Friday, February 27, 2009

Still as confused as ever

I just stumbled upon this gem: My first college essay, from English 105 with Jay Imbrenda. I'm not sure how much of it was meant to be connected to the literature...mostly I just wrote about my first month of college existential crisis. Reading it, I realized how incredibly confused, floundering, and miserable I was those first, um, two years of college. The floundering certainly continues, and although I've figured out a few of my quandaries in the 2.5 years since, new ones have arisen, and I'm likely only more confused at this point. Enjoy. Or don't. I was such a prissy little idealist. It's painful. And yet the sentiment of it is still mostly true.

I think this assignment was supposed to have something to do with Galilieo, Neil Postman, and Bill Gates all in one. Don't even ask me how, but clearly I didn't follow directions too well. I'm not even sure what I'm talking about:

Who Am I, and What the Hell Am I Doing Here?

The other day, I was leafing through a college guide leaflet someone’s mother had ripped from an airplane magazine. One of the suggestions was to “reinvent yourself.” “Create a new you!” it flirtatiously suggested, alongside a cutesy cartoon of a disproportionately thin, primped, cool college girl holding up a picture of her former, geeky, eyeglass-wearing high school self. This article tells me I can recreate my image, reputation, and classification without a second glance. No one here knows who I was for the first eighteen years of my life. College is the great release from my oppressive house and family-bound high school life. A world of opportunities has been opened to me. I have complete jurisdiction over myself for the first time. And I can do whatever I want. Or so I have been told.
All these notions and ideals concerning college have been shoved down my throat for the longest time. So what it is about college that I find so unnatural, so disquieting, so…odd? Why do I often stare up at my Portuguese flag as I lie on my back in bed and wonder, “What I am doing here?” Or-as I read thirty pages about globalization for a class: “Is there something I could be doing that would be more fulfilling?” The lights blare as my roommates watch a TV show on their laptops or use facebook, and I let my mind wander.
High school was easy to reckon with. It is just what everyone does after middle school, and it doesn’t matter if you aren’t motivated, aren’t excited, or don’t like school, because you have a whole other life-that which exists outside of school. During this time you can do whatever you damn well please. College doesn’t afford you two separate lives. The thing is, when I was in high school, I was motivated, I was often excited, and I did like school, usually. Yet come to think of it, I was unsettled with high school and its purposes too. That is why, Junior year, I had to run off to a boarding school on a farm in Vermont, and why, Senior year, I cut out early and headed to Portugal as an exchange student. It was never that I thought I was above high school and now it is not because I think I am too good for college. I know I need college, by which I mean the reasons why have been drilled into me. I’m just scared of what it is doing to me.
Back to that leaflet. I got angry. How can you change yourself fundamentally from the time you graduate high school to when you start college? It's, um, three months. Or is the idea that you are bringing out that person who always existed but was stifled by reputation and the conventions of a typical high school? And what if I don’t want to change?
I like who I was in high school. I was not known by everyone, but I was respected by those who knew me. I was comfortable. I had a small number of friends who were and still are very close to me. And if my friends had to say one thing about me, it would probably be “down-to-earth.” I could not ask for a better image, really. I had no need to be friendly because I was secure in whom I knew and whom I didn’t. And now everything has changed.
We are supposed to have more options in college, but I feel I have less. I can never be alone. I am constantly surrounded by people. I tried to eat a quick breakfast this morning before class and I was summoned over by two guys, admonished for “being a loser and eating alone.” I try to fall asleep early at night, but my roommates are studying or dancing, with the lights on, of course. Or they are glued to their computers, to their facebook, wasting time, something to which I will return later.
I am exhausted, but my exhaustion has nothing to do with sleep deprivation and everything to do with social overexertion. Sometime in the six months I spent dropped off the face of the American earth, something changed in me. Suddenly, without even batting an eye, I have become two things I never was before, and I am not sure how I feel about it. For one, I am an extrovert, at least outwardly I am, though I guess that is by definition what being an extrovert is: outward appearance. I didn’t just decide I was. Someone told me last week. For a large part I feel this is in direct conflict with my former, down-to-earth, self. Hand-in-hand with this, I have become (once again, by others’ approximation; not my own) “the girl who knows everyone.” I have been struggling with this, and unsure of how to proceed. Have I truly become this new person,? Am I becoming shallow and less of an individual in the process?
And now you must be wondering, when will I bring in Postman and Gates? And Galileo, where does he fit in with all of this? I am struggling to be all of them. I am Galileo. The things I do every day try to defy convention, at least in small ways. In high school I did it by leaving. Now I continue in other ways. I am already seeking new options, leaving campus for my courses. I am juggling in my spare time and unicycling through ultimate Frisbee games. I question my place in the world, and more specifically, in college, just as Galileo questioned his and everyone’s place. And by doing so, I am making others angry, just as Galileo did. I am leaving the party when I’ve had enough. I am going to bed when I am tired. And I am trying, oh so hard, to eat breakfast by myself. And yes, this makes people angry.
I am Postman. I deleted my facebook. I was disturbed at how wholly unnatural it seemed to delegate friendships to the simple functions of “poking”, “grouping” and “networking.” Not to mention the time it wastes. It keeps my roommates up at night so they can complain that they are tired the next day. It sucks us in for hours each day, a virtual connection with no basis in reality. People say things on facebook they wouldn’t dare say in person. It imitates intimacy. And the complacency Postman speaks of? That is why I created my facebook profile in the first place, and that is why my peers are glued to it.
I am Gates. I am hooked up, strapped in, reliant on technology. And I am enjoying it. I am watching movies on my personal computer. I am using blackboard every day. I check my email constantly. My computer always seems to be downloading, uploading, printing, saving, with me at the keys. I need it.
I admonish technology and depend on it. I am a friendly extrovert, but it is not in my nature, or at least it wasn’t until now. I know a lot of people, but I don’t let them know me. I let the two guys at breakfast drag me over to their table. I think I am special, different, unique, doing and saying things that don’t fit the norm, but am I really? I may get into bed when I want, but I don’t have the guts to tell my facebooking roommates to turn off the light, so I stare at my Portuguese flag. I have no sweeping generalization to make, no all-encompassing conclusion to turn this into a tidy essay. I certainly had trouble keeping it at two pages. But maybe tonight, I will ask my roommates to turn off the light. And maybe tomorrow, I will eat breakfast alone. I’m confused, but who isn’t? Who am I and what am I doing here?

Thursday, February 19, 2009

as strange a coincidence as they come...

An interesting update to my story from last night about the fraudulent "homeless" lady: On the very same day, she duped my roommate as well. I only just found this out.
Omer was going to some restaurant on his lunch break and there was this very pathetic (yet very genuine-looking) lady with a cast and a walker asking for money. Omer, contrary to what he usually does (I swear, this lady makes all of us have a change of heart) decided to buy her a sandwich. When he came back out of the restaurant, he sees she was being harassed by the cops for panhandling. He asked them if he could give it to her anyway and they said yes, but she's a fraud. So he gave her the sandwich and went on his merry way. It must have been just after he left that, as the woman told me later that night, there was a car accident that distracted the cops enough for her to make a getaway. The idea that she could make a "getaway" with her fake cast and walker should have been enough information for me, but I was clearly pushing out all thoughts that she was anything but a kind lady in need of some help.
So I can pretty much piece together her whole day.
Omer said, "What are the odds that she got two roommates in one day?"
Seriously.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Duped

I feel like the world's biggest chump. I feel green. I feel like a loser. I feel duped, cheated, messed with, and everything in between.
I got off a very long shift at the theater and I was walking to my car when a woman approached me. She was a middle aged black woman, with graying hair, frayed clothing, with a cast on her leg and leaning on a walker. Few sights are more pathetic. She told me she was trying to get a room for the night for her and her daughter. She said she needed to get $19 by the end of the night for the room. I gave her $2 and she told me that was the first money anyone had given her all night. I said, "Listen, you are not going to get $19 by the end of the night. Here." I handed her a twenty, and said, "Let me give you a ride."
I was half afraid she would run before I could get my car and pull it up, but she was there, right where I had told her to wait. I pulled up my car and helped her with the walker, got her into my low rider. She gave me directions and on the way we small talked. She told me she had seen me before, that I had helped her and her daughter. I had no recollection of this whatsoever, but she told me she had seen me at Fat Head's on the South Side. This is incredibly likely. I've never been any other place on the South Side, a neighborhood littered with restaurants and bars, but I have been to Fat Head's quite a few times.

Some of the things she told me I wanted to believe, like that she had just gotten a job at Goodwill, that they were going to pay her $9 an hour and par for her bus pass. Like that she had a little girl. Like that she needed to get this address so she could apply for welfare tomorrow. Some of the things I couldn't believe. Like that she had eight children, four sets of twins each a year apart, four boys and four girls. Some of the things I didn't know if I could believe. Like that she had leukemia. Like that her baby daddy worked mopping floors on the South Side.

In the end, our final destination was not a place she could "get a room." It was a broken down row home, now detached from what may have been other homes that had made it a row home. Next to an empty lot.
She didn't seem to need any help getting out of the car. Or unfolding the walker. Or taking out her key and going inside. Or taking me for a literal and figurative ride.

I had to fight back tears as I pulled around in the street and headed back to Fifth. I put my blinker on to turn left. A policeman walked over to me in the rain, signaled to roll down the window. I was certain he was going to say something about my passenger, though I had not a clue what. Instead, he leaned over and shouted in my face, "What the hell? Are you from another planet?" Right, because trying to turn left on Fifth meant I was as insane as the woman I had just dropped off. At least in Pittsburgh. I wanted to say, "What the hell? Not everyone in Pittsburgh was born here, lives here, and will die here. Maybe to any dumb fuck who's never left da 'Burgh, anyplace else is another planet, fucker." But I didn't. I turned right on fifth and made my way back to Forbes before breaking down. Not my car, just me.

It isn't about the money. I could easily have spent $20 on something else. And only part of it is about the lying. More of it is about the uncertainty, the betrayal of my trust. I NEVER do this. I learned the "don't give money to homeless people, they'll spend it on alcohol and drugs," lesson a long time ago, but it seems I have learned nothing at all. In my attempt to be a do-gooder, I've been played. And it doesn't feel good.

I know she needs help. I know she needs money. That much is certain. I know she needed a ride on a rainy night, and she hadn't even asked. I know, fairly certainly, that at least when I gave her the ride, she was sober and straight. I know I brought her to a safe place for the night. I can't say much else. If I can convince myself that I helped her in some way, maybe I won't feel like such shit.

My mom said that at least I learned my lesson. But what lesson did I learn? I am not going to categorically stop helping homeless people. I acted on a whim, and no amount of experience can dictate for sure what our instinct will be. The lesson is that I may get played again, that sometimes these things happen, and that hopefully, possibly, maybe, I helped her in some way, just a little bit.

The other lesson I learned is to never put on a turn signal to suggest I am going West on Fifth past Bellefield. For that is a cardinal sin, perhaps even worse than assisting panhandlers. I'm not sure; I'd have to ask the cops here.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Let's talk about dandruff

When did it become socially acceptable to point out physical flaws and deformities to strangers?
I know it's always been laudable to confront strangers about things they can change. But when it comes to things they can't, then it's just plain rude.
I remember once in 8th grade the 7th grade science teacher had her long skirt tucked into her panty line. It wasn't subtle either. A bunch of teachers were all standing in a circle talking, and it was clear no one was going to say anything. That is, except for Mr. Kenner, the somewhat inappropriate (though we could never put a finger on exactly how) drama teacher. He leaned in, and, without much pomp or circumstance, said, with full volume, "Honey, you've got your skirt tucked into your underwear."

I think that's nice.

On Saturday I stopped into a gas station to buy a soda and a kit kat. I'd just gotten my hair buzzed into a mohawk the day before. I always have a few problems in the days after such a haircut, namely, a dry scalp and tiny hairs that cling to my face and pillow. Anyway, I went up to the counter. At first I thought the cashier was going to flirt with me. His intro was, "How's it hanging?" Or some other shit like that. While he was ringing me up, he motions to his own head, and says to me, "You've got a little something in your hair."
Horrified, I grabbed both sides of my head to see if I could feel it.
"Nah, nah, left side of your head, here."
Slightly embarrassed, I say, "Oh, that's just a scar."
He follows: "No, not that. It's white stuff, or like something from outside, like..."
"DANDRUFF?" I practically shout.
"Dunno, maybe."
I frantically started to look around for something to find my reflection in, and the guy directs me to a sunglasses stand with the narrow little mirrors that you can never actually see anything in.
I go over, and I can't quite locate the dandruff flakes, or whatever it was, without my glasses. I sort of rub, as if I can see it, but I really can't. He tells me that I got it.

I walked out with my friend, reeling. She told me, "He was just flirting with you." Um, I know you can playfully jab at someone when flirting: "Hey you're short. Hey you smell funny. Hey your skirt is tucked into your underwear. " You DON'T tell them they have dandruff.

The thing is, I don't think he was flirting with me. I think half the time we think they are, they aren't. Maybe this is all coming off of seeing "He's Just Not That Into You." It comes off a high school and college career of never being able to tell if someone was flirting, or really just picking on me. Why should it be so hard to tell? At any rate, why do they have to be so mean? Because if they were nice, we wouldn't brood about it. We wouldn't even notice.

At any rate (as my mom would say), I've been checking for dandruff daily.