do something pretty while you can
I don’t remember what my first John Green book was, or if I read it on the year it was published. It might have been Looking For Alaska, which if it was I wouldn’t have read it on the publication year because it was published in 2005 and I’m pretty sure I read it in 2006 or 2007. It could have been An Abundance of Katherines, in which case it was definitely in 2007 and I read Looking For Alaska in the same year. I wasn’t as young as the protagonists in either book, of course, but I was still young-ish, and the wounds from my teenaged years were still raw and bleeding. I was in a lot of pain, but I also still had a bit of hope. You know how in the Breakfast Club Ally Sheedy’s character says, “when you grow up, your heart dies” or something like that? Mine hadn’t died. Yet.
The thing about me - which I realise now is related to being on the spectrum - is that I don’t feign disinterest (and when I do it makes me extremely uncomfortable) and I love things unironically and when that thing is a special interest, I love it obsessively. I’ve mentioned before how this complete lack of masking when it comes to my special interests have lost me friends. It’s dorky. It’s nerdy. It also makes me relate to a lot of John Green’s characters, because many of them, too, love things obsessively and unironically.
(And have been called unrealistic teens because of it, and because of the way they speak, which was not unlike how I remember my own teen self and at least a couple of my friends who were also considered too dorky/nerdy by my other friends, so I believe this is similar to the people that say “I didn’t know any gay people in high school, so it’s unrealistic that the group of friends in this book has more than one gay person!”)
I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprised that I read Paper Towns when it came out in 2008, and when 2012 rolled around and The Fault in Our Stars was published and I was a YA buyer where I work, I was obsessively and unironically a John Green fan and a nerdfighter, and had a DFTBA display in the store. The characters in these two books were less relatable to me, but these books did have an impact on me, and the latter did make me cry because how could it not? I gave a copy to my sister, and it was her favourite book for a long while. It was still in her top ten when she passed away.
There is this John Green quote that got circulated a lot, but it isn’t from his books - it was from vlogbrothers, the youtube channel he shared with his brother Hank Green:
“Because nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.”
This was always what I felt about being called nerd, even though I’ve lost friends because of my being overenthusiastic - about anime, about books, about riot grrrl music, about American history even, because these were all things I was obsessed about back when I still thought that these people who thought liking things made one a wanker were my friends.
Inspired by the vlogbrother’s original purpose, my sister and I kept a secret blog only accessible and readable to both of us. We would each write on a different day of the week, sharing the interesting (a patient who swallowed a needle, observations from a trip to Kyoto) and the mundane (new sneakers, the cat is being cute). When she passed, I continued writing sometimes - about Arissa, or books I was reading I knew she would like, that kind of thing. After awhile the fact that she would never write back became too much, so I stopped.
I think around this time I also stopped watching the vlogbrothers, because I now had a pain that Hank and John Green wouldn’t understand (yet), and knowing that made it hard to see them continue to send video messages to each other. For the most part, I stopped reading books that I could engage with philosophically the way I did with John Green’s books, and I stopped reading books that has any level of conflict or pain that would make me too uncomfortable. I used to like to reckon with my internal struggles and anxiety and depression - I wanted to see it laid bare and dissected, analysed so I could understand its whats and hows and whys. I wanted to understand how different people react to the same feelings, and I wanted to understand, and learn how to relate to things I haven’t experienced and couldn’t imagine. As a teenager and a young adult, that was (mostly) how I read.
After my sister, I still read some of these other books because, well, work. But when I chose what to read, I only wanted to read books that made me happy. The same goes with other media - which I guess was why my interest in the MCU quickly veered into the area of special interest, and the same with comics and romance novels and ANYTHING that depicts queer joy or gender euphoria because wtf are these things and how does one experience them irl while living in this shit place? Okay that’s just my period cramps and accompanying gender dysphoria talking. Probably.
In 2017, five years after the publication of his last book, John Green released Turtles All the Way Down. I wasn’t excited, really. I wasn’t anything back then. But I did get a copy (a signed one where he wrote DFTBA, too), and I did read it - for work. The “event” we held had only two participants, and I couldn’t bring myself to care, although it did end up killing all future in-store book club events. I probably should reread the book now, because I don’t remember much about late 2015 to mid 2018, but I do remember thinking it was better than his previous books that I read, and that the depiction of anxiety was spot on.
As a member of nerdfighteria, and a follower of Athena/Ioun/insert-your-wisdom-goddess-here, I used to read because it was the best way for me to absorb information, to learn more about the world I live in and all the things that made it amazing. For the last few years, almost nothing about the world felt amazing to me, and I only enjoyed consuming media that would have me escape it. I guess this is still true now, for the most part. Part of this media consumption includes watching a LOT of youtube - mostly of people reading memes, or people reacting to shows I’ve watched a million times so that I could remember what it was like watching it for the first time. And every now and then, a vlogbrothers video would pop up in my dashboard, or recommended videos list, or whatever that thing is when you hit the home button on the app.
I usually ignore it, even when I had started watching a lot of video essays and reading nonfiction again. Even when I’d forgotten why I stopped watching until I really thought about it. But a few weeks ago, I clicked on a Hank video (I tend to prefer Hank’s videos because they’re so informational, while John’s tend to me more philosophical?) and then I clicked next, and next, and next. I had watched a month’s worth of vlogbrothers content before I remembered that John Green released a nonfiction book based on a podcast that I didn’t know existed until the book came out, and I hadn’t bought or read the book because as it was a nonfiction, I didn’t feel obligated to do so for work. So - I started listening to the Anthropocene Reviewed podcast, and a few episodes in, I am realising that if this was what the book was, then I know without having read it that it is my favourite John Green book.
From sometime in 2018 onwards, thanks to Arashi (who also brought me out of deep depression in 2009), I was learning to love things enthusiastically again. I learned a lot of new things, and some of the things I was learning was about myself, and all of the things I learned about myself helped me live better, or more intentionally. But.
In the issue of Sandman where Dream goes down to Hell to get his helm back from the demon that stole it, Morpheus says, “What power would hell have if those imprisoned here would not be able to dream of heaven?”
I think - and this is more connected to the state the world is in, and the queerphobia I read about on a daily basis, and my complete lack of faith in anything getting better in this country for those of us who are mutants - that for me, “hope” is a word reserved for some things only. Like, I hope I stretch my bank balance to next Tuesday. Or I hope I’ll get over this cough someday. Or I hope next month I have enough good-mental-health days that I can do things that are sensory nightmares without it rendering me useless for the rest of the day. Sometimes I have less “serious” hopes, hopes that aren’t real because they’re kinda morbid, that are probably better left unsaid. When it comes to dreaming of getting out of hellscapes, though, I don’t know if I have any of that left. I also don’t know if listening the The Anthrocopene Reviewed gave me that, but it did give me back a sense of wonder, maybe?
I remember being at a bus stop after school, anxious af, and everything feeling too noisy and too much, but still feeling very much in love with the world as I listen to Bikini Kill on my walkman and scribble nonsense in my notebook to put in my zine later. And then, of course, I got home and read about Matthew Shepard. These days, every day brings me a Matthew Shepard-level bit of news. But I guess John Green’s words also remind me of the other things, like the existence of cats, observing the very large group of monitor lizards that live in the river behind my apartment, and that old man I just saw who stopped while walking in the mall to wait for his wife, and took her hand before they continued walking together.
“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.” - John Green
I’ve fallen out of love with the world a long time ago, but Arashi, and postcards, and Marvel comics, and yes, John Green, are all helping me find things to love about it again.
If I were doing my own series of reviews, which I might whenever I don’t have anything else I want to write about, I would give John Green (as a public figure) four stars out of five.
The title of this newsletter is from the song “We Rule the School” by Belle and Sebastian. I feel like this song, as well as the Bill & Ted motto “be excellent to each other”, encapsulates the general vibe of the vlogbrothers/nerdfighteria.