Letting my Nerd Flag fly

I may be totally overlooking it, but I couldn’t find the specific blog prompts for this week so I’m just going to go ahead and respond freely to the readings, as it appears everyone else did.

I really enjoyed the readings this week- I definitely felt like I was reading my old LiveJournal entries (and my friends’ entries) when I read some of the “Red” essays, in particular the “Appeal” and “Depp” ones. “Play” also hit home with me, although I have to say Olive has a much better music taste than I did when I was in high school. “Willow’s Transformation” in Queer Girls was also really interesting, as I never really got into the show when I was in high school. (I didn’t have that much of an attention span for long series of shows.) I also loved reading the “Just a Girl” article, because No Doubt’s music took up a lot of space on my iPod when I was in high school, and I’ve never really thought about it critically before. Mostly, though, I want to respond to the readings by talking about my own “Freakdom” and “Fandom” in high school.

I’ll admit it. I was That Girl. The one totally obsessed with Harry Potter. I tried to hide it but I always failed, usually by correcting people when they were having conversations about the books or movies and pronounced something wrong or said something bad about the Glorious J.K. Rowling. I had a few friends that were obsessed as well- some even more so than me. My friend Sarah would throw Harry Potter parties all the time- she really had a knack for themed parties, and when it was time for a new movie to come out, she’d be brewing butterbeer and developing some sort of Sorting Hat game. One Christmas we made a gingerbread Hogwarts (it turned out horrible- we decided it was a post-war Hogwarts, but Dumbledore tasted good).

This, along with my belonging to a particular group of “emos,” as we were called, made me a bit of an outcast in school. I always had my friends but I definitely wasn’t part of the in crowd. But that was okay with me, what did they know about good music and Harry Potter and my other obsessions, like Victorian-age literature and NES games? My obsession with Harry Potter might have bordered on distracting, but overall I think it was a good distraction. I’ve written in this blog before about how I’d sometimes get fixated on some of the more popular girls in the school, wishing I could have lives more like their (happier families, more money, a nice car and boyfriend and etc etc even though it usually wasn’t that way in reality). I know I wasn’t the only high school girl who fixated, either- as evidenced in every one of the essays we read, from girls’ wide range of responses to Willow to Grace’s Johnny Depp dreams.

My point is that my particular fixation was in a way, good for me. The fantastical nature of the books kept me dreaming like I did when I was younger, and Rowling inspired me to write- just like Depp inspired Grace to act. I fixated on literature with good morals with a community of other nerdy girls, instead of a number of other things I could have fixated on- America’s Next Top Model (Sarah was known to throw a good ANTM party, though), or dieting or being popular.

Obsession is a tricky term to navigate for young girls. Personally, I think it’s an integral part of being a young girl now- and maybe being a young boy, too, I’m not sure. The high school girls I work with have their obsessions too, and it’s hard holding my tongue when they gush about Twilight (don’t get me started) or the Jonas Brothers (this is making me feel old). When do you decide if it’s healthy and if it’s not? It may be totally healthy for Olive to spend every moment listening to music. Is it when my classmate, who had a similar level of obsession- but for Britney Spears- was declared to be at risk for an eating disorder? I keep trying to find an answer to these questions, but when I remember my high-school self, it's impossible to come up with an answer that isn't stifling to a young girls' creativity and livelihood.