Detritus: May 18, 2011

This column penned by 16-year-old Hattie

When I was in high school, I wrote for my local paper. Sometimes I covered events, like the regional debate competitions and the annual Memorial Day ceremony. I was an on-the-ground correspondent for anything happening in or around the high school.

Other times, though, I just kind of wrote…whatever?

For example, one week I wrote an opinion column about how much I liked muesli, which has since been rebranded as “overnight oats.” Another time, I wrote about the dangers of texting and driving. I wrote about “geek chic.” I wrote about the overwhelming cultural power of Glee. And ahead of the 2012 election, I wrote a column titled “Young, Wild, and Free – to Vote,” which should’ve gotten me beat up.

Until a couple of years ago, I had not revisited these columns. Some are eerily prescient, and others are terribly embarrassing. Most are a mix of both! There’s a throughline, of course, which is that I clearly had fun writing those columns, and I just haven’t stopped since. It’s rare, I think, to have this sort of time capsule of a career in its nascent stages. I’m grateful that, for whatever reason, the editor of the Grain Valley Pointe saw fit for a teenage girl to monopolize 12 column inches every week. And I’m grateful that my Gram Cracker saved every single column I published, from early 2011 to the paper’s closure in late 2012.¹

I was thinking these columns could be a fun little feature for paid subscribers. That way, if you feel like bullying me (justified), there is a barrier to do so. You get to see how Teen Hattie thought, and I get to create a digital archive of these issues. Yay! For the first installment in this series, I’ve chosen a column that falls into that “eerily prescient” category I mentioned earlier. Here’s the headline:

I took that “headshot” in my front yard. Earlier that day, I got my eyebrows waxed for the first time!