The first
time I saw Alice Dorset, she was thumping her way across the music room of our
school, lugging a saxophone case bigger than she was, wearing her (knee-length)
kilt hemmed so long it fell almost to her ankles, and muttering fluently to
herself in what I later learned was Arabic.
Insecure little middle-schooler that I was, I was naturally terrified
out of my mind. Here was someone of my
own age group that was so aggressively quirky that she didn’t even have an L.L. Bean backpack. Not only that, but there was not a scrap of North
Face anywhere on her person. As I
rapidly learned, these were sins unforgivable to a certain select group of
girls in our class, which made a point of ignoring her or teasing her; the rest
of the grade just tried not to get involved, in case she really did bite like
the rumors said.
I’d love to
say that my best friend and I fell in platonic love at first sight and hit it
off from the start, that we discovered we had a great deal in common in our
first conversation and that night we became blood brothers. Not so.
I only sought out Alice and tried to become her friend specifically
because I had declared private war on that one particular select group of
girls, and I figured that this was a soldier I could easily convert to my
cause. To my frustration and annoyance,
the quiet submissive weird Alice refused to be dominated by me, and utterly
refused to become like me. I am relieved
and happy to say that through nearly continuous exposure to her over the seven
years of middle and high school and as many visits as we can swing while in college,
I have become something like her.
By far the
single most important thing that Alice taught me was how to love being young,
how to love being alive, and how to love being a part of our own generation. At the time when we met, I was a snarky, rebellious
little seventh grader with an artistically ripped-up uniform and Sharpie-colored
nails, heavy eyeliner and a loud mouth, illegal black-spiked jewelry and an
ugly attitude, my half-inch of hair gelled into aggressive spikes that sent my
message to the world: Don’t touch me.
Don’t come near me. I scorned
popular bands as cheap and passé, I dismissed activists as sob-story
moralizers, I whined loudly and often about the utter injustice of having to
attend school, having to go to class, having to listen to the evil propaganda
passed down by the administration to try and make us into automatons. I made it a personal point of pride to
lambast High School Musical in every conversation I ever had—never mind that
I’d never even seen the film and therefore had no grounds to comment on it at
all. I hated everything so loudly and
vehemently that I forgot to like things as well. I read classical books that bored me to tears
so that I could loftily dismiss people’s questions about popular literature
with the excuse that I was reading real material
and had little time for such things as Clique
or Pride and Prejudice. I sloughed though Stephen King novels that
disgusted and horrified me just so that I could shock people by carrying them
around. I must have been quite a sight,
a tiny four-foot six-inch twelve-year-old with ballpoint tattoos and a cinderblock-sized
copy of Christine tucked under one
arm.
Well, I
think you know where this story is going.
Because Miss Giant Saxophone and Schizophrenic Muttering didn’t give a
crap about any of that. I had all the
show and glam of being a nonconformist, but Alice Dorset was the genuine
article. She listened to bands I’d never
heard of—and accompanied them with the soundtrack to Rent. She wore pink because (heaven
forbid) she liked the color, not because it was what a person was supposed to
wear—or not. She was familiar with a lot
of the popular trends in our class, and chose to reject them or conform to them
by turns, depending on what she herself
thought. Not what anyone else was
supposed to think of her; it was entirely possible for her to love both Gossip Girl and Twin Peaks, all at once. She
taught me how to stop being afraid to love things, how to listen to music and
read books that would earn me scorn or approval and how to take both in equal
measure. It was Stravinsky and Britney
Spears, Ernest Hemingway and Jodi Piccoult, and it was perfect.
I knew I
was way, way too cool in our class to hang around with the likes of her, but
the truth was that she was far too cool for the likes of me. It’s because she loved being in our
generation. She was a terrible influence
on my individualism, to say the least.
By the time we were powering through tenth grade together, I had let my
hair go dirty-blond and curly, I didn’t bother with make-up because it was
easier without, and I wildly, joyfully read the books that were popular, saw
the films that Hollywood prepackaged, and listened to music that had nothing to
do with deep inner pain or raging against the fascist regime. Worst of all, I admitted that I genuinely liked reading and writing in English and
American History class and doing experiments in Biology and even (heaven
forbid) learning new concepts in Trigonometry.
What I
realized along the way is that I love being young, I love being stupid (Or is
it that I love being smart?), and I love finding things to love. It didn’t matter that Linkin Park was a bunch
of whiny white boys—their instrumental harmonies kicked ass. Maybe cartoons were for babies—but if that
was true than our brilliantly artistic baby shows trump our overdone
melodramatic adult shows any day. I read
every single Harry Potter book and
cheered for Team Ginny the entire way. I
actually watched High School Musical—and
discovered I still hated it. I dared to
admit to myself that I actually liked music by Carrie Underwood and Kelly
Clarkson. I even tried watching American Idol—and hated that too, and so
dropped it because I could. It may be
stupid of me, but I love my own generation dearly. Someday I want to say to my kids, I was a
Potter Girl. I was a Little
Monster. I was an otaku. I was a
Twi-tard, God damn it, and I was proud of that fact no matter how many
people tried to tell me I should be ashamed of myself for wanting to enjoy a
popular series of novels.
That is one
thing that I think this generation could use a little less of:
disapproval. You can’t mention Mahatma
Gandhi’s groundbreaking peaceful revolution without someone piping up that he
refused his wife painkillers for religious reasons. It was with vindictive joy that the world
found out that Mother Teresa occasionally doubted God just like every single
other human being on the planet. Every
single American president, every folk hero, every great writer or artist or any
person that ever achieved the tiniest measure of fame has a whole laundry list
of grievances that the world holds against them, and these are what we hear
when their names come up. No one talks
about how President Clinton raised the standard of living for the entire two-hundred-million-person
nation, but “Monika Lewinski” is a household name. You can’t compliment Pope John Paul for
giving over half of the money of the
entire Catholic Church to humanitarian aid while essentially ending
homophobia for the single largest centrally organized religion in the entire
world without someone digging out the fact that eight centuries ago one of his
predecessors approved the killing of “infidels.”
So what if
Stephenie Meyer can’t write as well as, say, J.K. Rowling? Does
that mean that we should start yelling at ten-year-old kids when they admit to
liking her books? Maybe Bill Gates lives
in a mansion and pollutes the atmosphere, but anyone who hasn’t given three billion dollars to AIDS relief can
just shut the hell up about him. Lady
Gaga is a sell-out of the highest order—but then so is every single artist ever
to make it onto an MP3 player. And she teaches
young girls that they can be freaks if they so desire, while cheerfully
conforming to or rejecting the standards of Madonna and Freddy Mercury. That’s what Alice is as well, because she
didn’t stand against anything,
because she was too busy standing for
gay rights and free market ideals, pro-life laws and anti-death-penalty ones as
well. I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer long after vampires were so last year, and
Avatar the Last Airbender when I was a
full decade above the target audience’s age.
If you’re
wondering who those rabid fan girls are who scream themselves hoarse at rock
concerts and weird conventions, you’re looking at one of them. The door to my room has a “Hipster and
proud!” bumper sticker because I love the paradox. I own tee-shirts declaring my love for Fight Club, for The Hunger Games, for The Who and Guns ‘N Roses, for The Bridger
Chronicles and Death Note. For the past four years I’ve attended the
largest anime and manga convention on the entire east coast; last year I even
participated in a fan panel on Axis
Powers Hetalia. I attracted stares
walking around downtown Baltimore dressed all in black with two broadswords
strapped across my back, a hand-drawn blue and white demon mask on my head, and
an enormous red and brown flame painted across most of the left side of my
face, but I loved every moment of it.
Perhaps our
generation has its standards set too high.
We are the children of the flower children, the reaction decade of the
reaction decade of the reaction decade of the 1960s. From our aging-hippie parents we learned to
hope for a perfect world filled with perfect people, and to scorn anything
short of that. We learned from
middle-aged white-collar suburbanites who were married-with-kids never to trust
anyone over thirty, that there was no need to live in organized society, that monogamy
was a restriction on true love, that contraceptives would save the world, that
being your own person was the most important thing. Best of all, we get to watch Vietnam happen
all over again in Afghanistan, as people scream at each other on the news and
reveal that still not enough has changed when it comes to women and minorities
and gays and the poor, because it’s all still happening. Is it any wonder that we grew up cynical, in
the wreckage and ruin and tattoo regret and lingering drug addictions that came
from the joyously rebellious sixties? I
conformed to that attitude for two long, and then I found out that life is too
short not to love something about everything.
Either way,
Alice was there to quash my inner rebel, to teach me how to let my eyes adjust
rather than curse the damn dark. I was a
forty-something in the body of a twelve-year-old; nowadays, I’m a
twelve-year-old that just happens to look nineteen. She taught me frivolity, and
carelessness. She taught me to channel
my inner genius towards fan fiction and cosplay rather than just Charles
Dickens and world domination. She taught
me to ignore the bad and look for the good; maybe the world isn’t perfect, but
that’s why we protest about it. Maybe
people shouldn’t do the things they do, in which case we should all stop
bitching and start throwing flowers instead.
Here’s to you, Alice Dorset, for making me nothing like you, and nothing
like anyone else either.
Kyoya
Ootori said it best: “You’re an idiot if you think that a little capriciousness
ever harmed a truly serious man. I
wouldn’t be who I was if I didn’t know a few incredible pointless people.” And to think.
I wouldn’t even know who Kyoya Ootori was if not for Alice.
Note: Alice’s real name has been slightly altered for the
purpose of this blog post.
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