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jianantonicI've spent the last couple of hours skimming through the last two years of my blog looking for a manifesto that I wrote once upon a time to share it with Theri. Except I didn't find it and now I'm thinking I probably never wrote it. I should be more consistent with my use of LJ tags.
What I was looking for was a post I thought I'd written about Hanson, and my long standing love for them. My fandom is no secret, but I guess maybe I never really have told the whole story. Since I've got nothing else going on at the moment, might as well start at the beginning...
When I was 13, I started sleeping on the family room sofa in my parents' house so I could have the TV on all night. I'd usually have it on MTV or VH1, back when they still played music videos, at least late at night and early in the morning. In the spring of 1997, my eighth grade year, I was settling into bed one night when I first saw the video for "Mmmbop." My initial reaction was that I loved the song, and also, I can't tell if these are guys or girls or a combination, but if they're boys, they're really hot...
So I jumped online on my 2400bps dial up modem and confirmed that they were dudes. Fantastic! Over the course of the next few days, other girls at my school started discovering Hanson as well, and I bonded with these girls over our Hanson love. It was my first experience with a real celebrity crush, and boy did I get into it. I was caddying and babysitting a lot that year, so I had lots of money to spend. I started off buying the Hanson CD, of course, but also a few magazines advertising fold-out posters. Do you know how many of those magazines are sold each month? None of them have text or articles of any kind -- just zillions of pictures of whatever hotties are making teenage girls drool. I must've bought several dozen of those magazines. I was the only one in my group of friends with my own spending money, so my room became the Hanson shrine, and they would come over to worship.
Molly W. moved into our neighborhood that summer, and Emily G. and I became fast friends with her, especially since she, too, loved Hanson. She was the youngest and I was the oldest, so we divided the boys between the three of us. Molly got Zac, Emily got Taylor, and I turned my affections to Isaac (even though I secretly thought Taylor was the hottest, and would've totally gone behind my best friend's back and made out with him if the opportunity ever presented itself). It wasn't long before my walls were completely covered in Hanson posters. With no more room on the walls, I started hanging them from the ceiling. Not on the ceiling, but hanging down -- in columns. With more posters taped to the ones above, and to the backs of the other posters. It was insane. I think at the height of our obsession, my room was decorated with 400 pictures of Hanson.
I do not deny that I was out of my mind.
I didn't sleep at all that summer. Instead, my friends would spend the night and we would stay up all night together, playing Hanson on my stereo with the television on mute, flipping between VH1 and MTV, waiting for them to play a video. Never mind that we had all their videos recorded and could play them over and over if we wanted...that's just not how we did it. We also subscribed to various unofficial newsletters run by other psychotic teenagers so we could follow the band's every move, or at least know when there'd be a new TV segment or magazine feature. I'm more than a little ashamed to admit I even wrote some fanfic. And by "some," I mean "an embarassing amount."
I also spent hours composing achingly honest emails to Isaac, confessing my love. We even made videos of ourselves dancing to their songs. Thank the lord I never actually mailed them to the band, as had been our intention. (I found these videos in a closet a few years ago. MOST EMBARASSING THING EVER.)
After that summer, I started high school. I met lots of new people, including some boys that were fascinating enough to distract me from my Isaac obsession. I started hanging out with a crowd of pseudo-goth kids, and was dating Simon by the end of the first couple of weeks of school. (One of the main reasons I fell for Simon was his long brown hair...sorta like Isaac...) Trying desperately to be seen as cool by my new friends and boyfriend, I played down my Hanson obsession. I was honest about being a fan, but never really divulged just how much of a fan. With school activities back in full swing, my friends and I no longer had the time to get together and let our obsessions feed off each other like we had in the summer, so the intensity died way down. I still loved Hanson, but they stopped dominating my mind, thankfully.
I've kept up with the band ever since, and I still love their albums. They've always written and played all their own music, which I've always thought made my choice of boy band obsessions somewhat more respectable. I truly believe that they are great musicians (okay, "Mmmbop" isn't exactly a masterpiece, but they were children!) and when I saw them live in 2007, they put on an incredible show.
Looking back on the summer of 1997 is fun for me. I was so miserably in love with this band -- I knew I would probably never even meet Isaac, but I was fueled by a fantasy of happily ever after with him. It was optimistic agony. Sharing that whole experience as well as my ongoing love with Emily has been great. We've always been best friends, but this experience of going crazy together was a truly defining era for us.
Everyone always said it was just a phase and we'd grow out of it. We're not the ridiculous teenagers we were in 1997, but I'm actually pretty proud that I didn't grow out of it entirely, that I'm still a Hanson fan. I mean, wouldn't it be more ridiculous to be as insanely in love as I was, only to snap out of it and stop caring altogether?
There's also a sort of chicken/egg situation with Hanson and my attraction to guys with long hair, but I haven't gotten over my love for either, and it's been 12 years now...
Peace.
What I was looking for was a post I thought I'd written about Hanson, and my long standing love for them. My fandom is no secret, but I guess maybe I never really have told the whole story. Since I've got nothing else going on at the moment, might as well start at the beginning...
When I was 13, I started sleeping on the family room sofa in my parents' house so I could have the TV on all night. I'd usually have it on MTV or VH1, back when they still played music videos, at least late at night and early in the morning. In the spring of 1997, my eighth grade year, I was settling into bed one night when I first saw the video for "Mmmbop." My initial reaction was that I loved the song, and also, I can't tell if these are guys or girls or a combination, but if they're boys, they're really hot...
So I jumped online on my 2400bps dial up modem and confirmed that they were dudes. Fantastic! Over the course of the next few days, other girls at my school started discovering Hanson as well, and I bonded with these girls over our Hanson love. It was my first experience with a real celebrity crush, and boy did I get into it. I was caddying and babysitting a lot that year, so I had lots of money to spend. I started off buying the Hanson CD, of course, but also a few magazines advertising fold-out posters. Do you know how many of those magazines are sold each month? None of them have text or articles of any kind -- just zillions of pictures of whatever hotties are making teenage girls drool. I must've bought several dozen of those magazines. I was the only one in my group of friends with my own spending money, so my room became the Hanson shrine, and they would come over to worship.
Molly W. moved into our neighborhood that summer, and Emily G. and I became fast friends with her, especially since she, too, loved Hanson. She was the youngest and I was the oldest, so we divided the boys between the three of us. Molly got Zac, Emily got Taylor, and I turned my affections to Isaac (even though I secretly thought Taylor was the hottest, and would've totally gone behind my best friend's back and made out with him if the opportunity ever presented itself). It wasn't long before my walls were completely covered in Hanson posters. With no more room on the walls, I started hanging them from the ceiling. Not on the ceiling, but hanging down -- in columns. With more posters taped to the ones above, and to the backs of the other posters. It was insane. I think at the height of our obsession, my room was decorated with 400 pictures of Hanson.
I do not deny that I was out of my mind.
I didn't sleep at all that summer. Instead, my friends would spend the night and we would stay up all night together, playing Hanson on my stereo with the television on mute, flipping between VH1 and MTV, waiting for them to play a video. Never mind that we had all their videos recorded and could play them over and over if we wanted...that's just not how we did it. We also subscribed to various unofficial newsletters run by other psychotic teenagers so we could follow the band's every move, or at least know when there'd be a new TV segment or magazine feature. I'm more than a little ashamed to admit I even wrote some fanfic. And by "some," I mean "an embarassing amount."
I also spent hours composing achingly honest emails to Isaac, confessing my love. We even made videos of ourselves dancing to their songs. Thank the lord I never actually mailed them to the band, as had been our intention. (I found these videos in a closet a few years ago. MOST EMBARASSING THING EVER.)
After that summer, I started high school. I met lots of new people, including some boys that were fascinating enough to distract me from my Isaac obsession. I started hanging out with a crowd of pseudo-goth kids, and was dating Simon by the end of the first couple of weeks of school. (One of the main reasons I fell for Simon was his long brown hair...sorta like Isaac...) Trying desperately to be seen as cool by my new friends and boyfriend, I played down my Hanson obsession. I was honest about being a fan, but never really divulged just how much of a fan. With school activities back in full swing, my friends and I no longer had the time to get together and let our obsessions feed off each other like we had in the summer, so the intensity died way down. I still loved Hanson, but they stopped dominating my mind, thankfully.
I've kept up with the band ever since, and I still love their albums. They've always written and played all their own music, which I've always thought made my choice of boy band obsessions somewhat more respectable. I truly believe that they are great musicians (okay, "Mmmbop" isn't exactly a masterpiece, but they were children!) and when I saw them live in 2007, they put on an incredible show.
Looking back on the summer of 1997 is fun for me. I was so miserably in love with this band -- I knew I would probably never even meet Isaac, but I was fueled by a fantasy of happily ever after with him. It was optimistic agony. Sharing that whole experience as well as my ongoing love with Emily has been great. We've always been best friends, but this experience of going crazy together was a truly defining era for us.
Everyone always said it was just a phase and we'd grow out of it. We're not the ridiculous teenagers we were in 1997, but I'm actually pretty proud that I didn't grow out of it entirely, that I'm still a Hanson fan. I mean, wouldn't it be more ridiculous to be as insanely in love as I was, only to snap out of it and stop caring altogether?
There's also a sort of chicken/egg situation with Hanson and my attraction to guys with long hair, but I haven't gotten over my love for either, and it's been 12 years now...
Peace.
