rollerskating
writing with an ice pack on each knee
I love this Adrienne Rich quote that opens Sophie Gilbert’s new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves:
Re-vision - the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: It is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
This post is supposed to be about skating and the music I listen to while blissfully cruising around empty parking lots on four wheels but it’s going to take me a minute to get there. Until we bring this post back around to skating, here’s the playlist. It’s a meandering mix of genres that feel good in your ears with wheels strapped to your feet. This is my dream night at the roller rink and I get from Billy Joel to The Cosmopolitans in much less time than you might expect.
(here’s the link to the playlist)
All weekend, I turned the idea of usable nostalgia around in my head. The obvious point left unsaid last week is that when you dig into your past for the usable nostalgia you want to cultivate- the relearning how to be bored, making conscious decisions about disconnecting, and engaging with the analog - reevaluating your past means uncovering darker, more insidious ideas that smother out the good ones like kudzu growing up a hillside. That’s been clear as I dig into Girl on Girl.
I've been working on another post I alluded to last week where I'm thinking about the music I listened to as a teenager and college student. That’s for next time, but one thing that’s struck me as I compile my list of favorite indie songs of the early 2000s: they are all mostly by men. Preteen me was listening to No Doubt and The Cardigans and Fiona Apple, but that had shifted dramatically by the time I was 17. It was a startling revelation but it shouldn’t have been. Men and my relationships to them shaped so much of who I was at that age.
In high school, I felt sure that I was defining myself in opposition to mainstream pop culture. I rolled my eyes at boy bands and the Britney of it all. I had left behind the Seventeen magazines. I wore vintage t-shirts unearthed from the kids section at Goodwill. The idea that there were powerful forces worming their way into my brain anyways, and that those things were shaping me, dulling my sense of self would have seemed ludicrous to me.
I was (thankfully) uninteresting to most of the boys I went to high school with. My only boyfriend lasted exactly one month and he dumped me because he got too busy with karate lessons. This changed in college when I realized with an alarming thrill that there were boys who liked my whole look and were very different from the ones I met in high school. These were sensitive types with glasses, vinyl, and Converse. They talked about literature and handwrote lyrics into notebooks. I've often wryly joked that there is a Venn diagram of men I've dated with one circle titled "Men who play Dungeons and Dragons" and the other "Men who have record collections."
The era that Gilbert so deftly deconstructs created a tightrope I walked at that age between being cool enough, attractive enough and yet still palatable enough for the hipster boys I wanted to date. It didn’t take much for me to realize that part of what boys liked was my body and since I couldn’t reconcile the idea of SlimFast shakes with my PBR lifestyle, I instead developed a self flagellation around food that took years to undo. I sat on bunk beds in dark dorm rooms where boys would show me movies that they deemed “life changing works of art” and I knew the only acceptable response was to look enthralled at their intelligence. And when it came to music, there were some boys who liked that I had taste, but were delighted to discover that my knowledge was wide, but not deep. I could not (and still cannot) rattle off discographies like a music historian. With smugness, they’d say something like, “What do you mean you haven’t heard Driftwood Arrangement by 12 Percent Debra?”1 I hated being shamed, but I knew there was a certain currency in my particular combination of coolness and ignorance. I was cool, but they could always believe they were cooler.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve reflected on the paltry power that making myself smaller gave me back then. In Girl on Girl, Gilbert shares her own experience writing, “At sixteen…I didn’t discern any of this. What was obvious to me was that power, for women, was sexual in nature. There was no other kind, or none worth having.” Back then, I thought I was separate from those forces and I used to scoff at Britney Spears in her schoolgirl outfit in the “Baby One More Time” video. And yet, at some point freshman year, a fraternity hosted a “Catholic Schoolgirl” party and like everyone else, I stood shivering in the cold in a plaid skirt with a can of beer and Franz Ferdinand blasting over the sound system. The same thing, just repackaged as “cooler” but equally as devastating to my young sense of self.
It's taken me at least a decade to make progress untangling the mess of body issues and inadequacies embedded into my psyche in the late 90s and early 2000s. I’ll be 40 this year and have much less concern for how people perceive me anymore. My body feels like my own whereas for my younger self, it always felt distinctly separate. I’m more settled into who I am. To requote Adrienne Rich, “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.” A small part of my own personal critical reexamination has come through finding joy in my body through roller skating. I told you we’d get there eventually.
I started skating a few years ago after a friendship breakup. I was anguished and desperate to exorcise the feeling out of my body. I wanted to pour all my rage into something physical. I wanted there to be at least a small threat of injury. So I bought roller skates.
I started skating in my living room. And then the back porch. Within a few weeks I was on tennis courts and parking lots. Skating not only helped me sort my feelings, it made me feel powerful in my body. There’s nothing like looking down and seeing concrete blurring beneath you and feeling your thigh muscles work as you pick up speed. I love pulling off a trick for the first time. Even more than that, I love the falling and scraped knees and shredded palms and the constant picking yourself up to try again.
I went skating this weekend. I felt like I needed to do something with all the loose thoughts on nostalgia jangling around in my head.
The playlist linked above is a combination of my many real-life skating playlists edited down into something shareable. On a freshly paved parking lot, I queued it up and laced my skates. I was tentative at first. This was my first skate of the season and I always forget just how heavy skates are. But soon, I started picking up speed. I skated faster and my thighs ached and my knees hurt and I thought about Gilbert’s book and all of my own baggage and pushed myself even faster
Cruising along at a steady clip, I turned a corner during Fleetwood Mac and hit a break in the pavement. A split second later I was laid out on the concrete. My headphones were slung across the parking lot, my hands felt numb and gritty, and I laid there trying to estimate just how much damage I’d done. I had to scoot my way to edge of the lot and text Paul to come get me. This is how he found me. Bloody, sweaty, and laughing like a maniac. Now one kneecap is swollen and both are turning purple. It hurts like hell but I feel pretty damn great. Enjoy the songs, see you next time.
from the archives
You can’t go wrong with skating to disco and if that’s your vibe, you might like this one. Of course, everything I’ve ever added in on my mega-mixtape list.
I hope at least one of you Googled to see if this was a real song.