Another Post About Insomnia

As some of you may know, I have really bad insomnia. a professor at one of the various art schools I've attended told me I was lucky to have insomnia because it meant I had a lot of time on my hands. I wanted to punch him.

It hasn't been so bad lately. I just have to be careful not to indulge in spending the whole day in bed. The best way to sleep at night is not to sleep during the day.

I was talking with T last night about how, as a high school student, I had been confused by what it meant to be a girl in a subculture. For one thing, whether you were a boy or a girl in a subculture, even if you weren't conforming to mainstream society, you were conforming to your particular subculture. (I never subscribed to any particular subculture. I hung out with the artists, the freaks, the nerds, the druggies, the riot grrrls, the fencers [even though I didn't fence], and the English teachers, to name a few.) But the fact that subscribing to a subculture is its own brand of conformity is common knowledge to any teenager with two brain cells. What interested-- and perplexed, and frustrated-- me was that these girls in the subcultures (besides the riot grrrls) who were supposedly flouting "the establishment" were still expected to conform to mainstream ideas about expressing their femininity. For example, they could have a blue mohawk, but they had better still be skinny, have big boobs, and shave their legs and armpits. Now I know it for what it is: subcultures that are defined by boys will not SUBvert sexism. It was true in the pre-women's lib '60's radical groups like the SDS and it's true now, or at least it was in the '90s.