What was _I_ thinking?
Jan. 25th, 2001 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupHow nice that someone who was there has picked up on that oblique part of my last entry. What does this mean, I complained about clothes a lot? Or, as "Frank," who was there at the time, put it, "how can someone who cares so little about how he looks go on and on about clothing so much?"
I'm going to answer that with a story no one really knew much about at the time. If it sounds a bit like the psychoanalyst's couch, as it does to me, it's just that I'm trying to say explicitly things that I think about a lot but rarely have tried to nail down.
It's a weird thing to think back on. My journals of the time, filled as they are with torrents of rage about everything in the world of a mundane nature, are not really much help. But the truth is that I had several kinds of reasons for this preoccupation. What I yammered about to my friends was conformity and the symbols of accepting conformity. I had read The Catcher in the Rye too many times and had taken it too much to heart. (Though I really did find that people who didn't "get" it were people I didn't want to hang out with, so it had some use.)
Another thing that Frank pointed out to me was that my whole world-view was based on drawing a straight line between Dave Clements soft-pitching to me in little league and the Republican Party. (This incident-- which I had totally forgotten about when he told me-- and hadn't even been aware he was there at the time-- was that when I was 9 or something, I was a terrible little league baseball player, and they slow-pitched to me to taunt me at this one game, and I hit the ball and Andy Schmeltz or someone was waiting for me at first to tag me out, laughing at me, and I didn't slow down like you're supposed to, WHAM I ran right into him and a fight broke out or something. This was all clearer to "Frank" than it was in my own memory.) Which is to say that for me that chip on my shoulder about being tormented always led, maybe too easily, into seeing connections between being tormented and people who were just jerks, ie Republicans.
(A little too facile, I know. I'm sure there must be-- indeed, I think I met one once-- people who were tormented by kids in schools full of liberal Democrats and became Republicans for that reason. But I can't really believe that this is the rule. Most Republicans are pretty up front in admitting that they want to screw people and that this is the essence of life. But I may not really have a representative sample.)
So anyway. In 10th grade I had a girl who was my biology lab partner. I was not too crazy about her; she was mean in the way typical of my fucked up high school, just callous in that reflexive way, and not too bright either. And she often wore tie-dyed shirts and peace-symbol earrings. (This was 1987 or '88, when an inexplicable wave of Sixties nostalgia ran through the culture. It had something to do with the Monkees, I think.) So I'd ask her why she wore these earrings seeing as how she was Republican and all. And the answer, of course, was just fashion; it had no meaning. That's what things were in my school. People had absolutely no brains about messages or whatnot. It sounds like a stupid and obvious thing to realize, but at the time, I was amazed. (Since then I found out that the head of the school teachers' union was a Republican. Talk about eating out of both ends of the trough! Get yer pay raise on Monday, your property tax cut on Tuesday. So inconsistency--or hypocrisy--is something I hardly notice these days.)
Well, none of that hypocrisy for young Sanpaku. He is a dork, he dresses like a dork. This becomes in a convoluted way an expression of "individuality" although in fact it is something more like his mom buys his clothes and he wants to make a virtue out of being indifferent to that sort of thing.
My interest in "classic rock" came from a similar impulse. I wanted to listen to something that no one else did. It more or less worked at the time, too. Of course since then I've discovered that there are tons of fans of that music who did the same thing. But at the time, you did what you could to be different.
Even then, though, I realized that being different and "rebelling" often was what was so conformist about the culture. When the conservative girl wears peace earrings, you realize that you can't rebel with image. All you can do is renounce image itself. So though as I say it was kind of ridiculous, it had something to it that I think was kind of right in the larger way.
The thing is, of course, that this is all bound up mostly with women. It's not as though as a guy you have much choice about how you look, or at least then. The girl wearing the peace symbol earrings can do that because fashion is a women's thing more or less in that environment. So young dorky Sanpaku has bound up in all this a sense of girls rejecting him, and being into their looks, and all that, all at once. This is really where that whole Catcher in the Rye thing came in, because to be an adolescent is fundamentally about seeing girls in these cosmic terms, I think.
In my mind the drift of girls away from understanding me was always inescapably bound up with their maturation in this kind of direction. The very first girl who sort of was nice to me (the awful part of Welcome to the Dollhouse was the dead-on way it showed how easy at that age it is to mistake someone being nice to you--taking pity on you-- with liking you) went to junior high and stopped talking to me and started wearing blue eye shadow and dressing like Sheena Easton (this is 1984 we're talking about) and I never could get over the connection between the two events. And at that age I was kind of a proto-stalker. I mean I figured out her schedule so I could pass her in the hall and just see her, and it always hit me in the gut a certain way, so it was a big deal even at that time.
The real connection came in 9th Grade with this girl who sat next to me in English class. At this time in my life I had basically no friends at all except Ken; we made a newspaper on his Macintosh and sold it to people for a dime-- I was that introverted and weird. I hardly ever really talked to her in that class, but just in a small way became interested in her. She was new to the school and was teased mercilessly by the other people in the class, especially this one kid she told me she had a crush on. So the more he teased her and was mean to her the more she just took it.
I had this affinity with her in part because she looked so plainly dorky. She had big glasses and looked like her parents got clothes for her. She told me once that her dad, who was a minister, wouldn't let her get anything else-- she had a big argument with him about stirrup pants (this is 1985!). This was the first female I ever met who could maybe understand a bit of what my life was like. She was smart and had a nice voice and I thought she was great. I never said anything to her though.
The next year I didn't have any classes with her, but I saw her a lot in the halls. By this point I admitted to myself that I had a huge crush on her. But I could see that she was changing. She got contacts and wore her hair differently. And the trendy clothes all of a sudden, which were jean jackets and jean skirts. It literally broke my heart but I just could not help thinking about her all the time. Christ, I was such a fucking weirdo! I once walked all the way to her house, on the other side of Mount Lebanon, and then just walked all the way back. What would I have said if I'd seen her? This whole period of my life was some kind of crazy film noir fantasy of mine. This was all I could think about.
The summer between 10th and 11th grades I started hanging out with Richie, who was friends of mine back in elementary school but who I hadn't really been friends with since then. Indeed the basis for the renewed friendship was that he knew the girl and I "confessed" the whole story to him. And then... and then I came back to school in the fall and found out she had moved away to Penn Hills. That was that.
The obsession had been planted deep in my mind, though, and I fixated on the denim culture of faux rebellion with all of my adolescent rage. I think it actually made me angry, but then most things those days made me angry. It was a place of petty tortures and cruelty that fostered hatred of life. The problem was that I got locked into a manichean world-view based around things that were, after all, shallow. It was hard for me not to hate the absolute ubiquity of jeans jackets and jean skirts and so to yammer on and on to my friends about symbols of conformity etc. But this was a time when things were blurry too. I had people I sometimes thought of as "friends," people in classes with me or whatever, who were actually complete assholes to me much of the time. So you could say I picked my battles in this weird abstract way that was fitted to the place.
I would say that I carried on this view into college. It bothered me when people-- girls-- dressed this sort of way. I can't say I ever dated a girl with a jeans skirt, but I certainly gave a stupid earful to all of my girlfriends on the subject. My last ex-girlfriend finally said to me (c. 1994) more or less something like, "that's the past and it doesn't or shouldn't matter to you anymore." I resented her for saying it and I still do, because who is she to tell me that my high school wasn't as horrible as I say it was. But at the same time I realized that I was able to be with her in part because I no longer cared about those angry-young-man kinds of things anymore. It took me ten years, but I wasn't governed by high school.
I still blanch at the jeans couture but thankfully the times have changed and you don't see much of that anymore. It's as dated as '70s clothes were when we were young. And I no longer see conformity in clothing really, except for the occasional leather jacket, a fashion that has gotten completely out of hand. Do you people know they skin pigs and dogs alive in China for that stuff? But see even here I no longer care much about the conformity part of it except for the general stupidity of people making a "statement" by how they dress.
It's a weird thing, though. If I was kind of pathetic and weird and screwed up in those days, and saw the world in very black-and-white ways, I'm not sure what I am now. To not have those kinds of feelings about the world any more-- I wouldn't recognize today's equivalent of symbolic conformity, whatever it may be-- I miss it sometimes. You calm down and learn to look at the world in this more dispassionate way, but it is missing some of the stuff that made it interesting before. The dorkiness was all my own, after all.
I'm going to answer that with a story no one really knew much about at the time. If it sounds a bit like the psychoanalyst's couch, as it does to me, it's just that I'm trying to say explicitly things that I think about a lot but rarely have tried to nail down.
It's a weird thing to think back on. My journals of the time, filled as they are with torrents of rage about everything in the world of a mundane nature, are not really much help. But the truth is that I had several kinds of reasons for this preoccupation. What I yammered about to my friends was conformity and the symbols of accepting conformity. I had read The Catcher in the Rye too many times and had taken it too much to heart. (Though I really did find that people who didn't "get" it were people I didn't want to hang out with, so it had some use.)
Another thing that Frank pointed out to me was that my whole world-view was based on drawing a straight line between Dave Clements soft-pitching to me in little league and the Republican Party. (This incident-- which I had totally forgotten about when he told me-- and hadn't even been aware he was there at the time-- was that when I was 9 or something, I was a terrible little league baseball player, and they slow-pitched to me to taunt me at this one game, and I hit the ball and Andy Schmeltz or someone was waiting for me at first to tag me out, laughing at me, and I didn't slow down like you're supposed to, WHAM I ran right into him and a fight broke out or something. This was all clearer to "Frank" than it was in my own memory.) Which is to say that for me that chip on my shoulder about being tormented always led, maybe too easily, into seeing connections between being tormented and people who were just jerks, ie Republicans.
(A little too facile, I know. I'm sure there must be-- indeed, I think I met one once-- people who were tormented by kids in schools full of liberal Democrats and became Republicans for that reason. But I can't really believe that this is the rule. Most Republicans are pretty up front in admitting that they want to screw people and that this is the essence of life. But I may not really have a representative sample.)
So anyway. In 10th grade I had a girl who was my biology lab partner. I was not too crazy about her; she was mean in the way typical of my fucked up high school, just callous in that reflexive way, and not too bright either. And she often wore tie-dyed shirts and peace-symbol earrings. (This was 1987 or '88, when an inexplicable wave of Sixties nostalgia ran through the culture. It had something to do with the Monkees, I think.) So I'd ask her why she wore these earrings seeing as how she was Republican and all. And the answer, of course, was just fashion; it had no meaning. That's what things were in my school. People had absolutely no brains about messages or whatnot. It sounds like a stupid and obvious thing to realize, but at the time, I was amazed. (Since then I found out that the head of the school teachers' union was a Republican. Talk about eating out of both ends of the trough! Get yer pay raise on Monday, your property tax cut on Tuesday. So inconsistency--or hypocrisy--is something I hardly notice these days.)
Well, none of that hypocrisy for young Sanpaku. He is a dork, he dresses like a dork. This becomes in a convoluted way an expression of "individuality" although in fact it is something more like his mom buys his clothes and he wants to make a virtue out of being indifferent to that sort of thing.
My interest in "classic rock" came from a similar impulse. I wanted to listen to something that no one else did. It more or less worked at the time, too. Of course since then I've discovered that there are tons of fans of that music who did the same thing. But at the time, you did what you could to be different.
Even then, though, I realized that being different and "rebelling" often was what was so conformist about the culture. When the conservative girl wears peace earrings, you realize that you can't rebel with image. All you can do is renounce image itself. So though as I say it was kind of ridiculous, it had something to it that I think was kind of right in the larger way.
The thing is, of course, that this is all bound up mostly with women. It's not as though as a guy you have much choice about how you look, or at least then. The girl wearing the peace symbol earrings can do that because fashion is a women's thing more or less in that environment. So young dorky Sanpaku has bound up in all this a sense of girls rejecting him, and being into their looks, and all that, all at once. This is really where that whole Catcher in the Rye thing came in, because to be an adolescent is fundamentally about seeing girls in these cosmic terms, I think.
In my mind the drift of girls away from understanding me was always inescapably bound up with their maturation in this kind of direction. The very first girl who sort of was nice to me (the awful part of Welcome to the Dollhouse was the dead-on way it showed how easy at that age it is to mistake someone being nice to you--taking pity on you-- with liking you) went to junior high and stopped talking to me and started wearing blue eye shadow and dressing like Sheena Easton (this is 1984 we're talking about) and I never could get over the connection between the two events. And at that age I was kind of a proto-stalker. I mean I figured out her schedule so I could pass her in the hall and just see her, and it always hit me in the gut a certain way, so it was a big deal even at that time.
The real connection came in 9th Grade with this girl who sat next to me in English class. At this time in my life I had basically no friends at all except Ken; we made a newspaper on his Macintosh and sold it to people for a dime-- I was that introverted and weird. I hardly ever really talked to her in that class, but just in a small way became interested in her. She was new to the school and was teased mercilessly by the other people in the class, especially this one kid she told me she had a crush on. So the more he teased her and was mean to her the more she just took it.
I had this affinity with her in part because she looked so plainly dorky. She had big glasses and looked like her parents got clothes for her. She told me once that her dad, who was a minister, wouldn't let her get anything else-- she had a big argument with him about stirrup pants (this is 1985!). This was the first female I ever met who could maybe understand a bit of what my life was like. She was smart and had a nice voice and I thought she was great. I never said anything to her though.
The next year I didn't have any classes with her, but I saw her a lot in the halls. By this point I admitted to myself that I had a huge crush on her. But I could see that she was changing. She got contacts and wore her hair differently. And the trendy clothes all of a sudden, which were jean jackets and jean skirts. It literally broke my heart but I just could not help thinking about her all the time. Christ, I was such a fucking weirdo! I once walked all the way to her house, on the other side of Mount Lebanon, and then just walked all the way back. What would I have said if I'd seen her? This whole period of my life was some kind of crazy film noir fantasy of mine. This was all I could think about.
The summer between 10th and 11th grades I started hanging out with Richie, who was friends of mine back in elementary school but who I hadn't really been friends with since then. Indeed the basis for the renewed friendship was that he knew the girl and I "confessed" the whole story to him. And then... and then I came back to school in the fall and found out she had moved away to Penn Hills. That was that.
The obsession had been planted deep in my mind, though, and I fixated on the denim culture of faux rebellion with all of my adolescent rage. I think it actually made me angry, but then most things those days made me angry. It was a place of petty tortures and cruelty that fostered hatred of life. The problem was that I got locked into a manichean world-view based around things that were, after all, shallow. It was hard for me not to hate the absolute ubiquity of jeans jackets and jean skirts and so to yammer on and on to my friends about symbols of conformity etc. But this was a time when things were blurry too. I had people I sometimes thought of as "friends," people in classes with me or whatever, who were actually complete assholes to me much of the time. So you could say I picked my battles in this weird abstract way that was fitted to the place.
I would say that I carried on this view into college. It bothered me when people-- girls-- dressed this sort of way. I can't say I ever dated a girl with a jeans skirt, but I certainly gave a stupid earful to all of my girlfriends on the subject. My last ex-girlfriend finally said to me (c. 1994) more or less something like, "that's the past and it doesn't or shouldn't matter to you anymore." I resented her for saying it and I still do, because who is she to tell me that my high school wasn't as horrible as I say it was. But at the same time I realized that I was able to be with her in part because I no longer cared about those angry-young-man kinds of things anymore. It took me ten years, but I wasn't governed by high school.
I still blanch at the jeans couture but thankfully the times have changed and you don't see much of that anymore. It's as dated as '70s clothes were when we were young. And I no longer see conformity in clothing really, except for the occasional leather jacket, a fashion that has gotten completely out of hand. Do you people know they skin pigs and dogs alive in China for that stuff? But see even here I no longer care much about the conformity part of it except for the general stupidity of people making a "statement" by how they dress.
It's a weird thing, though. If I was kind of pathetic and weird and screwed up in those days, and saw the world in very black-and-white ways, I'm not sure what I am now. To not have those kinds of feelings about the world any more-- I wouldn't recognize today's equivalent of symbolic conformity, whatever it may be-- I miss it sometimes. You calm down and learn to look at the world in this more dispassionate way, but it is missing some of the stuff that made it interesting before. The dorkiness was all my own, after all.
