hello sinister. first. an epigraph. "so, is she or isn't she?" "is she or isn't she what?" "a phony." "i don't know. i don't think so." "you don't think so, huh? well, you're wrong. she is. on the other hand, you're right, because she's a real phony. you know why? because she honestly believes all that phony junk she believes in." (end of epigraph. beginning of. something.) i always used to think college would be how it is in the movies. i thought the whole shebang would look like strung together scenes from, i don't know, good will hunting and dead poets society and even that horrible with honors, starring brendan frasier as a non-neanderthal man. i think i secretly hoped, too, for a bit of dazed and confused and a splash of saved by the bell: the college years action. i wanted autumn-colored campuses and pretty, intelligent people writing papers and reciting poetry and falling in love and somewhere in between all that wise poignancy finding out what life is really supposed to be about. and then. i came to college. you don't always get what you want, i guess. what i have instead is a sparse gray concrete campus with bare trees and a metropolitan border of cornfields and flat roads. i have the frat boy who cooked me and my roommate dinner in exchange for the stocking cap i bought my ex-kind-of-boyfriend. i have roaches. i have i have i have well. i don't know if i have anything i want. or wanted. there are times, i have found, of some kind of etheral disruption, where the feeling of sudden displacement is inevitable and unexpected and inexplicable while still being both terrifying and delicious. i have always prided myself on being one of those who spent a large part of her life searching for herself, and successfully found something that might in some way equate to a complete, satisfying sense or knowledge of self. and suddenly, in these last few days of displacement, i think i may have been deluding myself a bit. i am lost. again. or maybe still. are all my posts like this? maybe. maybe that's a product of whatever it is that is wrong with the way things are. i used to be a big-time geek. and i liked it. because even if i hadn't been the happiest of girls all the time, i was me. not who everyone wanted me to be or thought i should be. and eventually, as i got older, i realized that people were always trying to fit me neatly into some such category or other. and around the end of my sophomore year of high school, i got pissed off and wrote. and ran in the high school newspaper exactly why i shouldn't have to be categorized, and just why such categories were bunk to begin with. i think the bulk of it consisted of why cheerleaders were not so something, after all. i spent the rest of my high school year belittling, i've heard, so-called things that some people allegedly loved or cared about. like fights in the hallway and tube tops and whatnot. and i knew the smiles and the popularity i gained were fake, and i liked it. because i could get through the day, then, knowing that everyone watched and wondered and never really quite knew. because i could spend my friday night with a bowl of jiffypop and john cusack because i wanted to, because i had no obligations to anyone other than myself. and the overly made-up girls could smile and invite me to their parties. the school could talk about my columns. and i could simply say thank you, and resign myself to the back journalism room to write. talking about that time with someone a few days ago, i had forgotten exactly what all i had written about in high school. and i realized i had certainly forgotten exactly why i wrote any of it. i am now the official fashion maven of my college newspaper; tuesday, my column about the benefits of wearing scarves ran at the bottom of the front arts page. i have always loved clothes, to be sure, and now, for some reason or other, i and my editors have decided that i am somehow qualified to tell people how they should dress, perhaps because i myself apparently dress well. and i love giving advice. but when i turned my story in monday night, i felt pretentious. partly because i am now locked into a role to which i probably really have no right; to compensate, i make sure i always tell people to take risks and wear what they love. (as an added bonus, i really do mean that.) but also because my fashion advice has a strong indie bias. i have begun planning out a series that will, in subtle truth, be an advocate for thrift stores and brown sweaters and band t-shirts. and so i see that not only am i telling people how to dress, i am, in truth, also attempting to shove them toward a category of people i myself am longing to be a true part of. i recently ended a just-begun romance with the first real, live twee boy i have ever layed lips to because he was trying to decide what kind of indie girl i am. if i am emo or indie punk or indie pop or indie rock. and i was irritated, not realizing why it wasn't OK to just be indie me. when what i should have been thinking all along was why it wasn't OK to just be me. i am not perfect. i am not an angel or a goddess or any of those other things i sometimes hear. i'm not always the nicest of girls. i don't, to my horror, know fully who i am. i am not as indie as i'd like to be. some days, i'm rather horrifyingly preppy. and i don't know if would be happier being one way all the time, with one consistent style of dress and manner and kindness and music taste. i used to know that i wouldn't be. i listened to belle and sebastian while i shopped ebay for fendi handbags. i listened to elliott smith while i got dressed in my new gap skirt and blouse. and neither the music nor the clothes nor whatever category i was in made me who i am. whoever that is. and at the end of all this, the realization, i suppose, that i try to make myself something instead of just being something without effort -- at the end of it all, i am still not any further than i was in the beginning. instead, i am only aware that i am human, and that the world is in and of itself not strung together scenes of happy people but a duality of joy and sorrow, being found and being lost. and i shall always, always be both at the same time. i have started to believe that perhaps a cure for my growing apathy, as it were, or a way to feel more found than lost is to start back at the beginning and retrace my steps with the new, or maybe old, reminder that the purpose of live is to live, even with the daily 50-50 chance of attaining one pure feeling or one absolute truth. and so. in a little while. i am leaving home. with the intention, i guess, to find out what really does lie beyond my cornfields, and why it is really no different. and so miss lindsey "is she or isn't she" lou reluctantly decides to annouce her pending voyage to scotland. even homer figured it out in the end. yourlou _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. 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