The World Today and Grundies

The post that has cracked me up the most on The Teenage Construct yet is the most recent on the back-to-school experience. You could call it the story of my life. It's not about school life exclusively, because if being preppy and nothing-less-than-perfect is the essence your "school culture"and "social world" then it also drives your whole life. Considering how many hours of your life are devoted to affairs and thoughts of school...it's a big deal.

The word to sum up the vibe I'm being sent from my new school is quite the opposite - GRUNGE. 

So funny, on the first day of school I overheard THREE separate conversations about how this school  is "supposed to be 'Indie'" and how "apparently Indie people go here". And I swear someone said that they weren't finding it Indie. And these were people who don't fit the Independent Norm. And then they all went on about how Indie is now Mainstream and abusing the concept of "Indie".

Which brings me to this discussion I saw a few weeks ago on the World of Warcraft Forum titled "Hipsters". And there were pages and pages i.e. hundreds and hundreds, of people going on debating like this:

"Is Hipster here to stay, because I just wish hipsters would all die"

"Nah, I reckon there have always been hipsters"

"I can't believe people would label ... (e.g. type of sunglasses, shoes, jeans, books) as hipster"

"I always wore...and now that there are hipsters, I'm classified as one and people hate me for it."

"It sounds like you're a hipster because you're pretending you aren't..."

"Hipster is stupid. It doesn't even make sense."

"Hipsters are so stupid, they don't know....."

"I hope hipster goes away soon. I hate them. I wish they would ***** die"

AND I AM DEVASTATED THAT I CAN'T FIND THE PAGE ANYMORE!!!! Whatever. Fill in the blanks - you know how it goes.

For the past couple of days, I've been walking around and trying not to crack up. In Year Seven, my colour group, whom I spent most classes with, went through a phase of obsession with BONDS grundies. I SWEAR some of us (not me) presented a song to the rest of us for a group task in Music. Today I looked them up on the Internet and they weren't exactly the same sort of daggy underwear everyone told me they were. (These ones I saw had all these in-your-face kind of Australia flag designs...)

Yeah. And now to state the obvious - that I haven't been blogging in AGES. And also, I need to state that by saying this at the end of the post, I was trying to not be an ordinary person who states the obvious at the beginning of the post. If, like, you didn't get it.

Pax Ex, it's the Summer Holidays

What's up Homo? It's the Summer Holidays!! So much fun to have but also so much studying do get done. So, what will you be reading over the holidays? The last two books I read were Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park and Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua. 

The previous (and first) time I read Playing Beatie Bow was in Year Six. I must have been the only person who liked the book. Every week we read a couple of chapters and over the weekend we had to write a couple of pages long reading response - oh! the tears shed getting it done! In retrospect, I think that when we were ten/eleven/twelve, we really didn't get the book, especially the main character Abigail, who was fourteen. She was super Indie, okay, she was into vintage things and was a "weirdie". Dude, you could so hate that book because no one says "weirdie", it's "weirdo". We were too young to understand Abigail throughout the whole book and also the journey she undertook. In retrospect, it's ironic because we now can see ourselves in Abigail and can see how teen-angsty she was, and also how like her, we thought we knew everything. Read it.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was so funny!!! I thought it would be really terrible because I first heard about it earlier this year in Singapore where they made a big hoo-ha about it and every review was negative. The author is this Chinese-American writing about being a Chinese mother to half Chinese children. It's Indie - the children were also Jewish. The story is crazy and her writing is honest. They must have hated the book in Singapore because she was hanging out the dirty laundry about Chinese parenting!!!! 

What I will be reading these holidays (I've actually already started You'll be Sorry When I'm Dead by Marieke Hardy and it's funny) is Tell Me if the Lovers are Losers by Cynthia Voigt. Yes, the name is weird, but it's extracted from a poem. I guess this book is Indie because I've never met anyone who's read it. (Or maybe I'm just Indie?). The story is set in Stanton College in the sixties and is about the friendship between these three roommates. The three girls are very different in character and extremely vividly created. One really feels the changes in dynamics between the friends and all characters. I fall in love every time I read it, which has been every year, starting in 2007. If you liked Home Coming, you'll like Tell Me if the Lovers are Losers and if like me, you couldn't get into it, you'll like this book even more. Oh, and the book is so preppy.

This makes me reflect on friendship. I love my friends (yes, also the TV series) so much and now I've made new ones at my old/new school (weird feeling because I was only there for six weeks) (and I plan to make new ones at my new school next year. LOL.) At my old old school (I'm technically between schools right now, right?) we had a colour group, which was a class/group of girls having four subjects together. This spanned two years. Dude...so close...the sisterhood of Colour Group Four! We were always bragging about having the best colour group. This time last year (end of Year Nine) was emotional because so many of us were leaving the school.

Message of the story? Remember the ultimate girl-gang, better than all those mentioned on RookieMag last month. Last year, the colour group came together in song to this in the pool change rooms:

Now I will go and clean my room and stop being weird.

The Big News

Okay, so this is the end of my third week of the third part of the year. And I am amazed at how quickly things become normal (and normal doesn't mean things aren't still interesting). I had come to the conclusion that it was now or never for experiencing a) a school system that is not the private all-girls one and b) the Real High School Experience. So I announced my intentions and started at my local school on the Monday (rather than continue my homeschooling). Okay, so this local school is pretty mild and you could call it Indie because it is funded also by the French Government. I'm in the English stream i.e. the non-bilingual stream, unless you count singing La Marseillaise in assembly as speaking French. I was really tired on the first week of school, not just because I was in a new system but because I was actually in a system. I met lots of nice people on my first day, so let's call it a happy beginning. Okay, I don't want to harp on about myself or anything, but I just don't know whether or not I'm the type who goes with the flow or not. I think stress makes one tense. Whatever. So  what was bewildering at the start was not being in a different school system (see, I sometimes go with the flow), but that I couldn't identify the types/groups I had evolved with and understood like the ones at my private girls' school. On my first day, a girl asked me whether at my old school there had been "mean girls like in the movies". So I replied with stupid mixed messages saying "I don't know". I found that question funny because I certainly could not match either school to one in a movie.

I can't finish without telling you that I am not Esther Blueburger. On the weekend before I started at school, I had to tell it to my friends and that was pretty scary because I had no idea what their reactions would be (and it was all cool). Which reminds me of how in the first couple of weeks I kept thinking about how at my private girls' school, everyone banded together and hung in class even though their "groups" were pretty exclusive in the playground. And how at this public co-ed place, peoople kind of just stuck in their groups. Ha. So I guess the Indiest place in town is werever me and my homies are hanging this weekend. (I think I use brackets excessively.)

xoxo