cheaper, less respectable, right on the main street and situated directly over a bar. I'd run out of budget tourist activities, I was young and restless in a town full of complete strangers, and I had nothing to do but wait for an interview. You can probably tell where this is going.
Before I'd left home, my mother had given me a very gentle lecture about the kinds of things to expect and avoid in this party town, should I end up spending any time there or even possibly staying. In metaphorical summary: Alice, I trust you to keep yourself safe, but just be aware of various subterranean passages and don't think yourself above their allure. With this in mind I went down to the bar, my first night at the new hostel, intending to have one drink - one! - and no more. I promptly made three new friends, accompanied them to several other bars, and stayed out till nearly three in the morning. I could manage myself, I argued internally over my second beer. I know the rabbit hole's there; I'm perfectly safe at the edges; as long as I keep my wits about me I'll be fine. And I was! That first night was probably the best I've had so far in my extremely limited alcoholic experience. The second was where the trouble happened, the trouble I started out trying to write solely about and have ended up wasting three paragraphs trying to contextualise.
I made even more friends the morning after, while making breakfast at 11 after having stumbled up to my dorm and slept soundly for about eight hours, and was persuaded to join them in their plans for that night: a free pub crawl, pizza at the starting line and shots at each door, c'mon, it'll be great. Why not? I thought. Young, dumb and full of horrible buzzing energy, a stranger in a strange land; I'd been a nice proper young lady all week. I wanted to let the devil out, just a little. I wanted to see what it was like, being the other kind of tourist, only if for a night. Or two.
Oh, I'm tangling myself up and retelling a story I already know and getting away from what should be the thesis statement here: I got drunk, as a result of the aforementioned pub crawl, and a boy kissed me and I sort of kissed him back and I can't tell whether or not I liked it and to be quite frank I'm terrified at the possibility I did like it. The whole thing was really not fair on several levels. I'd had five drinks and four shots, the most alcohol I've ever consumed without passing out on my friend's couch in the process, and I can't think of an excuse for why I didn't think him buying me a drink was intended in that way, and I've - never - made out with anyone and it's not fair, it was disgusting and unexpected and seriously sketch considering how much drinking was involved but god fucking damn if my nasty lizard hindbrain wasn't into it for some reason. Even though I didn't want it, even though the whole thing was circumstantially weird at best and downright dubcon at worst, it was like being on fire. I want to try it again. Just... not with a boy.
I just got back from a three-month stint backpacking around my own country, during which I spent about a fortnight hanging around and (to no avail) trying to get a seasonal hospo job in our most notorious - no, that's not right - infamous is more like it - party town. We're a small country; it was pretty tame. But at eighteen, fresh out of a highschool experience spent following all the rules and watching the in-crowd from afar, it was like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Or: Alice approaching the rabbit hole with eager caution, intrigued by its mysterious depths, only to find the edges a little less stable than expected.
Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's back up a bit. I spent my first week there doing pretty wholesome touristy stuff: went hiking, did the gondolas, ate some nice food, took a metric fuckton of photos. I spent the evenings sending in resumes and reading and listening to podcasts, and turned in at the respectable grandma hour of about 10. This was all probably influenced by the hostel in which I was staying. It was very tidy and respectable, the sort of place you'd book for a school trip or your parents, and about ten minutes' walk from the centre of town ("town"). Everyone there was very busy keeping to themselves, which is pleasant at first but begins to get boring after a while. It took me a while to figure out that I had other options, and plenty of them, and at the end of the first week I packed up my stuff and moved to another hostel, this one considerably cheaper, less respectable, right on the main street and situated directly over a bar. I'd run out of budget tourist activities, I was young and restless in a town full of complete strangers, and I had nothing to do but wait for an interview. You can probably tell where this is going.
Before I'd left home, my mother had given me a very gentle lecture about the kinds of things to expect and avoid in this party town, should I end up spending any time there or even possibly staying. In metaphorical summary: Alice, I trust you to keep yourself safe, but just be aware of various subterranean passages and don't think yourself above their allure. With this in mind I went down to the bar, my first night at the new hostel, intending to have one drink - one! - and no more. I promptly made three new friends, accompanied them to several other bars, and stayed out till nearly three in the morning. I could manage myself, I argued internally over my second beer. I know the rabbit hole's there; I'm perfectly safe at the edges; as long as I keep my wits about me I'll be fine. And I was! That first night was probably the best I've had so far in my extremely limited alcoholic experience. The second was where the trouble happened, the trouble I started out trying to write solely about and have ended up wasting three paragraphs trying to contextualise.
I made even more friends the morning after, while making breakfast at 11 after having stumbled up to my dorm and slept soundly for about eight hours, and was persuaded to join them in their plans for that night: a free pub crawl, pizza at the starting line and shots at each door, c'mon, it'll be great. Why not? I thought. Young, dumb and full of horrible buzzing energy, a stranger in a strange land; I'd been a nice proper young lady all week. I wanted to let the devil out, just a little. I wanted to see what it was like, being the other kind of tourist, only if for a night. Or two.
Oh, I'm tangling myself up and retelling a story I already know and getting away from what should be the thesis statement here: I got drunk, as a result of the aforementioned pub crawl, and a boy kissed me and I sort of kissed him back and I can't tell whether or not I liked it and to be quite frank I'm terrified at the possibility I did like it. The whole thing was really not fair on several levels. I'd had five drinks and four shots, the most alcohol I've ever consumed without passing out on my friend's couch in the process, and I can't think of an excuse for why I didn't think him buying me a drink was intended in that way, and I've - never - made out with anyone and it's not fair, it was disgusting and unexpected and seriously sketch considering how much drinking was involved but god fucking damn if my nasty lizard hindbrain wasn't into it for some reason. Even though I didn't want it, even though the whole thing was circumstantially weird at best and downright dubcon at worst, it was like being on fire. I want to try it again. Just... not with a boy.
Thursday, 23 April 2015
Introversion
I've never been terribly good with people.
My parents are both huge introverts, so I never really got used to going places or seeing people as a younger kid. Then the whole I'm-a-preteen-and-everything-embarrasses-me phase kicked in and I didn't really want any of my friends to meet my family, so all of my friends were kinda low-key. It just continued until the point where I'm now approaching 16 with no actual best friend and no life outside of school. It... sorta sucks.
It doesn't help that I practically have NO social media. Yeah, sure, I have Facebook, but who doesn't? Tumblr isn't really social, as anyone on there will tell you, and that's about it apart from this weird little blog. I don't have Snapchat, or Instagram, or Twitter, or Kik or anything else. The internet's a lonely place when you know that your friends are having fun in some other bit of it.
So I tend to spend intervals and lunchtimes sitting with the two people who can bear my presence most as they scroll through their Insta feeds and casually snapchat people on the other side of the school, losing myself in a book as they lose themselves online. Sometimes it feels peaceful, and other times I just want to SCREAM that this ISN'T FRIENDSHIP. For all I know, they're messaging each other about how lame I am. For all I know, they're watching hot tentacle porn. For all I know, they're arranging a kidnapping.
I know I could probably have a life if I wanted to. I could probably be on every social media under the sun if I wanted to. But the thing about growing up with introverts is that even if you yourself aren't an introvert, it rubs off on you. Yes, it does feel like you've been punched in the soul when someone casually mentions that they stayed up messaging a person they met two days ago, but it's also somehow really satisfying to stay home and do nothing all weekend.
I can try, though. I can at least try.
My parents are both huge introverts, so I never really got used to going places or seeing people as a younger kid. Then the whole I'm-a-preteen-and-everything-embarrasses-me phase kicked in and I didn't really want any of my friends to meet my family, so all of my friends were kinda low-key. It just continued until the point where I'm now approaching 16 with no actual best friend and no life outside of school. It... sorta sucks.
It doesn't help that I practically have NO social media. Yeah, sure, I have Facebook, but who doesn't? Tumblr isn't really social, as anyone on there will tell you, and that's about it apart from this weird little blog. I don't have Snapchat, or Instagram, or Twitter, or Kik or anything else. The internet's a lonely place when you know that your friends are having fun in some other bit of it.
So I tend to spend intervals and lunchtimes sitting with the two people who can bear my presence most as they scroll through their Insta feeds and casually snapchat people on the other side of the school, losing myself in a book as they lose themselves online. Sometimes it feels peaceful, and other times I just want to SCREAM that this ISN'T FRIENDSHIP. For all I know, they're messaging each other about how lame I am. For all I know, they're watching hot tentacle porn. For all I know, they're arranging a kidnapping.
I know I could probably have a life if I wanted to. I could probably be on every social media under the sun if I wanted to. But the thing about growing up with introverts is that even if you yourself aren't an introvert, it rubs off on you. Yes, it does feel like you've been punched in the soul when someone casually mentions that they stayed up messaging a person they met two days ago, but it's also somehow really satisfying to stay home and do nothing all weekend.
I can try, though. I can at least try.
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