I love reading. I bring a book everywhere. The only thing is that sometimes my book reading habits can show up in unexpected places. In eighth grade, I carried around these photos I printed off of Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco. I saw a girl in my U.S. history class who had a binder with boy bands on the cover and I wanted to have pictures to look at because I just had to have a distraction. So I printed out pictures I got on the web of Pete Wentz, Patrick Stump and Brendon Urie and also the Harry Potter cast. And I literally would look at these photos all the time. I often stayed up late watching on YouTube the music videos of Fall Out Boy and Panic! At the Disco. I would imagine meeting these guys in the bands, and how cute Pete Wentz was. One time it got to the point that I felt too embarrassed to go out in public without my staring pictures because all I could think about was how cute Pete, Patrick and Brendon were, so I needed yet another distraction. I chose a book my sister had gotten from the library. At least it had some pictures. On the cover anyway. We had gone clothes shopping at a secondhand clothing store, and I needed to look at something while changing in the dressing room, so I had the nerve to bring my book in the changing room with me and drop it so that it was open so that it looked as if I was reading the book while dressing. There was a long line and unfortunately I was holding up the party. My sister told me that two girls were looking at each other when I did that, like, “Is she really going to read her book in there?”
This was around the same time I started dressing like Juno MacGuff from the film Juno. When I was visiting family in Chicago, I absolutely insisted that we go to H and M. When at H and M I found a plaid miniskirt and an orange and white striped shirt. I could wear the miniskirt over my jeans like Juno! My aunt looked at my chosen outfit and asked, “Are you sure you want to wear this to school?” And not knowing any better or foreshadowing the chuckles and comments I might get, I affirmed that yes, this was in fact what I wanted to wear to school, comments and stares and chuckles be damned. So I did wear the miniskirt over my jeans and wore that orange and white striped shirt to school too. And I can’t remember if people laughed at or commented on the outfit (then again, everyone was dealing with their own insecurities and shit so they probably weren’t super concerned about me wearing a miniskirt with jeans all that much. Or I just had the confidence to not care what anyone thought of my clothes.) The one thing I do remember is some of my classmates telling me I hadn’t taken the price tag off of the miniskirt. A girl named Karen* (I changed the name) had pointed it out.
“Ginger, the tag is showing on your skirt….”
I spun around proudly, my Afro spinning with me (I also decided at the time to wear my hair in this massive Afro, even though people kept touching it and it bugged me) and declared, “Oh, it’s personal choice, thanks.” And then walked off. To this day remembering this whole debacle has me rolling.
The Arts Are Life 