Pop culture has touched all our lives in some way. Our writers are just a little more open about it: meet Pop Addict, the semi-regular column where we talk about how pop culture has made us the brave citizens we are today.
I’m not the kind of person you’d look at and think, “I bet she’s a black belt.” I’m a short, skinny white girl majoring in journalism whose idea of an “awesome” Saturday night is watching the entire Back to the Future trilogy back-to-back-to-back.
Oh yeah, and to top off that nerdiness, I’m a Scooby; that’s what we hardcore Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans call ourselves. It’s an in-joke — if you get it, you’re one of us.
I became addicted to Buffy the summer after the first season aired, watching reruns on the now-defunct WB. At the time, I was gearing up for the fourth grade, and watching a group of nerds kick vampire ass made me feel incredibly grown up: Buffy wasn’t on Disney or Nickelodeon and was thus a very “adult” show in my eyes.
I’d like to say the strong, kick-ass female who killed the undead with her martial arts skills was what appealed to me, but a feminist appreciation for Joss Whedon’s brainchild wasn’t something I consciously acknowledged during the early years of my love for Buffy. I was drawn, at first, to the fast-paced witty dialogue and, I think, to the fact that HQ was the kind of library I always wished existed in my hometown, but could never find — which might explain why I spend such a ridiculous amount of time in Deering.
The lasting effects of my Buffy addiction are numerous: a box of memorabilia under my bed at home, retrospectively creepy elementary school drawings of Buffy standing victorious over exploding vampires, my dog (named “Xander” after one of the show’s main characters) — but one in particular actually gives me great pride: my black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
For a long time, somewhere in the back of my mind, I held out a hope that maybe the fantasies I was so engrossed in were real. I remember being terribly disappointed that I never received my letter from Hogwarts. Eventually, I outgrew the ability to really believe in the fantasy worlds, but even though I accepted that I wasn’t going to be called as the Chosen One and that vampires weren’t living in romantic basement-apartments, Buffy still seemed like a hero to me. I realized that, unlike Harry Potter, who without the fantasy was just a nerdy orphan, Buffy Summers was pretty amazing even without the help of the Powers That Be.
At around this time (seventh grade or season five of Buffy, for those of you keeping track), the feminist “girl power” admiration I mentioned earlier finally started to kick in. Suddenly, I felt an intense desire to be able to kick something’s ass.
My first attempt at studying the martial arts was short-lived. I joined an after-school class at my middle school, the instructor of which was more interested in showing his pupils off at competitions than in our development. Several months later, in eighth grade, a new school opened right down the road from my house, in a gymnastics facility. The instructor was young and goofy, not at all what I thought a martial artist should be like… which I guess was a strange combination of Jackie Chan, Mr. Miyagi and Giles from Buffy.
Mike, who preferred be addressed by his first name any time formal class wasn’t in progress, didn’t fit the bill of my imagined Frankenstein instructor, but he made Tae Kwon Do feel very personally mine. Because I wasn’t receiving the pop culture version of instruction I’d expected, Tae Kwon Do became, in my mind, something unique that only I was doing. The extremely small class I was a part of helped feed that feeling, I’m sure.
It took me about four years to earn my black belt. For those of you still keeping a time line, I earned my black belt two years after Buffy ended its run. I dedicated as many years to Tae Kwon Do as I did to high school and as I am now to my Northwestern diploma. Earning my black belt is easily my proudest non-academic accomplishment and, to be honest, it beats out most of the academic ones, but I rarely think about it.
When presented with the task to think of an element of pop culture that had changed my life, Tae Kwon Do didn’t enter my mind immediately. Actually, it took most of the quarter for me to even think about it. For something that I’m very proud of, I rarely think about my accomplishments in Tae Kwon Do and I almost never talk about them.
When I started martial arts lessons, I really did just want to be able to kick someone’s ass; the whole “personal growth” aspect was actually a huge turnoff. By the time I got my black belt, I knew I could kick someone’s ass, but those “personal growth” things were ingrained and more important to the ass-kicking part than I’d ever thought they would be. The five tenants of Tae Kwon Do that my young, “cool” instructor required we recite weekly — courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control and indomitable spirit — are still etched on my brain and I’m sure they nag at me unconsciously with every decision I make.
Looking back, I don’t feel like I spent that long taking lessons, but it feels like much longer than two and a half years have passed since I stopped. Even though it’s no longer a weekly part of my life, I have absolutely no doubt that I’m a different person than I would be without Tae Kwon Do and, as an extension of that, without Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I mean, seriously, I’ve broken two-inch thick boards with the palm of my hand — if that doesn’t build character and confidence, I don’t know what does.