Tavi's World: People Care, Things Matter, There Are Good Days

I got back from seeing Tavi Gevinson at the Athenaeum Theater. Her talk was basically a complete affirmation of the philosophy I have developed and my attitude towards the world. 

She spoke about the value and importance of being a fangirl. It was wonderful because I've gotten to the point where even though there's still a lot of frustrating, depressing, infuriating stuff in the world, I still love it and I love people and I get really bouncy and excited about small, seemingly trivial things. Like, I still freak out when a band I haven't listened to for years release new music (TWO NEW AFI SINGLES OHMIGOSH) and I get really excited about pugs and flowers and shiny things and I spend lots of money on glitter and food because they make me happy. And sometimes people tease me about that or give me a hard time, but it doesn't really matter because it won't make me love those things any less or make me less in love with the world.

Tavi signed my copy of The Virgin Suicides, which she'd been talking about in her speech so that was cool. It's a book I only read recently and one I sort-of wish I'd discovered earlier when I had more time for reading so I could devour it all in one sitting. I fell in love with the language and feel of the book in a way I haven't for a while, which was really wonderful. She told me it was brilliant when I handed it to her. 

She's probably the best famous person I have met, from the combination of sincerity, enthusiasm, and also being someone I really idolise. It was also much easier talking to her than to some of the other people I've been lucky enough to meet. She's younger than me by a couple of years (she's the same age as my brother, which is terrifying, in a way) and still figuring herself out, but is still hugely successful, which is enormously validating to me. 

Meeting Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer was incredible, and they were all really fantastic experiences, but also quite intimidating. They have experience gained from years of practice and a solid understanding of the world, which is great once you're there but can also be nerve-wracking for people still figuring things out and haven't aligned their experiences with their beliefs and may yet grow to disagree with the people they now idolise (and by 'they' I of course mean 'I'). With Tavi I can both be in awe of her and feel like we are actually peers and might actually have something to say to each other which will be interesting and not just annoying and/ or one-sided, which is sort-of my fear with some of the older people I idolise. 

I am actually terrified of the concept of going to dinner or something with one of my heroes because I'm pretty sure I would either blather on like a idiot about incredibly banal things, or just make a series of mildly alarming choking noises while covering myself in soup. With Tavi, I feel like we could have a conversation. It may just be wishful thinking, but hey, so is most of my thinking, and that doesn't mean it's inherently impossible.

She told us about her new mantra, taken from a Rookie commenter, which is kind of a summary of how I view the world and the sort of thing I remind myself of when things get bad: people care, things matter, there are good days.

I think it's really important for everyone to remember that and to make it their mantra.

People care.

Things matter.

There are good days.

I would just like to establish...

... that I bought my Birkenstocks in January or February, because I am a fashion visionary. That is all.

Things Occurring in My Life

Next weekend, I'm organising a meet-up for Melbourne Rookie fans. If you are one of the zero people who reads my blog, and want to come along, the facebook page is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/563765947016391/?fref=ts

Uni has started back again. Today is the end of week three. Week three! Time goes too fast. My subjects are really interesting. I get to read obscene novels and be a pretentious wanker, which is all I want from life, really.

I have an etsy shop! http://www.etsy.com/au/shop/GrandmasTattoo It is very productive I swear. (mostly I just need to be able to take photos in decent lighting, which is apparently difficult). 

Was I going anywhere with this post? I don't know. I think mostly I am putting off housework.

I have to do my application for Masters sometime in the next week. That's in addition to my Dad and my brother visiting this weekend, plus organising the meet-up, plus making flower crowns and gift bags, plus going to a Fannibal meet-up, plus going to Tavi Gevinson's keynote, plus writing articles for Gay Geek, plus uni work, plus maybe actually completing a job application, minus all of the browsing tumblr and procrastinating which is what I will probably actually be doing. My greatest achievement last week was doing four loads of washing on one day - including things which probably haven't been clean since April. Hopefully this week I can do better.

In other news, my face looks awesome today. My hair magically reached a nice-ish length a couple of days ago and I'm just feeling really happy and optimistic about everything, despite how much I have to do. Yay positivity!

Nostalgia: Love Will Tear Us Apart

My housemate and I went to the Harry Wragg warehouse sale today. We were shown into the backroom where a pretty girl sat in a shin-high pile of old vintage clothes. We stuck to the fringes at first but suddenly I noticed I had progressed to the middle of the pile, crawling through satin shirts and patterns that never should have been born. Everything in the room was $3.50 and it was like being in a tale of op-shopping from one of the magazines I read, the ones where people who by now have had their turn at their 20's spurting nostalgia for the good old days of Lifeline ties for 50 cents and dead designers in bargain bins.

Imagine if the secondhand clothes we bought came with small brown envelopes with facts about their previous owners and one or two poorly developed photos of them wearing what you've bought. You wouldn't be allowed to open the envelope until you had brought the garment home and were alone in your room. It would be like opening up a secret. The Bargain Hunter's Reward.

Between the Edward Scissorhands negligees and paisley scarves were things which reminded me of my grandmother, who dressed like her art in globulous patterns of rich purples and greens.

The sun was out this morning, before the clouds scrabbled it back in again, eating up the blue to grow fat in its bilious grey cheeks. The wind is cutting through everything and spreading up the coast to where my family can sit in front of the fire. It smelled like sparklers in the street this evening.

I've been reading The Virgin Suicides and it affects me in a way not much else does. I don't get the melancholy with it I was expecting - though that could be due to post-period lack of emotional turmoil - and instead certain passages fill me with an intense momentary despair. The book must be a death sentence for anyone with depression because it is almost killing me, but it is so, so beautiful and one of those books I want to give to everyone I meet. Some bits make my skin crawl because he is a man writing about teenage girls, but not as many parts as I had thought.
I wonder what would have happened if I had read it as a teenager, if it would have altered the way I was back then. Now, it just makes me happy to read, to put down and pick up again. I want to re-read it at a time when I can devour it all in one sitting. It makes me want to write like poetry, and I make myself cat-like content with pale imitation because some things are meant to be perfect on their own.

The photo above was taken last year, when I was cutting my own hair. Things are so much better now, but I still miss that haircut. It was the closest I've come to looking like Karen O. I have too many style icons, too many heroes.

I'm seeing Tavi Gevinson in August, and Amanda Palmer the month after that. I am always inspired to do more, to do better. I feel in a good place now, like I'm always moving forward and getting closer to the life I want, so I can look back and say not just that I've changed, but that I am where I wanted to be. It's nice to look at myself and see a person I wanted to be, even if only for a little while, and not that long ago.

On Self-Indulgence and Becoming

I found an incense stick today in the record sleeve of a Fleetwood Mac album given to me by a close friend's boyfriend because he was clearing out his things and I couldn't take the desk with the map of the world. Bits of shrapnel from other peoples' exes worming their way into my life.
It makes me think of Stevie Nicks' dreamcatcher and the fact that Tavi Gevinson is coming to Melbourne. She's high on the list of reasons I wish I could rewrite my childhood into an amalgamation of '90s tv shows. I find things too late, when they're no longer educational guides for living my life and now just relics of a decade I wasn't cool enough for. I was the Lindsay Weir or the Angela Chase, straight-living kid from a good home hanging out with the freaks but I was still listening to Delta Goodrem instead of the Smashing Pumpkins, then trying to be emo when I want to go back and rewrite myself into Enid Colweslaw's 1977 original punk look.
I found all the good things too late because I didn't know where to look and we had dial-up for too many years. I grew up sheltered in a sweaty Queensland suburb and the best bits of the city were off-limits until I already knew I liked them, instead of wandering in and finding something new, a fresh paradise built from bootleg Twin Peaks videos and brown and orange floral mod dresses.
I blame Brisbane for my late blooming into cultural awareness. The city and its people kept things from me, and I let them. I was too  busy cultivating a well-adjusted morbidity to seek out the things which now curl up in my soul. I tried to hard and now I can laugh too loud at things I would probably have sniffed at then. Sometimes I think about what I would do at fourteen if I found out that the twenty-year-old me occasionally enjoys hip hop. Self-immolation comes to mind as a reasonable solution.
I feel I have grown so much since then, and yet I have always known myself. Some changes happen naturally the way faces shift with age and others have perhaps been more conscious but always I feel I have been moving away from false, from trying to be a different idea of 'cool' and into the truth of myself.
I still enjoy Die Hard and David Hasseflhoff's 'Hooked on a Feeling' more than is probably healthy so I feel reassured that the pretentiousness I know is in myself is well-balanced with an un-ironic love for truly terrible things. I've written before in defense of my love for the awful but I still wish I could look back on my teen years and that I, too, was sassy and cool and full of spunk as a spry young thing. The best characters for young girls and women exist in those films and I feel myself floundering now, looking for a guide and role model over the age of seventeen who is a projection of someone I would be comfortable becoming, and not someone I would have to bury parts of myself to be. I have been seeking such a woman in order to create a costume but the best female characters for the over-twenty set are rarely feminine. I write this now in a man's shirt and jeans that are washed intermittently after three-months' dirt but I still don't want to be anything but a woman.
I still wish more of my wardrobe was mod dresses and pleated skirts but I always end up with more T-shirts bearing pictures of David Bowie Jesus or pizza slices melting with cheese. I still try to construct truth upon truth from a seat of comfort - and comfort is underrated, for feeling like I am completely wearing my own skin is my greatest day-to-day accomplishment.
I wore foundation recently to costume myself and the flawless, painted look was eery. I did not know myself in that false skin. Girls who make their face up each day must feel as though they are deconstructing themselves when they spread on that first smooth coat, erasing each pore's point of difference. More likely they no longer notice, or perhaps never did. To overcome the insecurities of youth I had to become entirely certain that this is my face, and I must love it as it is and so to erase it and begin again is something to run from.
The incense is slowly burning through on the table. I imagine the scent is sandalwood, but I am making assumptions, and do not know for sure.

July Goals

- Creative project a day
- Etsy store set up
- min. 2000 words on novel
- min. 3 things submitted for publication
- min. 5 job applications completed
- Enquire about N. Melb. craft markets
- Decide study plans for next year
- Regular posts for blog and gaygeek

Let's Talk About 'Skinny Privilege'

So I saw some post on tumblr the other day talking about how things like heterophobia and misandry and so forth don't really exist, which, fine, yes, but on that list was 'prejudice against skinny people' or something similar. And that upsets me.
First up: I am in no way denying the existence of fat-shaming and society-wide prejudices against larger men and women. I'm also not denying that 'skinny privilege' exists - I frequently shop in stores which don't seem to stock anything above a size 12 (US size 8). But being skinny isn't some magic club where everyone is nice to you and prejudice doesn't exist.
I am 20 years old, approx. 5'10" and around 60kg/ 132 pounds (haven't weighed myself in a while, but I've been 60kg for a couple of years). I have to be really vigilant about eating enough, because if I don't I can very easily become underweight. I've been incredibly skinny my whole life. This is not a dietary issue, or an eating disorder, or a fitness addiction. This is Marfan's Syndrome, a genetic disorder of the connective tissue. But most people don't know that. Most people know that I am thin.
Most people assume that I diet, that I exercise, and that I have an unhealthy body image. Many people assume I have an eating disorder. How do I know people assume this? Because they ask me. Frequently, and without pretext.
One kid in high school, whose name I never knew, would frequently come up to me and ask me if I was anorexic. He even, at one point, asked me this while we were in the line to buy lunch. The irony of this seemed lost on him.
My bullies would call me 'Bony'. My friends would call me 'Skeletor'.
No matter how many times I try and politely tell people to kindly not make jokes about my weight, they still do so. When I object, they say 'it's just because we're jealous!' Am I to take that as a compliment? Should I thank you for telling me, with a smile, that my friends resent me for something over which I have no control?
I have built up what I believe to be a defensive mechanism, which is a constant obsession with food - not in a calorie counting way, but in a  'we should get cake, all the time. I want donuts. why don't we have bacon? LOOK I LOVE FOOD'-personality trope kind of way. Unfortunately this does not seem to have stopped people from putting their hands demonstratively around my forearm and telling me I ought to eat more - no matter how many times I insist I eat plenty, no matter how much I refuse to welcome their maternal concern.
Should I be welcoming that concern? Should I shake it off as my friends just trying to look out for me?
I think my friends should trust me when I say that I take care of myself and that my weight is not an issue and, frankly, none of their business.
I've been called a 'skinny bitch' many, many times, both by friends and bullies. This happens often when I am consuming large amounts of food. Sometimes it has come from the same people who encourage me to eat more. What am I to take from that? That I should eat more, but only in private, to hide, ashamed, so others won't resent me for apparently flaunting my dubious gift of having extreme difficulty putting on weight? Efforts to lose weight are frequently applauded, encouraged by every women's magazine across the country. My efforts to prove that I am trying to do what I am told, to eat a lot, are met with the words 'skinny bitch'. Forgive me if I do not take being openly shamed as complimentary. I don't intend to make anyone 'jealous', but nor do I need to hear about that jealousy. Why would anyone think I did?
After years of hating my body, of analysing it for its desirability to men and finding it lacking in appealing curves, of believing it too sharp and knobbly and jutting, I somehow managed to develop what I believe is a very positive body image. Still, I have internalised a great many messages about my body type which I have only recently begun to acknowledge.

• My response to 'fatshion' blogs and supremely self-confident women like Beth Ditto is admiration. My response to thinspiration blogs is fear - fear for the people who follow those blogs and aspire to my body image (I have a couple of thinspiration blogs following my tumblr. When I discovered the first I felt an overwhelming wave of nausea. I felt afraid and I wanted to cry. A large part of this was driven by the fear that an impressionable young girl or women may see my body as inspiration, which, due to my genetic condition, is literally aspiring to an unhealthy, abnormal body. I don't want that  for anyone.).
• I assume any woman who spends a great deal of time in the gym to lose weight (even if it is also to gain strength and muscle - unless this is the primary aim) has low self-esteem. 
• I assume most beautiful, thin women are hiding their insecurity.
• I am still mildly surprised when I am found sexually desirable, because my positive body image means that I find myself incredibly attractive but cannot yet move past the concept that the majority of society desires 'curvy' women, and thus not me.

I assume these things because they are what I have been told, what 'society' has taught me to believe about thin bodies - and especially thin women. Until recently, I did not really register that campaigns for 'real' women in the media tend to exclude me. I was in denial about the fact that when I was looking at images of incredibly thin women in magazines, I was reading them as 'impossibly' thin, as unhealthy, victims of a culture which forces women to starve themselves for beauty. Somehow I could forget how people may think that when they look at me.  But now, when I read those taglines, I indignantly ask, 'Am I not real?'
Men are not exempt from assumptions based on weight. Think of who is typically cast as the 'nerd' in films and television - there is the overweight nerd, the 'runt', and the gangly one. Thin men are seen as weak, weedy, less potent and aggressive than they 'should' be.
Writing this has made me depressed. It makes me sad because of the way our bodies are policed. It makes me sad because of the way different body types are pitted against each other. It makes me sad because no matter how I try, people can't - or refuse - to understand, and I can never seem to articulate myself fully enough to make them. And it makes me sad because I still can't help but feel like I'm being petty, ungrateful, because I've been told so many times that I'm so lucky to have the body I do - even though this genetic disorder has the potential to kill me - and I've seen the way overweight people are shamed for their bodies and I know I'll never have to experience that.
Just please, don't try and tell me that I don't know what it's like to experience negativity because of my shape. Don't tell me thin people are always portrayed positively. Don't tell me about 'skinny privilege' if that's all you're going to say.