paper hearts
Jun. 2nd, 2008 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmWhen the magazine store burnt up, my mother mentioned it in wary passing, a reminder of what a sore point perhaps the only normal thing in my childhood was.
I was obsessed with normal. Normal like I saw on TV shows and read about in the papers. The normal of football teams and beauty pageants and learning to drive and curfews and bonfires. The normal, I suppose, of Tiger Beat magazine.
It seems peculiar now, because I do absolutely remember being queer then, how presentable the manner of my fixations were when I was 13 and 14. Not that that somehow made them less embarrassing. And always disciplined, I had rules for myself when I did get the somewhat hard to come by permission to walk the three blocks alone to the State News on Third to see if any new magazines had come in featuring photos of my crushes.
One simply did not buy Tiger Beat. Or 16. No matter how hot the new pictures of David Bowie in Labyrinth were or how awesome Falco's news suit was. And, okay, if one utterly had to, one made sure it was buried in a stack of slightly more respectable publications, like European music magazines, the newspapers retrieved for my parents, a Vogue I would never read.
Like all little girls, and I was, absolutely a little girl at 12 and 13 and 14, I kept a scrap book of my heartthrobs and it awes me now that I never accidentally cut myself putting it together. You see, I found looking at the photos I collected awkward. I was scared of eye-contact in real life -- it was, I felt, presumptuous and had heard tell I had no right of it -- and felt as nervous gazing at pictures of men as I did looking at the real thing. Desire, presupposed possibility, and I was scared to be scolded and told I had none.
My parents, in an effort both to teach me fiscal responsibility and to engage with me on the somewhat horrifying terms of female puberty, tried to tease me about all this, but I was closed and sharp, protective of the photos I could barely look at of stars who were merely footnotes in the teenybopper magazines. And I was desperate for my dignity.
Before I went to Sicily, I made an internal commitment to manage to be as unabashed on the trip as I could. After all, people already think I'm weird, so why suffer in the trying to hide it? So aside from bringing Kushiel's Justice for trashy reading material, I picked up a copy of Torchwood Magazine over at the Borders near the Garden.
It was the first time, other than the fire, I had thought of the magazine store in years. And I didn't realize I was doing it until as I was standing there arguing on my cellphone with my father ("We need your address in Sicily" -- "Yes, and what on earth are you going to do with that?" -- I still don't even know the name of the town we stayed in) and looking for other magazines to buy with it in the name of some strange disguise.
"Oh this is ridiculous," I snapped all at once, more to myself than my father. I agreed to email him the URL of the hotel, and hastily got off the phone and bought my magazine. My one magazine. And when I went up to the counter I looked -- the way I still can't really do with newsprint pictures -- the bored college kid who didn't give a damn in the eye.
I wound up reading the magazine in the Catania airport, waiting for Michael and Alex, fascinated by the stuff from the writers and producers, feeling bad for the people whose job it is to write the articles (I mean, I write stories about the history of shoes for a website and _that_ makes me want to scream for days over the sheer mind-numbing, chirpy and uninformative nature of it) and being embarrassed at the ads, all structured even more clumsily than conventional advertising to prey on the feeling of being small.
It is strange to think of what would break my heart were I ever to raise children ("have" is a verb I choose to no longer use, being the age I am, being as I am about my flesh, being female and disinclined to the carrying of such a thing). But the secret griefs of magazines would, I'm almost certain, be near the top of the list. I would hope, though, that any children of mine would at least have the courage to look the pictures in the eye, even if they were still inclined to smile, years later, upon finding out the shop where they had bought it all had simply burnt up, in that way hearts do when on Sunday afternoons when you're twelve.
I was obsessed with normal. Normal like I saw on TV shows and read about in the papers. The normal of football teams and beauty pageants and learning to drive and curfews and bonfires. The normal, I suppose, of Tiger Beat magazine.
It seems peculiar now, because I do absolutely remember being queer then, how presentable the manner of my fixations were when I was 13 and 14. Not that that somehow made them less embarrassing. And always disciplined, I had rules for myself when I did get the somewhat hard to come by permission to walk the three blocks alone to the State News on Third to see if any new magazines had come in featuring photos of my crushes.
One simply did not buy Tiger Beat. Or 16. No matter how hot the new pictures of David Bowie in Labyrinth were or how awesome Falco's news suit was. And, okay, if one utterly had to, one made sure it was buried in a stack of slightly more respectable publications, like European music magazines, the newspapers retrieved for my parents, a Vogue I would never read.
Like all little girls, and I was, absolutely a little girl at 12 and 13 and 14, I kept a scrap book of my heartthrobs and it awes me now that I never accidentally cut myself putting it together. You see, I found looking at the photos I collected awkward. I was scared of eye-contact in real life -- it was, I felt, presumptuous and had heard tell I had no right of it -- and felt as nervous gazing at pictures of men as I did looking at the real thing. Desire, presupposed possibility, and I was scared to be scolded and told I had none.
My parents, in an effort both to teach me fiscal responsibility and to engage with me on the somewhat horrifying terms of female puberty, tried to tease me about all this, but I was closed and sharp, protective of the photos I could barely look at of stars who were merely footnotes in the teenybopper magazines. And I was desperate for my dignity.
Before I went to Sicily, I made an internal commitment to manage to be as unabashed on the trip as I could. After all, people already think I'm weird, so why suffer in the trying to hide it? So aside from bringing Kushiel's Justice for trashy reading material, I picked up a copy of Torchwood Magazine over at the Borders near the Garden.
It was the first time, other than the fire, I had thought of the magazine store in years. And I didn't realize I was doing it until as I was standing there arguing on my cellphone with my father ("We need your address in Sicily" -- "Yes, and what on earth are you going to do with that?" -- I still don't even know the name of the town we stayed in) and looking for other magazines to buy with it in the name of some strange disguise.
"Oh this is ridiculous," I snapped all at once, more to myself than my father. I agreed to email him the URL of the hotel, and hastily got off the phone and bought my magazine. My one magazine. And when I went up to the counter I looked -- the way I still can't really do with newsprint pictures -- the bored college kid who didn't give a damn in the eye.
I wound up reading the magazine in the Catania airport, waiting for Michael and Alex, fascinated by the stuff from the writers and producers, feeling bad for the people whose job it is to write the articles (I mean, I write stories about the history of shoes for a website and _that_ makes me want to scream for days over the sheer mind-numbing, chirpy and uninformative nature of it) and being embarrassed at the ads, all structured even more clumsily than conventional advertising to prey on the feeling of being small.
It is strange to think of what would break my heart were I ever to raise children ("have" is a verb I choose to no longer use, being the age I am, being as I am about my flesh, being female and disinclined to the carrying of such a thing). But the secret griefs of magazines would, I'm almost certain, be near the top of the list. I would hope, though, that any children of mine would at least have the courage to look the pictures in the eye, even if they were still inclined to smile, years later, upon finding out the shop where they had bought it all had simply burnt up, in that way hearts do when on Sunday afternoons when you're twelve.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-06-02 05:39 pm (UTC)Sigh.
I also had a binder full of Christian Slater, but he was more popular. He was no Leonardo DiCaprio, but still.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-02 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-02 05:46 pm (UTC)I also always totally had a thing for Julian Sands. What IS that?
no subject
Date: 2008-06-02 05:47 pm (UTC)Were I ever to raise children
Date: 2008-06-02 07:59 pm (UTC)I'm much too old to safely sire a child. I could still love them,care for them,teach them their manners,their letters,their sums
,how to kill people with three foot sticks...no subject
Date: 2008-06-02 10:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-02 11:14 pm (UTC)Friends from middle school still tease.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-03 12:25 am (UTC)Me too, and only one friend ever saw the fic I wrote at 11-12-13-14 because it was so embarrassing. I couldn't bear to have it criticised and the biggest heartbreak of my 9th grade year was when my notebook was stolen and everyone laughed at it (and had the gall to say they were "concerned" because the character telling the story was depressed for a while and the handwriting looked it). So much was wrong in my RL, did they have to take my fantasy too?
I wonder how adults can not remember that desperation and not understand how horribly cruel such teasing feels to the recipient, even if they intend no cruelty (something one can never be certain of with anyone who was an adult in my family when I was a child).
It pains me deeply to see Harrison Ford look so old. When I was 13 he was the love of my life I was sure. That he can look so old makes me wonder if I am.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-03 12:29 am (UTC)And I have an autographed picture of Adrian Pasdar (as Jim Profit) in a silver frame next to my bed that used to hold an ex-husband's picture.
Profit is so the better man.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-03 09:27 pm (UTC)