This started out as a post about R.E.M. I have 299 R.E.M. songs on my iPod and I've been listening to them for the past couple of days at work.
R.E.M. has been my favorite band since the mid-90s when I was a freshman in High School. I fell in love with them sometime between Automatic for the People and Monster.
At the same time I was falling in love with R.E.M., the show My So-Called Life debuted.
Somehow, in my mind, the two will always be inexplicably linked.
And this is where this post takes an wildly different turn than I originally intended it to...
Imagine being surrounded by kids who loved grunge or hip hop and telling them that you favorite band was a bunch of middle aged guys from Athens, Ga. My love for Michael's melancholy voice and nimble lyrics made me feel intellectually superior to my peers. In High School, I was invisible. Loving R.E.M. made me feel like I stood out.
I fancied myself a brunette Angela Chase--cool beyond words with a sweet, fragile sensibility. The truth is, I was a lot more like Brian Krakow--socially awkward, geeky, and pretending not to care what other people think while wanting desperately to be accepted.
Like every teenager ever, I struggled to identify who I was and to accept the parts of myself that made me feel different from my peers. I was bookish and quiet and didn't dress quite right. I didn't have perfect hair or social graces. I didn't go to football games or dances or to parties.
Honestly, I kind of carried my pain like a cross I had to bear. I got an almost sick amount of pleasure from being on the outside looking in. I felt intensely lonely sometimes, but I didn't do anything to change my situation. I could've cut my hair or bought new clothes. I could've gone to football games. I could've worked harder to "fit in." Instead, I reveled in my outcast-ness. But I wasn't even really an outcast, truthfully. An outcast would've been made fun of or treated poorly. Me? I was invisible to most of the people I went to school with. Just another body they bumped into in the hallway between math class and lunch.
R.E.M. spoke to me then, made me feel normal in much the same way that watching My So-Called Life did. Angela Chase and Brian Krakow made me feel like it was okay to want to be liked and to hurt when I not only wasn't like but also wasn't noticed. R.E.M. spoke to the quiet place in me that felt uncomfortable in my own skin like nothing else I had ever heard.
I don't actually remember what my point was. When I started writing, this was going to be an ode to R.E.M. Somewhere along the way, though, it became a blog post about me. It kind of feels like an ode to the 16-year old me who just wanted to be noticed.
