Sinister: murder was the case that they gave me

[lindsey baker]

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



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