[Public] The Facebook Game, Part II
Oct. 14th, 2008 02:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kniteracyReconnections
Last week, my high school roommate was in town for a conference, so we arranged to get together on Saturday, when she had a free day, to reconnect with one another and maybe do some touristy things around London. There’s always something to do here in the greatest city in the world (I’m biased!), and quite a lot of it is free. As it turned out, she was already knackered from a morning walking around Trafalgar Square, so we ended up taking a bus back to my house and just spending the day talking and hanging out.
Interlochen Arts Academy is a funny place. As a teenager, I dreamed of going to a place where I would fit in somehow, meet other kids who were like me in terms of talent and disposition, and get more musical and artistic training than I was getting in my public high school. This may have come from too many hours watching the television show based around the film FAME. ;-) It was expensive, so when my mother and I started looking into it, we made the decision that if I were going to go, I should go only for my senior year: that way, I could say I’d graduated from Interlochen, which would look mighty nice on a college application. We prepared an audition tape (a reel-to-reel!), my first experience in a real recording studio. We sent everything off and applied for scholarships at the same time. The phone call came one day while I was at school; my mom called my high school so I could get the news right then. Not only had I been accepted, but the scholarship was generous enough that we could afford it. I don’t remember how I felt that day, but it must have been good. There I was, the biggest loser in the high school world (and sure, I could be more dramatic about that, but I won't be), going to this cool place far away from all the kids who’d known me since I was in kindergarten. Michigan seemed like an exotic foreign country. I’d never set foot there. My single plane journey up to that point had been an international flight to Europe on a choir tour the previous year. Compared to my peers, I was already well-travelled, but I didn’t realise that.
We look at things through such a filter, don’t we? All we have, in the end, are our own perceptions. Even our trust in other people’s perceptions is coloured by those messages we send ourselves. I felt like an outcast at my high school, even though I had friends there. At the time, I felt very different from everybody around me. I wasn’t the smartest kid at my high school, but I hope it isn’t hubris to say I was in the top 1% as far as talent went, in a number of areas. On top of that, I was the kind of kid who really did enjoy spending half a day in a practice room, if I thought my playing or singing would be better in the end. I can’t remember now if I did this self-consciously, though I’m sure there was a bit of that. The summer after my junior year in high school (I was sixteen, for those of you not from the US or unfamiliar with the American school system), I went to the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts. Most states have a programme like this: it’s a six-week summer school for kids who pass an audition and write an essay. If you’re accepted, you get to spend a good part of your summer in the kind of school you like, learning stuff you’re interested in. No maths, no science, all art. Similar programmes exist for kids who are academically talented. In the vocal music department, there were all kinds of different kids, even though they were all from South Carolina; we were as diverse as we could be, given the homogeneity of American culture (really on show in a place like South Carolina, trust me). My roommate went to Bob Jones High School, which is the high school connected with Bob Jones University (Look it up; I’m not going to link to it here). That was surreal. Anyway, the vocal music department held a master class with a regionally famous soprano I’d admired for a long time. I felt I did badly in the master class and bitched about it later to my classmates. One of my fellow students got angry with me. He actually ranted at me for several minutes, but I’ll encapsulate the gist of what he said. He said, “I don’t really have a lot of sympathy for you. From my point of view, it looks like you wake up in the morning, have breakfast, spend two hours in a practice room, go to class, spend two more hours in a practice room, and then you stand up and open your mouth and nobody listens to anything else but you and the rest of us might not even have voices. It was good. I can’t believe you’re taking yourself apart for this. It’s not fair to everybody else in the class to have to listen to somebody like you bitch and moan about not getting it perfect when the rest of us are lucky if we get the notes right.”
That’s kind of how it was for me. I found solitary practice energising. I was a perfectionist. I had mastered the art of repeating tiny little things a million times fairly early in life, and I was willing to do that for long periods of time, if it made me sing a little better.
Interlochen was something else. Four hundred kids, all talented (or alternatively very rich, and sometimes both), all different, all interesting, lived on campus or commuted from not very far away, and we all lived in each other’s hip pockets. It was unavoidable, that intense closeness. I went from being the weirdest person at my high school to being the most ordinary, mundane kid from the provinces anybody had ever met. And I went from being in the top 1% of people, talentwise, to that milling-around-in-the-middle place. All the usual teenage stuff happened at Interlochen, except with added drama. It was no wonder I became disillusioned with the vocal music department there and all the competitive girls in my class. I gravitated toward the relatively safe and small creative writing department, even though I wasn’t close to being the department’s star student. I don’t think I wanted to be. I wanted to learn to write, to read interesting stuff, and to know interesting people. All that happened. I tried not to be from South Carolina, not to have a southern accent, not to be surprised at how many out homosexuals there were. I tried to fit in, for the first time. It wasn’t easy. As a first-year student (even though I was a senior), I had to serve breakfast in the morning, which meant getting up at 6:00 and padding over to the dining hall, sometimes in my slippers, to make toast and serve eggs and bacon. Other kids had better work study assignments, and everybody had to do one. First year students always got stuck in the kitchen. It was a little like the Army in that respect, I guess.
My best friend was from Virginia, and we haven’t spoken in years, but I still miss her. She had a boyfriend whose roommate turned into my sort-of boyfriend, but who later turned out to be gay (no wonder the sex wasn’t so great....). I fell in love with an older guy who left halfway through the year. We still keep in touch, oddly enough. I thought he was amazing. I still do. Even though my relationship with him was short-lived, he’s sort of my signature guy. You know, that guy (or girl) you date in high school who becomes your basis for attractiveness for the rest of your life? He was that guy, and I was completely nuts about him. Distance, though, when you’re that age, is a bitch. We never had sex, but I’m sure it would have been great. I met him again years later at a science fiction convention, and he’s still that guy, only forty. People are comfortably predictable that way, I guess. He probably doesn’t know he was that guy. Well, he might now.
G, the friend I met on Saturday for hangout time, was my third roommate at Interlochen, and during the second half of my year there, she became my best friend, too (other best friend being busy with the boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s roommate being my sort of ex who was also sort of gay. Confusing!). My first roommate asked for a change of room within a month of moving in with me: she said the fact that I didn’t make my bed every morning reflected badly on us. My second roommate was another vocal music student, a year younger than I was, and that was OK while it lasted, but then I met and got to know G. She and I became close friends, probably because we were both in the chorus and in creative writing classes as well, and things just spun from there.
I’d never met anybody as comfortable in her skin as G seemed to be. She wasn’t pretty (though 'beautiful' would apply), she wasn’t conventional, she didn’t dress to impress boys, and she was just about the smartest girl I’d ever met. I admired her. We always got crushes on the same boys, because we admired the same things—some combination of brains, talent and brooding unapproachability, I think. What I remember about G from living with her for six months was her strong personality, her willingness to talk about absolutely anything, in depth and without shame, and her admirable and amazing forthrightness. It was sometimes scary, like if she was angry with me about something. She’d just tell me. She’d walk right into our room, close the door, and say, “Gwen, I’m really angry about such-and-such.” No nastiness, no passive-aggressive barbs, just, ‘this made me angry and I want to talk about it.’. I don’t think I’d ever seen or met another human being who could do that, and I’ve only met a few people since then who can talk about things that way. I was never afraid G wouldn’t be my friend anymore just because she was angry about something. I think maybe they grow them that way in Michigan; folkmew is one of those other amazing people who can say she’s angry without starting WWIII. Growing up in the south, or maybe just with my mother, taught me to be afraid of anger. You could never be sure of what someone would do when they were angry. G never hid my stuff or said shit about me to other people: she just told me she was angry, and then we’d talk about it.
How oddly we remember people, and even more odd I suppose is how we imagine they remember us. The reality of how we are remembered is always different from what we imagine it to be. Do you remember your best friend from high school? What do you think they’d think of your life now? To me, G was amazing. I sense she thinks of herself as pretty ordinary these days, but I still see amazing.
What specifics do I remember about G from high school? I remember her telling me my feet smelled! I remember having ice cream at our on-campus soda shop with her. I remember that “Oh, no!” moment when we’d both get a crush on the same boy – again. I remember wanting to be like her, but that’s not really specific. I remember how comfortable our room was. Everything was everywhere, although you mostly could see the floor. I remember her questioning my line breaks in a poetry workshop. What sticks in my mind from last weekend? How completely comfortable I felt seeing her again, how it was OK to invite her to my house even though it’s a tip, and how it might as well have been about twenty-five minutes (twenty-five very eventful minutes) since the last time I saw her.
G and I briefly touched on the way that former Interlochen students seem to need to stamp on their various internet profiles, “Look at me! I’m still an artist!” I think I must do that too. I know people who won’t go to their high school reunions because they feel they’ve moved on from all that, or because they’re fat, or because they haven’t done ‘enough’ with their lives (whatever that is), and they fear that other people will think less of them because they haven’t done ‘better’ (whatever that is). A few years ago, I probably would have been reluctant to go to a high school reunion. Now I kind of want to. And not just to catch some kid who called me names or made fun of me or gossiped about me and tell her what I think of her. I’m really interested in how we all turned out. I said earlier, in a locked post, that for some folks I think the Facebook game is motivated by schadenfreude. We want to imagine that we’ve done ‘better’ than our old classmates, that we’ve travelled farther, had more experiences, succeeded, made more money, had better kids, lived better lives, whatever. Those kids who teased or ignored us in high school or broke our hearts are now ordinary people like us who work at insurance companies or file things for a living. We want to say, “Sure, I work at an insurance company during the day, but look at THIS!” and then we have pictures of our kids, or scrapbooks of our travels, or the clip of that time we got interviewed at a war protest. We want to show that we’ve accomplished something, anything, with our lives. I think we mostly want to make that statement for ourselves, and many of us are most comfortable with doing that through impressing other people.
But I’m seeing a different angle to it now. I keep getting in touch with people from years and years ago who remember me very differently to the way I remember myself. G remembers me as having a strong personality at a time when I remember feeling very weak and out of touch (and imagining that other people could sense this about me). Lots of people remember me as talented. They don’t seem to remember how awkward I was sure I appeared, how ugly I felt I was, how fat, how imperfect. They remember me passing auditions and going to cool places and being a free spirit (which on a bad day I imagine is just a kind euphemism for ‘SLUT!’).
I’m learning to be comfortable with the reality of my life. I will never be rich. I probably will never be famous. I do what I can to improve the world, work for peace by being peaceful, work for tolerance by being tolerant, try to meet every person as an individual and not as the group(s) they belong to, no matter what those groups might be. So when I look at the people with whom I’m playing the Facebook game, I try to see people, not the kids I went to school with. Some of them don’t seem to have changed a whole lot. Most of them are every bit as ordinary as I am, which is to say they’re not ordinary at all. And probably even back in high school, they weren’t ordinary. They all had, even if they were afraid to express it or channelled it into something I and my filtery perceptions didn’t understand, some unique spark inside them. Even the gifted youth of Interlochen grow up to be insurance salesmen and have children and drive Chevys. Some of them are famous, and most of them are not, and that’s the way we all figured it would turn out when we were there. We just all hoped, I think, that twenty-five years down the road, we’d be the impressive ones. And you know what? We are.
Last week, my high school roommate was in town for a conference, so we arranged to get together on Saturday, when she had a free day, to reconnect with one another and maybe do some touristy things around London. There’s always something to do here in the greatest city in the world (I’m biased!), and quite a lot of it is free. As it turned out, she was already knackered from a morning walking around Trafalgar Square, so we ended up taking a bus back to my house and just spending the day talking and hanging out.
Interlochen Arts Academy is a funny place. As a teenager, I dreamed of going to a place where I would fit in somehow, meet other kids who were like me in terms of talent and disposition, and get more musical and artistic training than I was getting in my public high school. This may have come from too many hours watching the television show based around the film FAME. ;-) It was expensive, so when my mother and I started looking into it, we made the decision that if I were going to go, I should go only for my senior year: that way, I could say I’d graduated from Interlochen, which would look mighty nice on a college application. We prepared an audition tape (a reel-to-reel!), my first experience in a real recording studio. We sent everything off and applied for scholarships at the same time. The phone call came one day while I was at school; my mom called my high school so I could get the news right then. Not only had I been accepted, but the scholarship was generous enough that we could afford it. I don’t remember how I felt that day, but it must have been good. There I was, the biggest loser in the high school world (and sure, I could be more dramatic about that, but I won't be), going to this cool place far away from all the kids who’d known me since I was in kindergarten. Michigan seemed like an exotic foreign country. I’d never set foot there. My single plane journey up to that point had been an international flight to Europe on a choir tour the previous year. Compared to my peers, I was already well-travelled, but I didn’t realise that.
We look at things through such a filter, don’t we? All we have, in the end, are our own perceptions. Even our trust in other people’s perceptions is coloured by those messages we send ourselves. I felt like an outcast at my high school, even though I had friends there. At the time, I felt very different from everybody around me. I wasn’t the smartest kid at my high school, but I hope it isn’t hubris to say I was in the top 1% as far as talent went, in a number of areas. On top of that, I was the kind of kid who really did enjoy spending half a day in a practice room, if I thought my playing or singing would be better in the end. I can’t remember now if I did this self-consciously, though I’m sure there was a bit of that. The summer after my junior year in high school (I was sixteen, for those of you not from the US or unfamiliar with the American school system), I went to the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts. Most states have a programme like this: it’s a six-week summer school for kids who pass an audition and write an essay. If you’re accepted, you get to spend a good part of your summer in the kind of school you like, learning stuff you’re interested in. No maths, no science, all art. Similar programmes exist for kids who are academically talented. In the vocal music department, there were all kinds of different kids, even though they were all from South Carolina; we were as diverse as we could be, given the homogeneity of American culture (really on show in a place like South Carolina, trust me). My roommate went to Bob Jones High School, which is the high school connected with Bob Jones University (Look it up; I’m not going to link to it here). That was surreal. Anyway, the vocal music department held a master class with a regionally famous soprano I’d admired for a long time. I felt I did badly in the master class and bitched about it later to my classmates. One of my fellow students got angry with me. He actually ranted at me for several minutes, but I’ll encapsulate the gist of what he said. He said, “I don’t really have a lot of sympathy for you. From my point of view, it looks like you wake up in the morning, have breakfast, spend two hours in a practice room, go to class, spend two more hours in a practice room, and then you stand up and open your mouth and nobody listens to anything else but you and the rest of us might not even have voices. It was good. I can’t believe you’re taking yourself apart for this. It’s not fair to everybody else in the class to have to listen to somebody like you bitch and moan about not getting it perfect when the rest of us are lucky if we get the notes right.”
That’s kind of how it was for me. I found solitary practice energising. I was a perfectionist. I had mastered the art of repeating tiny little things a million times fairly early in life, and I was willing to do that for long periods of time, if it made me sing a little better.
Interlochen was something else. Four hundred kids, all talented (or alternatively very rich, and sometimes both), all different, all interesting, lived on campus or commuted from not very far away, and we all lived in each other’s hip pockets. It was unavoidable, that intense closeness. I went from being the weirdest person at my high school to being the most ordinary, mundane kid from the provinces anybody had ever met. And I went from being in the top 1% of people, talentwise, to that milling-around-in-the-middle place. All the usual teenage stuff happened at Interlochen, except with added drama. It was no wonder I became disillusioned with the vocal music department there and all the competitive girls in my class. I gravitated toward the relatively safe and small creative writing department, even though I wasn’t close to being the department’s star student. I don’t think I wanted to be. I wanted to learn to write, to read interesting stuff, and to know interesting people. All that happened. I tried not to be from South Carolina, not to have a southern accent, not to be surprised at how many out homosexuals there were. I tried to fit in, for the first time. It wasn’t easy. As a first-year student (even though I was a senior), I had to serve breakfast in the morning, which meant getting up at 6:00 and padding over to the dining hall, sometimes in my slippers, to make toast and serve eggs and bacon. Other kids had better work study assignments, and everybody had to do one. First year students always got stuck in the kitchen. It was a little like the Army in that respect, I guess.
My best friend was from Virginia, and we haven’t spoken in years, but I still miss her. She had a boyfriend whose roommate turned into my sort-of boyfriend, but who later turned out to be gay (no wonder the sex wasn’t so great....). I fell in love with an older guy who left halfway through the year. We still keep in touch, oddly enough. I thought he was amazing. I still do. Even though my relationship with him was short-lived, he’s sort of my signature guy. You know, that guy (or girl) you date in high school who becomes your basis for attractiveness for the rest of your life? He was that guy, and I was completely nuts about him. Distance, though, when you’re that age, is a bitch. We never had sex, but I’m sure it would have been great. I met him again years later at a science fiction convention, and he’s still that guy, only forty. People are comfortably predictable that way, I guess. He probably doesn’t know he was that guy. Well, he might now.
G, the friend I met on Saturday for hangout time, was my third roommate at Interlochen, and during the second half of my year there, she became my best friend, too (other best friend being busy with the boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s roommate being my sort of ex who was also sort of gay. Confusing!). My first roommate asked for a change of room within a month of moving in with me: she said the fact that I didn’t make my bed every morning reflected badly on us. My second roommate was another vocal music student, a year younger than I was, and that was OK while it lasted, but then I met and got to know G. She and I became close friends, probably because we were both in the chorus and in creative writing classes as well, and things just spun from there.
I’d never met anybody as comfortable in her skin as G seemed to be. She wasn’t pretty (though 'beautiful' would apply), she wasn’t conventional, she didn’t dress to impress boys, and she was just about the smartest girl I’d ever met. I admired her. We always got crushes on the same boys, because we admired the same things—some combination of brains, talent and brooding unapproachability, I think. What I remember about G from living with her for six months was her strong personality, her willingness to talk about absolutely anything, in depth and without shame, and her admirable and amazing forthrightness. It was sometimes scary, like if she was angry with me about something. She’d just tell me. She’d walk right into our room, close the door, and say, “Gwen, I’m really angry about such-and-such.” No nastiness, no passive-aggressive barbs, just, ‘this made me angry and I want to talk about it.’. I don’t think I’d ever seen or met another human being who could do that, and I’ve only met a few people since then who can talk about things that way. I was never afraid G wouldn’t be my friend anymore just because she was angry about something. I think maybe they grow them that way in Michigan; folkmew is one of those other amazing people who can say she’s angry without starting WWIII. Growing up in the south, or maybe just with my mother, taught me to be afraid of anger. You could never be sure of what someone would do when they were angry. G never hid my stuff or said shit about me to other people: she just told me she was angry, and then we’d talk about it.
How oddly we remember people, and even more odd I suppose is how we imagine they remember us. The reality of how we are remembered is always different from what we imagine it to be. Do you remember your best friend from high school? What do you think they’d think of your life now? To me, G was amazing. I sense she thinks of herself as pretty ordinary these days, but I still see amazing.
What specifics do I remember about G from high school? I remember her telling me my feet smelled! I remember having ice cream at our on-campus soda shop with her. I remember that “Oh, no!” moment when we’d both get a crush on the same boy – again. I remember wanting to be like her, but that’s not really specific. I remember how comfortable our room was. Everything was everywhere, although you mostly could see the floor. I remember her questioning my line breaks in a poetry workshop. What sticks in my mind from last weekend? How completely comfortable I felt seeing her again, how it was OK to invite her to my house even though it’s a tip, and how it might as well have been about twenty-five minutes (twenty-five very eventful minutes) since the last time I saw her.
G and I briefly touched on the way that former Interlochen students seem to need to stamp on their various internet profiles, “Look at me! I’m still an artist!” I think I must do that too. I know people who won’t go to their high school reunions because they feel they’ve moved on from all that, or because they’re fat, or because they haven’t done ‘enough’ with their lives (whatever that is), and they fear that other people will think less of them because they haven’t done ‘better’ (whatever that is). A few years ago, I probably would have been reluctant to go to a high school reunion. Now I kind of want to. And not just to catch some kid who called me names or made fun of me or gossiped about me and tell her what I think of her. I’m really interested in how we all turned out. I said earlier, in a locked post, that for some folks I think the Facebook game is motivated by schadenfreude. We want to imagine that we’ve done ‘better’ than our old classmates, that we’ve travelled farther, had more experiences, succeeded, made more money, had better kids, lived better lives, whatever. Those kids who teased or ignored us in high school or broke our hearts are now ordinary people like us who work at insurance companies or file things for a living. We want to say, “Sure, I work at an insurance company during the day, but look at THIS!” and then we have pictures of our kids, or scrapbooks of our travels, or the clip of that time we got interviewed at a war protest. We want to show that we’ve accomplished something, anything, with our lives. I think we mostly want to make that statement for ourselves, and many of us are most comfortable with doing that through impressing other people.
But I’m seeing a different angle to it now. I keep getting in touch with people from years and years ago who remember me very differently to the way I remember myself. G remembers me as having a strong personality at a time when I remember feeling very weak and out of touch (and imagining that other people could sense this about me). Lots of people remember me as talented. They don’t seem to remember how awkward I was sure I appeared, how ugly I felt I was, how fat, how imperfect. They remember me passing auditions and going to cool places and being a free spirit (which on a bad day I imagine is just a kind euphemism for ‘SLUT!’).
I’m learning to be comfortable with the reality of my life. I will never be rich. I probably will never be famous. I do what I can to improve the world, work for peace by being peaceful, work for tolerance by being tolerant, try to meet every person as an individual and not as the group(s) they belong to, no matter what those groups might be. So when I look at the people with whom I’m playing the Facebook game, I try to see people, not the kids I went to school with. Some of them don’t seem to have changed a whole lot. Most of them are every bit as ordinary as I am, which is to say they’re not ordinary at all. And probably even back in high school, they weren’t ordinary. They all had, even if they were afraid to express it or channelled it into something I and my filtery perceptions didn’t understand, some unique spark inside them. Even the gifted youth of Interlochen grow up to be insurance salesmen and have children and drive Chevys. Some of them are famous, and most of them are not, and that’s the way we all figured it would turn out when we were there. We just all hoped, I think, that twenty-five years down the road, we’d be the impressive ones. And you know what? We are.
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Date: 2008-10-16 11:39 am (UTC)