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Michelle is a New York City native, but is
currently in exile in the fair state of Connecticut, getting an education or
something like that. She grew up in downtown Manhattan and was a happy
child until, oh, say, middle school, when that peculiar synergy of
immaturity, hormones, urban grit and popular culture molded her into an
adolescent that was, to oversimplify things a bit--less happy, more tense,
angrier, less sensitive, more argumentative, more judgmental, and a little
more perceptive. |
Thus she progressed naturally into the world of
zinedom. She became involved with zines at the age of fourteen, around
the time that she discovered that she could transform her teenage bitterness
and irony into a paper format and thus efficiently distribute her angst-ridden
rhetoric among complete strangers. This discovery coincided with the beginning
of high school--a very unique and enlightening chapter in her little
"Bildungsroman." There were the relatively normal teen
phenomena--getting attached to certain genres of underground music, going to
shows, wearing different clothes. But more importantly, freshman year
pried her eyes open to the existence of others. It was the snobbery and
pettiness of junior high and the frustration of young adulthood mashed
together, but there was something else under the surface--a realization that
she wasn't the center of the universe; that sometimes she didn't have a right
to be angry and condescending; that the rest of humanity actually had
interesting things to offer, even if they did wear trendy clothes or consume
designer drugs or what have you. She saw there were experiences to be had
that didn't entail self-destruction or subservience to convention, though there
were also plenty of other worthy experiences that did. As usual, there
were people on her wavelength and people who pissed her off to no end, but for
some reason, she found herself accepting the good along with the bad, letting
go of a tiny bit of her disillusionment, and embracing the teen age by letting
herself be a stupid, average kid once in a while, instead of just a tormented,
precocious victim of society.
Her first zine, Inverted, reflected this subtle shift in attitude, with
essays on "neo-feminism" (as if she even knew what that really was at
the time), subculture, the question of individual identity and weird things she
found on the internet. The zine derided the human condition and yet the
process of creating it inspired her to like life more than she had in several
years. The operation was put to sleep sometime during her sophomore year
of high school, due partially to lack of motivation, but also to a other
commitments and a general feeling of blah towards the way her work was turning
out, as she was her own harshest critic. After that, she continued writing
articles, poetry and fiction, some of which has been published, most of which
is sitting in some dingy corner of her bedroom. In the last two years of high
school, she underwent another large and important phase of her emotional and
intellectual maturation. Strange experiences in her mental and social
life (which are too complex to delve into here) pushed her again into extreme
cynicism. But as she had a couple of years earlier, she emerged with a
clearer outlook. It was not until her senior year of high school that she
decided that it was time to develop a new creative outlet, one that embodied
her interest in different kinds of media, youth culture, weird music and angry
people. In fact, she had realized that she had grown up quite a bit since the
acid and cacophonous days of Inverted, and she wished to etch yet
another rabble-rousing notch into her recorded history. What else but a zine
could really do the trick? And so little Michelle embarked on yet another
mission in her bumpy journey towards her true identity, armed with all the
love, hate, ferocity and curiosity that she had collected along the way.