Three weeks ago, I walked into my local new feminist bookstore (Broad Vocabulary, owned by a fucking awesome acquaintance/customer of mine, and well-deserving of your hard earned cash), looking for (and happily finding) good, inspiring, music-related books to stuff in the van for Chariots Race's last weekend tour. On my way to the checkout counter, I came across Hip Mama zine and purchased it. With the top headline on the front page screaming, "My kid dropped out of school!" over a photograph of The Old Lady I Hope One Day to Be (a 70ish bespectacled woman dressed in colorful - if mismatched - attire, smoking a big fat stogie), I couldn't resist. Truthfully, the magazine has sat on my coffee table ever since, due to a lack of time to read it compounded with a nagging fear. I cringe whenever buying/reading magazines of this nature, for two reasons: 1) I get really turned off by people who refer to themselves as "hip" in an unhip sort of way, you know, the whole "I AM SUCH A DORK" thing when really your experiences, although individual and worthy of validation, are really not that far-fetched, making you not a dork, but just a HUMAN BEING (let me point out here and now that yes, I am aware of my own guilt in this realm - but I still hate it! They say you hate in others what you despise in yourself...); and 2) I know that reading such intelligent, inspired, thought-provoking, hilarious, and punk literature will only frustrate me in its inspiration to me to get off my FUCKING ASS AND WRITE MY OWN GODDAMN ZINE OR BOOK OR WHATEVER. Like I've been talking about for, oh, at least ten years.
Sigh.
So here I am, reading this zine, specifically an article by China Doll Marten about how her rebelling-against-the-rebellious-mother-by-being-"normal" daughter (gee, where have I contemplated that one before) is suddenly dropping out of school for all the right reasons (amen, sista!) and how she, as a punk-culture mom, is dealing with it.
Oh, weep. To glance into one's own possible future and see, not the terror, not the horrifying scaryness of it all, but the real possibility for some parents' nightmare to be, in actuality, hopeful and good. Oh, my.
What the fuck am I doing? Why am I writing this blog? Why haven't I gotten off my ass and done something with my experiences and written about them in a more concerted-effort sort of way? Why do I think that my little drop-out story, my teenage hell, isn't worth writing about simply because someone else experienced the same thing? Why do I think that every word of every sentence describing each experience has to be completely, 100% unique for anyone to have any interest in it whatsoever, as though I need to fully develop and articulate my own language or cure cancer or do something REALLY BIG and special for anyone to give a fuck about it? And really, what makes me think that my actual experiences - down to the molecular level - AREN'T unique? Don't I still sit down and read zines like this, articles and books written by people who have had similar experiences to myself and countless others - don't I still sit down and read their bullshit solely because it is THEIR individual take on THEIR individual bullshit, and although the stories may be similar, they will never ever be the same, having been written in individual unique voices? Didn't Mr. Rogers have a valid point when he preached on TV that there is no one in the whole wide world that is just like you?
Get off it, Thorvalson. And get off your ass.
Posted by stephanie at August 10, 2005 11:03 AM