For about two weeks at the start of this spring semester, I walked around campus with a navy ceramic mug in hand, my oxford shoes sliding over ice encrusted sidewalks and wool coat collar flapping against my chin. I’d just spent my fall in London. I only drank tea from the mug, which I did every morning on the walk from my dorm to my awful early morning class at 11. It was a Look. Then I slipped on some ice and spilled hot tea all down one leg, so the navy reusable, environmentally friendly ceramic mug retired to my window ledge. I got a haircut, and I abandoned the chic-absurd European look for more college-friendly snow boots and sweatshirts.
the kind of look/impression/people I was trying to evoke
College is all about reinvention, whether fashionably for two pretentious weeks during the winter of junior year, or religiously for a while (as one of my friends became an evangelical Christian around the same time that I sought to represent Camden Town on our campus). There’s the standard academic branching out: “There’s a class on African Dance that fills the physical exercise requirement and the social analysis requirement. Let’s take that. Also, it’s African Dance. When else but college?” You can become even more of a theatre geek (and within that there’s the Straight Plays camp and the Musicals camp), you might spend a summer in Korea and change your major to East Asian Studies, you might go to your first rave and spend the rest of your undergrad career learning how to DJ. The college age is a volatile time in our lives; we have to create new identities to present an entirely new set of people. College is the perfect environment for fertilizing our newly freed personalities; all the options are presented to us. Every group wants you to join them, and we can reinvent our personalities and interests to better suit the people we wish we could have been in high school if it wasn’t for the small town/administration/parents.
I’ve been thinking a lot on the trajectory of my college reinvention lately, because I’m about to become a senior and the entire process of reinvention is about to start again—but this time without the impunities of undergraduate lifestyles. I used to flake out on projects I didn’t really care about (let’s say I agreed to help because a friend of a friend asked); now I just say no if I’m uninterested. I used to worry about the changing social scene of upperclassmen, and now that I’m an upperclassman I try my hardest to ignore the drama that so consumed my sophomore year. My nights were filled with different friend groups and different plans. But there’s a sense that anything I do from here on out goes down on some permanent record. My pretentious Anglophilic phase won’t have a chance to resurface once I join the real world—professional mornings have no room for whimsically out-of-place utensils. No room for quirky Salvador Dali-printed wallets. Chipped white summer nail polish—perfect for blacklights—will have to be either retouched or removed every weekday. I’ll have to reinvent a working personality and a personal personality. I can favor the trend for white skinny jeans, still, or continue cultivating my place in the English major spectrum of graduates, but on my off-hours. The task of establishing where I stand on postmodern minimalism, keeping in mind the impression it will make on other students and the judgments associated with my stance and the works that I’ll have to cite to explain my opinion—no longer my full-time job. I have to choose now. Will I be that flaky person senior year who everyone expects to flake? Will that carry over in interviews and other jobs? Am I the type to cheerfully champion what I know and ignore the rest, or will I bore my co-workers with the minutia of my personal research on Verizon versus T-Mobile, in both network coverage and variety of phones offered? I might have to get recommendations from these people—I better figure out my work persona soon.
Of course, this dreadful sense of permanence is sort of panicky and young. People change. There are always new first impressions to make. But I still feel that college is the best time to start over whenever you want. There’s no better time to abandon a lifestyle—others are right there for you to pick up. I could bleach my hair peroxide white (I’m a dark brunette) and fill my year with planning committees for formals and semiformals—I love planning parties. I could get a tattoo somewhere conspicuous and take minimal classes and spend my fall camping every weekend on the nearby battlefields—I love camping. Nobody cares. And I guess I have a few months left to go through all the different identities I wanted to try on before I get thrust into that nebulous “real life” of rent obligations and job-hunting and impressing bosses that so many of my recently-graduated friends tell me about. So I’m going to go get a haircut now (Shampoo on Avenue B has a student discount of 20% on all salon services, so maybe I’ll go there to see if I can do all the awful color-leaching processes to my hair that I want) and make plans to see a show. Because that’s the kind of person I am this week.
x
Robin
I tweet while I’m at work. I have yet to master hashtags.
My personal blog: a chronicle of the shifting tastes that make up my student persona.
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