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.

Punk Fashion, the Met Gala and the Perfect Dress

So the Metropolitan Museum of Art has an exhibition called PUNK: From Chaos and Couture and the Gala was your average red carpet celebrity pile-up (there's a slide show here with a bunch of snaps from the event). The red carpet displayed a pretty typical range of hits and misses - though with slightly more OTT eye makeup than usual. There are a few goes at the theme, some more obvious than others, but only one person I feel really got it absolutely perfect: Carey Mulligan.

[Image from perezhilton.com]

So why is this dress basically the most perfect thing ever? Because of the dress Liz Hurley wore to the premier of Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994. The infamous Versace number epitomises punk's influence on fashion. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

[Image from partnoveau.com]

Mulligan's Balenciaga dress subtly references this number while also being extremely elegant and sophisticated. A little black dress captures with one safety pin the entire history of punk's influence on fashion. When I came across the picture of Mulligan while flicking through the slideshow I was so, so excited - yes, perfect, yes, she totally gets it, this is amazing. And while that probably says more about my sad interests than anything else, it's still probably the best fashion moment I've seen in a long time.

It's just a pity it seems to have gone over the heads of so many.

Dork in Disguise: In Defense of Crap

Confession: unless you are referring to a Batman character or a Harry Potter book, I am probably only pretending to have any idea what you're talking about. I'm good at sounding like I know what I'm talking about by picking up scraps from the conversations of hipsters around me and vague references in articles I read on the internet, but my knowledge has no depth. I'm a superficial sponge for fragments of culture, and while I talk big, I'm still more likely to be sitting in my room  watching Pretty in Pink for the gadjillionth time than going to that French movie in that art-house cinema. Yes, I do genuinely take an interest in that stuff, but it's not fun. 

A woman in my poetry class today was talking about actress Jennifer Coolidge and her role in Legally Blonde (it was relevant to the class, I swear). The woman was trying to remember another film where she plays a stepmother, and I immediately, and extremely sheepishly, asked "is it Cinderella Story?". Yes, obviously. I made my awkward 'Iamsuchadork' face and people laughed, with one woman at my table declaring me 'busted'.

I would like to be able to defend this knowledge, to mention the fact that I watched the film with my late grandmother and has particular memories tied to that, or make up a story about it being for a 'class', but that would be denying the fact that I just like really crap stuff. I like bad movies. I like donuts and pizza and McDonald's hamburgers. I collect plastic dinosaur toys. I own a 'Best of Duran Duran' CD. And not just like: I love this stuff. I mean, I really cannot tell you how excited I was when I discovered Die Hard 5 was going to be a thing.

I embrace high culture and the arts. I read sophisticated literature and go to art galleries and listen to legitimately good bands. But that stuff, even though I'd never give it up, just doesn't make me happy in the same way as Starship's 'We Built This City (On Rock'n'Roll)'. Daniel Clowes makes amazing art but Kate Beaton's Fat Pony is my happy place. 'Good' art and high culture make me think, and that is so important, but sometimes being able to not think is important too.

I'm sure I can pass quite well for an elitist Melbourne hipster, and I'm pretty sure that's what plenty of people take me for, but scratch the surface and you'll discover I am actually a super massive dweeb. I don't spend my time alone reading Foucalt (who the hell reads Foucalt for pleasure, though), I spend it running around the kitchen pretending to be a velociraptor (fun fact: my computer just suggested 'appreciatory' as the correct spelling for velociraptor. really, computer?). I have long ago embraced my status as a huge dork, even though I still pretend I'm super cool when I meet new people (I mean, I am super cool, but, like, not that kind of super cool).

So here's to loving stuff which is awesome but also totally shit. Here's to instant coffee and buying a cake from Coles for an afternoon snack. Here's to synthesisers, all the time, in all the songs. Here's to every film Bruce Willis has ever made. Here's to ridiculous webcomics about butts. Here's to the first album I ever bought myself being by Hilary Duff. Here's to Supernatural marathons and still reading terrible teen novels at twenty years of age. Here's to awful. Here's to, secretly, beneath the surface, being a massive, massive dork.

Supanova Article

I wrote an article for my uni's student magazine which I have just realised is already up on the internets:

What's a Supanova?

I think they cut a chunk of what was there, because it looks much shorter, but I'm not sure. Anyway, doesn't really bother me. The important thing is my face is on the internet. Obviously.