live, laugh, lobotomy

the Internet Bedroom September Issue (but in October) featuring girls skateboarding, girls wearing full suits of armor, and girls indulging in time consuming hobbies so they don't have to think/feel.

The girls know that fall is the real beginning of the year. It’s the time of year when going outside feels manageable for once, when putting on lipstick isn’t such a hassle because the lights are gonna go out soon anyways, so no one will be looking at you for that long. All of your favorite records feel right and that clawing sense of unease dims for a month or two. At least, that’s how fall is for me.

However, every fall in the Midwest, the weather careens from 99 degrees to 30 degrees in 24 hour cycles, and as much as I love the tease of cooler weather, I inevitably end up getting violently ill. Something about the extreme shift in temperatures draws out any infection that’s been lying dormant in my system, reminding me that I’m only human after all. And all of this is to say, I wrote a lot of this issue in a haze of Mucinex and Nyquil so all errors are truly my own.

watching: girls skateboarding

If you met me circa 2012/2013, you could easily lure me back to your apartment with the promise of watching skateboarding videos on VHS. I have always wanted things that are just out of reach, and as a subculture of media, skateboarding videos were difficult to come by unless you were plugged into the scene.

I kind of miss it — the feeling of tracking something down that was rare and difficult to get your hands on.

This is maybe why I am trying to slip past my YouTube algorithm so that I can find cute videos of cute girls skateboarding like it’s the late 2000s/early 2010s. It’s hard to get past all the “Girls Skateboarding??? Girl Power!!!” chaff to find videos like the one I dug out above, but the rewards are three and a half minutes where I didn’t have to listen to someone talk about Developing a Personal Brand or telling me to Stay Consistent in My Posting Schedule. I can just enjoy the wipe outs and the giggles and the outfits and the feeling of flying through the air.

So I guess what I’m saying is more girls should make more skateboarding videos and if you guys have found any good ones, please send them to me. I’m stressing about my Prozac prescription running low and my doctor is impossible to get in touch with, so it would mean a lot to me :)

trending: full suits of armor

I’m calling it now: the girls with the coolest halloween costumes this year are going to be showing up in chainmail with swords ready to fight to the death (also, whoever is working

Polyester

, the real ones KNOW the Internet Bedroom girls have BEEN planning chainmail fits). As soon as Ms. Chappell Roan showed up to the VMAs with bow and arrow blazing, I knew it was over. No more see through bullshit. We are showing up in full suits of armor for the rest of Dark Fantasy Fall (aka Fetch The Bolt Cutters Fall, thanks

Alex Lewis

).

In an era of athleasuire and microtrend cycles that are gone in the blink of an eye, the full suit of armor is a commitment, an investment. It says: I’ve let this shit weather and age as I have watched my fellow men slain by the swords of their enemies. It says: Men have tried to burn me at the stake. It says: I will literally be interred in this outfit, so please know that this isn’t a phase.

The full suit of armor is, in many ways, the antithesis of fast fashion. Plus, you get to play around with the juxtaposition of undress against impenetrable metal. If you’re not ready to invest in a full suit of armor just yet, consider layering some chainmail under (or over) your favorite t shirt or maybe adding a breastplate to your next look. That way, you’ll already have your fit ready when Baz Lurhmann drops his new Joan of Arc biopic in a few years.

obsessing: 17th-century girl crafts

I feel truly Loved and Seen by both my IRL and Internet Friends because so many of you sent me this specific TikTok about girls making tiny shit 400 years ago:

@historicembroiderybrb getting emotional about historical teenaged girls and their art #history #art #17thcentury #womensart

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I love it so much that I wrote a passage about it in the book I’m working on, which has transitioned from a history of girls’ bedroom culture to a book of essays about girls’ bedroom culture. And I thought it might be fun to share a little piece of what I wrote with y’all, so please enjoy this excerpt:

I know the things we made in our rooms were deeply personal to us, intimate, for our eyes only. I know that they were private confessions: a love note slipped in a borrowed lyric that we hoped someone would find when they listened to our mixtape; a diary entry that became a piece of a zine that we hoped someone else like us would read; a drawing or piece of cut up paper that slipped between the cracks in the floorboards.

In July of 2024, just as I was returning to writing this book, an art historian who studies the material culture produced by women and girls from the 17^th century through the 19^th, Dr. Isabella Rosner, went viral on TikTok for sharing her discovery of bits of paper that teenage girls living nearly four hundred years ago had cut up, folded, and colored.^⁠ The paper cuttings survived because they had fallen beneath the floorboards of Sutton House, which was once a girls’ boarding school in London, not to be recovered until the building was renovated in the 1980s and the floorboards were pulled up. Rosner points out that upper and middle class girls, like those who lived and learned in Sutton House, would have learned how to manipulate paper in this way as a craft, just like they would learn needlework or embroidery. But since paper is so ephemeral, few paper cuttings from this era have survived. As she excitedly told her followers in a video titled “What was it like to be a teenaged girl 350 years ago?”: “The art of teenage girls has always been important. And we’ve always been the same! We’ve always wanted to decorate our surroundings and make them beautiful and vibrant…[it is] very poignant to me that girls have been doing this for almost 400 years.”

Girls have always been making things in their private spaces, and, by making stuff, they are not only able to engage with culture. They are able to shift and shape that culture — all from the privacy of their bedrooms. And they did not go to sleep one night as the ideal consumers of culture and wake up the next morning as its creators, as Dr. Rosner’s discovery evinces.

It’s impossible for me to look at these tiny pieces of paper, cut up and colored upon and altered, and not see the progenitors of zinemaking, which requires cutting up, collaging, pasting together, and altering print and images in order to create something new.

<3 <3 <3

Ok kind of scary putting in process work out there!!! Let me know if you all liked this little excerpt. I do sometimes do writing updates on this book for my paid tier, so maybe consider subscribing or upgrading and supporting me while I finish writing this book!

That’s all for me this week! Next issue is my Big Thoughts Essay for the month. I’ve been thinking about this one for a long, long time and no I’m not telling you what it’s about — you just gotta wait and see. Anyways I hope you all drag your boyfriends to pumpkin patches and haunted houses and make them pay for your pumpkin spice lattes!!!!!

If you wanna check out my long read from last month, I wrote about Joan Didion, femme persona as a creative online, and the literary It Girl phenomenon:

And my husband and I are currently plotting our fall pilgrimage to Japan, so let me know what kind of girly shit you want to know about in Japan! Or if you have recs of where I should go…let me know that too! Ok love you bye!!!

xxx rach