a peek into my high school photobucket

emo music & growing up

The oldest image in my Photobucket is from 2006, the year I discovered emo (fine, pop-punk) music. One fateful MTV New Years Eve special—featuring The All-American Rejects and Fall Out Boy collaboratively performing a (not great!) cover of Let The Good Times Roll—launched a years-long obsession with music, boys, and the internet.

I collected photos of musicians like they were Pokemon cards. Photobucket was my digital archive of all the cute, hawtt, HiLaRiOuS content I absolutely needed to preserve, a central hub of links I could send my internet friends (and some real life friends) for a shared squeal.

Amazingly, I remember the password.

Today I’m going to share one photo from a selection of sub-albums with you. It’s gonna get intense. Thank you for being along for the ride <3

2*Sweet:

My first sub-album holds 49 photos of a local band that had absolutely no success outside of the suburbs of Chicago. Some of the pics are from shows at Knights of Columbus, a small suburban venue that Fall Out Boy and The Academy Is… played before they got famous. But others are…much stranger. I have a photo of one of the band members and his girlfriend in front of a gingerbread house; five men, some recognizable from the band, taking shots in a sudsy jacuzzi bath together; an image of the man pictured above, wearing a women’s camisole. How did I get these?? I must have saved them from their band/personal(??) myspaces. Why did I save them?? Probably to share with the two girls in the photo, de-identified to protect their innocence (though please note what we chose to wear to this show: my Delia*s shirt with rainclouds on it, my friend’s dinosaur shirt, and my other friend’s t-shirt that simply says, “Rock”). I wonder why I was so unself-conscious about the contents of this sub-album, which now feel like such an obvious invasion of privacy. At the time, the way I knew how to relate to loving something was by obsessing over it, by taking it too far. As a teenager, the collection of these photos just felt like excitement and adoration. I wonder at what age that started to feel different, and when it did, was it a loss of innocence or was it a gaining of something else, something like respect for privacy, respect for the normalcy of being a human being?

Anyway, the guy in the photo is the lead singer. I thought he was really hot.

Because Straight Guys Totally Do This:

During this time in my life, I was obsessed with guys being gay. I would entertain ideas about hot guys in bands being gay for each other, even though I of course knew they weren’t. I DELIGHTED in “stage gay,” which ran rampant in the emo scene: this sub-album includes photos of Adam Lazzara licking Mikey Way’s face, Jesse Lacey kissing John Nolan’s head, Frank Iero and Gerard Way kissing on the LIPS (it was a big deal).

In my adult life, I have analyzed this…a lot. I have wondered if imagining these men were gay softened them, made them feel safer for me to love. I’ve wondered if I was a freak with an offensive fetish who should live and die in shame. I’ve wondered if fantasizing about someone else’s queerness provided an avenue to covertly explore my own, without any of the negative consequences my Catholic surroundings might have unleashed were I ever to allow myself actual queer experiences. I don’t really know the “why” yet, if I ever will. For now, I will have to just look fondly at the above photo of Adam Lazzara and Jesse Lacey on the floor together, eyes closed, mouths open. Very important personal part of the LPB lore. (PS: if any of this feels personally familiar to you, I beg you to read Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas).

CIWWAF and Paramore Concert:

This is for some reason the only sub-album I made for an individual concert: a 2006 Cute Is What We Aim For/Paramore acoustic show at Tower Records in Chicago. I love imagining whipping out my digital camera and asking these people if I can take a photo of them—if anyone asked me to do that I guess I would also make the face that Striped T-Shirt is making (ofc I remember that’s Josh Farro but I’m trying to sound cool).

Still, I hate this sub-album. My mom drove me to this concert and stood in the crowd with me. I was 15. She was already drinking but I didn’t know it yet. I just knew that sometimes she got weird. To this day I have never actually seen her drink. She’d always be totally normal until suddenly she was totally not. At this show, she tried to push me to get closer to the front and she kept trying to throw these little plush, McDonalds-toy footballs onto the stage during CIWWAF. I wrote in my journal that I had to “pry them out of her hands.” Thinking about it now, I almost want to laugh because it is so bizarre—rushing the stage at an acoustic in-store performance? Giving an emo musician a small toy? But I can’t laugh, because it is too devastating. To remember being young enough that I didn’t even understand she was drunk, being young enough to have no idea what was coming over the next five years.

emily etc:

I will never think of this time in my life without thinking of my best internet friend. I wondered if I would cry while making this post and it is HAPPENING baby!! This sub-album contains the letters I would write them while bored in class, letters I had to scan into my computer so I could send via email or maybe Livejournal or maybe All-American Rejects message board PM. There’s a picture of me making a coy face while holding a showerhead—we always very casually joked about illicit showerhead use when discussing boys in bands, though I was all talk and I think didn’t even really know how to use a showerhead illictly—and a google maps screenshot of an aerial view of my house, so I could show them where I live. I feel lucky to have had amazing irl friends in high school, but there was something special about an internet friend, someone across the country who was just like me but California-flavored, who thought my life was interesting, whose life i thought was interesting, too. Our late night AIM chats about nothing were everything to me.

funny music secretsssss:

There was a Livejournal community called Music Secrets that was like, emo-themed PostSecret. Some of the ones I saved are funny but some aren’t. There are lots of confessions about feeling suicidal or wanting to cut before being saved by the music. The above music secret is one that freaked me out when I recently revisited it, post-Jesse Lacey accusations (read the vertical text on the right). I have written so much about emo in the last few years—a few short stories, 60,000 words of a novel I’ve abandoned (for now). I have sort of mined it to death, but I’m still fascinated by these two truths of the emo scene: it made so many girls feel seen, heard, and understood, and so many girls were preyed upon by the very musicians making them feel that way. It was often toxic and harmful.

But maybe that’s just enjoying anything as a girl. The tension of finding love within systems designed to fail us.

last.fm:

Pre-spotify, last.fm tracked my listens. I don’t know why I screenshotted a few of my weekly stats…probably to share on Livejournal. It’s so weird looking at this because I never would have remembered (and still barely do) some of these bands. The Builders and the Butchers? The Snake the Cross the Crown? But I wanted to listen to as much as I could. Music felt so limitless back then, like there was always so much more to discover.

As I’ve gotten older, I have become less passionate about new music, or really, any music at all. I feel this stupid rebellion against the stuff all my friends listen to. I say that I just don’t feel it but I don’t know why I say that, I barely give it a chance. Instead, I listen to music made by people ages 18-23 with mostly word salad lyrics. I think I like hearing the passion in their voices because it reminds me of how music used to make me feel. I am so afraid that it no longer has the capacity to make me feel anything strongly. So I just listen to younger people singing and feeling strongly about a time in their life that is so far from the one I’m living, far enough to justify the way I can’t relate.

not famous people:

Most of my high school photos were uploaded to facebook, but for some reason I kept some in Photobucket too. Here, I’m in my best friend’s basement after a big group of us went to, yes, laser tag. I’m wearing an Italian boy’s lanyard and am wrapped in packing tape. There’s a part of me that looks at this photo and is like, was I being actively bullied? lol. But I know I wasn’t, I know this is just the kind of stupid stuff we did. I miss how much fun my friends and I used to have with caffeine and a digital camera. We were probably listening to music and sitting around talking before “getting hyper” and taking pictures. It probably hurt when a friend peeled the tape from my skin but I probably didn’t mind, we were probably all laughing.

I miss how comfortable we were being stupid together. No one scrolling through their phone. No drinking, no dying to go home because we were so exhausted we just wanted to sleep. I’m sure I’m going deeper with my friends now, in adulthood, but it still does not feel as intimate as this was.

Screencaps:

Most of this sub-album contains screenshots of LJ comments or AIM conversations, but I will leave you instead with this. In 2008, my mom made a Myspace to send a message to Taking Back Sunday after she drank on the day we were supposed to see their show together. She did it without me knowing. When she showed me that they responded, I remember feeling so strange. Kind of like how I feel reading over it now.

My mom didn’t stop drinking after this, but I know her remorse was sincere. When I read this now, I first feel sadness. I remember this night, sort of, or maybe I just remember my journal entry about it. I should have been devastated, but I wasn’t. I was just numb. Almost like I kind of expected her to drink, kind of expected something to go wrong and keep me from the show. Reading now, I feel anger, like how could anyone have done this to their kid? Then I feel something like disgust at the thought of her confessing all this, my whole history, to my favorite band, disgust that she thought this was appropriate, that these guys, who were probably like 26 years old, had to receive messages like this, being begged to absolve a random person’s bad behavior. Then I feel sad again.

And now I feel this tenderness that is so emotionally familiar to me, this space that I live in when I reflect on my life. I have such deep love for this woman. She understood how much music meant to me. She never made fun of my love for emo—so many of these bands were so not good, and she listened to them when I’d play them in the car, and she’d listen to me overshare all the facts about them that I had memorized—and she drove me into the city through rain and snow and heatwaves, to drop me off at shows and pick me back up. She wrote to my favorite band to try to get them to send me a message of hope. I can imagine how shameful she felt writing this. How much she probably hated herself. How badly she wanted to fix something that could never be fixed with a myspace message.

My childhood, probably like many of yours, is something I can’t look back on without these complicated feelings. The emotional tapestry of my teen years feels like it’s made up of puzzle pieces that don’t make sense together. But nothing making sense is all that makes sense to me. I want to say I’m grateful for it, but I don’t know if I am. I just know it happened, and here I am now telling you that it happened.

Maybe that’s the part I’m grateful for. Someone listening.

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This post was for sure subconsciously inspired by the book I’m currently reading: Log Off by Kristen Felicetti, a novel formatted into LiveJournal entries by a junior in high school in 2000-2001. It’s the second LiveJournal book I’ve read (I try to get everyone in my life to read the other, Gag Reflex by Elle Nash). I recommend them both if you like this sort of thing!!

+ manuscript word count: 72,453 <3

& follow me on instagram and also, if you have it, Bluesky?? I see some people from lit twitter are actually using it so what the hell i’m gonna give it a go. it will probably skyrocket my anxiety and crush my self-esteem just like twitter did :)