go now. go
I have been watching My So-Called Life on Netflix. I missed it the first time around, for the most part. I knew who the characters were, and I vaguely remember an episode where Rickie gets kicked out of his house, and I'm pretty sure I thought Jared Catalano was cute. But that's it.
Watching it now, when that was more than half my life ago... well, it makes me nostalgic, for starters. Angela Chase is pretty much exactly my age. I don't get that a lot - I'm not quite Gen X, and not quite millennial, and I don't get a lot of media targeted right at me. But it came out in 1994, and Angela was 15. I was also 15 that year. The music, the clothes... I remember that. (Well, not Rayanne's clothes, but mostly everyone else's.) I saw an episode where a kid gets a hall pass to go to the bathroom, and the "pass" is this big piece of... something. And we had hall passes like that too, that were huge so they could be seen from a distance and not easily made off with.
And I remember what it was like to be 15. I wouldn't go back for anything. I don't think there's a single kid I haven't wanted to hug at least once. I can't help wondering how it would have been if I'd seen it at the time. All I know for sure is that I wouldn't have cared about the parents nearly as much as I do now. Would it have been inspiring? Would I have felt like it really got me? Would I have taken it too much to heart, the way I over-identified with the characters in Pamela Dean's Tam Lin? I'm not sure if it was a great tragedy that I never saw it, or if I dodged a bullet. I had some proto-Rayannes when I was 14, but I mostly went the Sharon route in high school. Maybe I was better off not getting any ideas.
I'm also made deeply uncomfortable by some of the sexual dynamics. I'm sure there was a ton of that at my high school - the rumors, the sexualized gossip, that kind of thing. But I was never aware of it. I never had that realization so many girls and young women have, that you can never just be anymore, there's always this filter over how you'll be perceived. And I watch it happening to the girls in this show: all of a sudden you're just a pair of boobs, or you're that girl who puts out, or you're not any of those things and therefore you don't have any value, and you're not you anymore, and it's heartbreaking.
I'm about one-third of the way through. I could chug the whole thing in less than a day, but I think I'm going to parcel it out. I've got to give myself some kind of break.
Watching it now, when that was more than half my life ago... well, it makes me nostalgic, for starters. Angela Chase is pretty much exactly my age. I don't get that a lot - I'm not quite Gen X, and not quite millennial, and I don't get a lot of media targeted right at me. But it came out in 1994, and Angela was 15. I was also 15 that year. The music, the clothes... I remember that. (Well, not Rayanne's clothes, but mostly everyone else's.) I saw an episode where a kid gets a hall pass to go to the bathroom, and the "pass" is this big piece of... something. And we had hall passes like that too, that were huge so they could be seen from a distance and not easily made off with.
And I remember what it was like to be 15. I wouldn't go back for anything. I don't think there's a single kid I haven't wanted to hug at least once. I can't help wondering how it would have been if I'd seen it at the time. All I know for sure is that I wouldn't have cared about the parents nearly as much as I do now. Would it have been inspiring? Would I have felt like it really got me? Would I have taken it too much to heart, the way I over-identified with the characters in Pamela Dean's Tam Lin? I'm not sure if it was a great tragedy that I never saw it, or if I dodged a bullet. I had some proto-Rayannes when I was 14, but I mostly went the Sharon route in high school. Maybe I was better off not getting any ideas.
I'm also made deeply uncomfortable by some of the sexual dynamics. I'm sure there was a ton of that at my high school - the rumors, the sexualized gossip, that kind of thing. But I was never aware of it. I never had that realization so many girls and young women have, that you can never just be anymore, there's always this filter over how you'll be perceived. And I watch it happening to the girls in this show: all of a sudden you're just a pair of boobs, or you're that girl who puts out, or you're not any of those things and therefore you don't have any value, and you're not you anymore, and it's heartbreaking.
I'm about one-third of the way through. I could chug the whole thing in less than a day, but I think I'm going to parcel it out. I've got to give myself some kind of break.