Tanya

An Education

I grew up overseas, a bookish tomboy with literature providing escape from the frequent bullying. Countless hours were spent reading Ray Bradbury, Alexander Dumas, C. S. Lewis and fantasy and fairy tales from across the globe; dreaming of wild planes of the Australian outback, or the Little Prince on his lonely adventure from planet to planet; writing poems and short stories. And then my family moved to the United States where I enrolled in high school as a nervous immigrant teenager with almost no social skills. If I was a little withdrawn before, this pretty much cemented it.

TV helped me a great deal during the awkward years of immigrant adolescence, providing an outlet and serving as my American pop culture education. I watched everything: from Nick at Nite reruns of Taxi and Wings, to My So Called Life, X-Files, and Star Trek: TNG. It was because of the latter that I went to sleep every night dreaming of being aboard a ship floating through space, part of an intrepid crew of explorers who did not value any particular creed, language or gender over another: all were welcome to revel in the wonders of the Universe if they were brave and passionate. RPGs on AOL forums, as well as a community of users who wrote short stories and provided supportive critiques, served as a creative outlet for my dreams.

High school was about Anne Rice and Tamora Pierce (belatedly), as well as incessant quoting of Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part I and Monty Python’s The Holy Grail. After graduating at 17 I dyed my hair and enrolled in a community college. There I made new friends, other outcasts and dreamers. I discovered Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Clive Barker and John Waters. I transferred to a university where I wrote pompous essays of media criticism that seemed brilliant at the time. I worked part time at a library and at a hipster video rental store, where I fell in love with art house films (Terry Gilliam, Pedro Almodovar and Sally Potter, in particular), Twin Peaks, and BBC TV shows. Alongside my pop culture education, a more subtle and indelible development was taking place. I found that I did not grow up to be the type of woman who believes in outmoded ideals of masculine/feminine roles in the society; I am tenaciously opinionated (which, ironically, is a very Russian quality), and not likely to ever subdue myself to fit any particular expectation. I’ve come into my own, and my own has much to say.

To this day, I have a fondness for pop culture, particularly books and movies, as well as a love for a good sitcom or crime drama. However, I am quite aware that we live in a dichotomous society that hungers for underdogs who’ll tell their story, yet still manages to denigrate them. Pop culture makes our daily lives more entertaining, but it also breeds insecurities and creates false perceptions and ideals among viewers. This is why I am excited to be part of the Geekquality collective: it will be like an open-ended paean about my love/hate relationship with modern mass media.

~ Tanya