Fridays Realisation

I am so glad facebook was not around when I was a teenage girl because now I have much less reminders of how seriously I took my slightly sadly life.

I happened to come across the facebook profile of a girl I sort of know. She is 11 years younger than me and she pretty much owns a fully paid up membership to the club of "I am so Emo and Goth Right Now". Along with a whole album of her in eyeliner and fringes frowning at teh camera looking So Hard Core Right Now. And statements about hating people and being hated and hating life and hearts all the way through the text.

 

(Side note: ever notice that 90% of teenage fiction in the bookstore contains some element to do with the supernatural - Co-incidence?)

I feel a little sad and yet feel a little amused at how she portrays herself mostly because she reminds me of being a teenager. Trying to find a balance between being yourself and trying so hard to copy all the cool things about your friends.

It paid off in the end I guess.

I gained a ton of self-confidence from seeing and copying how my friends interacted with people of the male persuasion.

I learned about responsible underage drinking (does stealing teaspoons of cooking brandy count?).

I learned about how listening and going with what your friends say does not always pay off. One evening in the middle of August in a borrowed short skirt results in a week of unhappy sniffles.

I watched friends mope over boys and learned that break-ups can be pathetic and drawn out and resolved to avoid doing that at all costs.

Most of all I saw how annoying it is when people copy you and I resolved to figure out what I loved all for myself. I wish I could say I succeeded.

Funny enough I can attribute a lot of who I am and who my friends are today to one single person. The weird thing is that even tho he is dating the Lindt Fairy and thus firmly part of my social circle, I don't think that either of us would have ever thought that he would be a pivotal person in the creation of Frank2010.

(This revelation is unfolding in my head as I type it)

 I turned from boy bands to enjoying rock music under his influence. Rock music took me to being friends with other people and wild nights at The Doors . (wait this is me, No so wild nights at the Doors)

 The timeline of how The Gang came together stems from our friendship and the subsequent his group of friends and my group of friends becoming friends... and then joined friends friends...

Okay I only have two reasons so far but I look back to who I was at 14 or 15 and I am so relived to not have a posted-on-the-internet reminder of who I was. I guess the reward is that easily influenced teenage girls eventually do grow up and become not easily influenced wiser young women eventually. We'll just roll our eyes at them in the meanwhile... (I would so add a picture of Frank1999 if I had one right now)