When I was in high school 4000 years ago I still thought I was going to grow up to be a Journalist.
My boyfriend at the time also had similar asperations and we were in the Journalism class together. We were insanely optimistic that we were going to change the world. We were also really competitive with each other, it was ridiculous.
(yep)
The one thing that we both wanted to do though is have a zine.
I don’t remember how many of them we worked on together. Our good friend JG had one we both wrote for. Chris made his own. I made my own, I think the name changed several times. One of my best girlfriends in high school had one called UltraSonic Vibrator and that was awesome.
You have to understand that making a zine in the 90’s was this labor of love. It’s hours and hours and more hours of cutting up magazines and newspapers and trying to find money to pay for glue and printer paper and trying to find content. We were the generation right before the internet was wildly available. We were the generation that basically created the internet you’re reading this piece of shit blog on.
Back in my zine days the internet was hard to access. I had the keys to that kingdom because of friends in tech and being able to go to my dad’s office and use computers and copy machines before I started working there. And when I started working at the radio station I was able to use our pathetic dial up internet there to print stuff out during my shift. Just imagine 16 year old Stephanie running back and forth from the studio to the computer room, trying to get webpages on Netscape to load up so I could print out stuff to cut and paste into the master of my Zine before I made copies of those pages to staple together and pass out to people.
I made a lot of friends with other weirdos like me online in those early days, asking them can I print your story out here in Bakersfield? My longest running zine was pretty much Riot Grrl themed and I had a bunch of internet friends encouraging me to start a website and I did. I was using the internet anywhere I could to build several versions of a website I had back in the day. I can still write HTML code to make backgrounds change colors or add a picture to a story.
This a useless skill now by the way but I taught myself HTML with a book I stole from the downtown library.
Stealing though is part of that Zine life. If you’re a broke ass high school kid who barely has bus money, you figure some shit out real quick.
Office Depot, I’m really sorry about all the times I used the self service copiers and only paid for like 10 copies.
Kinkos knew who Chris and I were so they watched us like we were going to walk out with a copier (we might have if we could have, seriously, we were savages.) Rubber cement in the supply closet at school? When you’re Editor In Chief of the school paper you can just go ask them to give you more. You need line tape? Okay. You want to take the lightbox home so you can “work on the school paper?” Yeah go for it. Journalism kids are “the good ones,” and we’re definitely not pocketing Exacto knives to go home and perfectly cut out pictures for a collage we definitely weren’t making about cops and punk rock, I have no idea what you’re talking about….
Back then we were even internet criminals. My Grandma didn’t really understand the computer and what it was capable of, I didn’t really either but I did figure out how to disable the regular phone in the Journalism class at my high school so I could use the phone line for my modem my Grandma bought for me for school work. I think the West High Saga classroom had the first internet on the campus, even though it was just me with my Juno email account and various free AOL accounts we kept setting up so we could do almost anything but school work.
I wrote about boys. I wrote about sexuality. I wrote about music. I shared other people’s stories and drawings. Photography wasn’t a focus because on a Xerox machine, those don’t reproduce well. I worked on these things in my bedroom after I was supposed to be in bed. I worked on them in the studios at the radio station. I stapled them where ever I could get a few minutes with a stapler. Any given night of the week you could find me in the bedroom at the apartment my dad and I lived in. Radio on or stealing cd’s out of the living room, drinking a Coke out of the can, maybe talking on the phone while I was cutting and pasting these things into existence. I took all the printed out work that was sent to me and lovingly and carefully put it into new pieces of paper and then went and stole more paper and photo copies and staples and handed them out to friends and mailed them to people all over the country.
The internet is such a gift to kids now. I’m sure the shoplifting of office supplies and illegal copier usage has gone waaaaay down now that blogs are so easy to create. If I hadn’t put Office Depot out of business ravaging their self serve area, I’m sure they’d be relieved.
Connection with others is power, its comfort. It was powerful for some girl in Kentucky to let me reprint her story. It was powerful for a handful of likeminded kids at my school to know that Chris and I were having the same struggles growing up. It was powerful to be able to connect with someone in Texas because you liked the same music. Zines were the internet before the internet.
So now when people complain about kids using TikTok or Instagram or whatever service is cool right now I honestly want to tell them to stay in their own lane. Do I understand everything a kid does online? Nah. Do I know that they can do exactly the same thing I was doing as a kid without robbing an office supply store? Yes.
RIP Office Depot on Ming Ave. You have no idea how turning a blind eye to my “bad behavior,” helped me and my friends connect with others on a large scale. Also the guy who worked there and absolutely didnt give a shit about some little girl in a Keroppi t-shirt robbing their copy machine area blind, I’m glad you never fired him.
(Keroppi loves you “Mark”)
Wasn't the word "liberating" tossed about? It was! We were liberating ideas, shared for 'the cause". Yes, in plain thought: stealing. Good that you recognize you did in Office Max. An the band played on.