Love at First Sight

I was new to Washington and sixteen years old. Inevitably the question of which college I would go to came up. While elite colleges were definitely not going to happen with my middling-to-decent grades, I was considering all the major Washington State colleges. One of my first trips to Seattle was to visit the University of Washington campus. While I was entranced by Seattle itself, nothing about the University of Washington as a college stood out to me as particularly compelling.

Of course I would go to college. My mom and father had — they had met as undergraduates at the University of Florida. I was primed from a young age to be an overachiever and a prodigy. I was trained on several instruments, had been in many youth orchestras, and had been signed up for lessons in all manners of disciplines and activities. I think it was part immigrant mentality on my mom’s part and part American Dream — I had to be the best at everything. A source of later depression would be how I failed on this front, but that is another story for another time.

I was in eleventh grade and exploring college options when a school counselor showed me a pamphlet on The Evergreen State College in Olympia. I asked my mom to take me down for a campus visit and met with an academic counselor there. The sprawling campus with Brutalist architecture jutting out appealed to me, as did the sight of many counterculture-looking youths. I drooled over the course catalog — which seemed rife with intellectual possibility. I was already hungry for knowledge and culture. I was also well aware that I didn’t fit in in “society” and this sure seemed like the place for a weirdo like me.

Later that day my mom and I went to a pizzeria in the downtown. While we were eating our pizza, I noticed the coolest person I had ever seen walk in. She was a big lady, bedecked in loud punk attire. Pigtails in her hair, a striped shirt and other signifiers of punk. She ate a slice of pizza, apparently not giving a fuck. A fat person eating food in public, not hiding her body in a moomoo. She didn’t tuck herself away in a corner to eat, but did it in full view of the entire restaurant. The insidious lessons I had learned about what it meant to be a woman in public and whose body was socially acceptable seemed to fall apart before me. That was the moment I fell in love with Olympia. I decided I wanted to go to Evergreen. I applied and was accepted.

**

I first encountered Mr. Dorsey in the hallways of my high school. He noticed my oversized Smiths t-shirt and struck up a conversation with me. I worked part-time in the school library at the time and when he came in, he would make an effort to ask me about what other music I liked and indicated he didn’t particularly approve of The Smiths. Eventually I found myself in his classroom, the walls of which were covered in all manners of rock paraphernalia and counter-cultural artifacts. SUB POP logos were all over the place, and his bookshelves stocked with obscure art-related books. He lent me Please Kill Me, the pivotal punk oral history. Not surprisingly, I fell completely in love with Mr. Dorsey.

But this isn’t a love story about my future English teacher. One of the most important pieces of things he shared with me was a CD of Le Tigre’s self-titled debut album. “I think you should listen to this”, he said. I turned it over in my hands quizzically. I told him I would definitely listen.

Le Tigre was the first explicitly feminist band I had ever heard. Hearing them coincided with my concurrent discovery of Olympia, Washington and uncovering more feminist-orientated musicians. I was a recent Washington State transplant, but ate up every piece of Seattle-area arts I could by picking up copies of periodicals like the Rocket and The Stranger. I combed the reviews and took stock of all the bands I could. My first local music purchase was Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out in the Auburn Fred Meyer.

**

I struggled with making friends most of my life, but made a friend with a senior-age girl named Lily. She had a car, and we would make lengthy trips to Seattle, going to restaurants, to random Denny’s, to the ocean, to anywhere really. She was clearly troubled, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I certainly had no conception of my own troubled mind that would become readily apparent in a few years. For now we were both exulting in the freedom afforded to youth and a sense of liberation. My own liberation was tied to my burgeoning feminism, mostly thanks to music like Le Tigre. ESPECIALLY Le Tigre. It was tied to feeling the perpetual weird girl in school that no one really noticed, stewing in my own fantasies and obsessions.

**

During one trip to Seattle we were listening to Le Tigre’s “What’s Yr Take on Cassavetes?”.

“What’s a misogynist?” I asked Lily. I also wondered who Cassavetes was, but knew enough to know he was a filmmaker (I also had a long background as a budding cinephile at this point).

“I don’t know” she said. She had a copy of a dictionary in her car. We both worked at the library, so this was not particularly surprising. I recited the meaning — someone who hated women.

Thanks to King County Library’s abundant compact disc collection, I was able to put all kinds of CDs on hold. I was ravenously devouring all the music I could at the time. I was able to take out a copy of Bikini Kills’ Reject All American. I brought it along on one of our many road trips. I played the title song repeatedly on this particular trip. At one point we sang/screamed all along. “RE-JECT ALL AMERICAN/RE-JECT”.

Within two years Lily would vanish one day, consumed by mental illness, and would try to kill herself. Within that same year, I would have my first panic attack, the first incident in one of many years of trouble with my own mind that would come to define my adulthood. But for a brief moment in time, we were both free. All sound tracked by some of the most unabashed feminist music ever recorded.

**

Olympia, Washington was a paradise to my 18-year old self. It was 2001, no long after the musical and artistic heyday that would come to define the city. I arrived at a time still reeling from a town that only a few years prior had hosted events like the International Pop Underground and the first Ladyfest. Bands associated with the most famous acts and record labels still played. One of my first shows was Dub Narcotic Sound System and the last ever performance of Unwound.

I loved the music, but I also became entranced with its politics and the feminist focus of the scene. Olympia was ground zero for Riot Grrrl (along with Washington D.C.) and had fostered a culture responsible for my beloved Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney. I felt safe. It was a haven. It instilled me both a do it yourself and feminist, political sensibility that stayed with me for the rest of my life.

I wasn’t able to maintain the freedom and exultation of my years prior to the onset of my mental illness. This time also coincided with troubling relationships that brought me down from the heights of my youthful artistic and spiritual liberation. Since the first time I saw that punk woman in the pizzeria, my own depression and low self-worth butted up against the ideals I saw in her. If only I could give zero fucks. I would find it wouldn’t be easy to do.