I woke up this morning thinking 'Ack, Ack.'

I went up to Boston this past weekend to visit my good friends Corey and Chris. (You'll hear all about my trip when I download pictures to accompany it. And once I write it.) Corey and I walked around Harvard a little, and talked about grad school a lot. He and I are both preparing to go next fall, but I feel like he's a teensy bit better prepared than I.

During my trip up to Boston I read scholarship guides on the bus. Corey and I compared notes on the GRE Lit. test, which I took a few weeks ago, and he's studying for right this minute. We discussed potential references and talked about where we were applying. I'm going for University of Oregon, University of Texas at Austin, and three in London. He's a little more ambitious, applying for Ivy League schools for his M.A. and tons for his Master of Fine Arts (as he explained, so few accept MFAs that you have to cast a wider net).

Back home I scheduled my application deadlines into my Microsoft Outlook calendar, read over the requirements for entry once more.

And then, right on schedule, I had a panic attack.

I'm terrified that I won't get into these universities; that they will take one look at my sub par resume, my unconvincing recommendations, and my academic writing sample and they will laugh, wondering why I would ever consider graduate school.

Part of me wants to blame my lackluster GPA and academic performance (coming in at a paltry 3.2) on the fact that I never considered wanting to go to graduate school until I was in the real world and realized that my education was not complete. I missed the classroom, and not just because it was safer, but because I missed feeling alive and curious and studying literature. And now that I am volunteering with Higher Achievement I know that teaching is something I want to do, that I love doing. So, now I'm trying to salvage what I can of my undergraduate performance, shine it up and pass it off as Acceptable at the very least. But I don't feel Acceptable. I don't feel like I've worked hard enough or been dedicated enough to my studies. I compare myself to other students who seem to do it so easily, who never procrastinate, or always get the professor to like them. To all those students who understood math and took the SAT prep class. I feel like a fake and it makes me nervous.

Writing this I can see that it doesn't seem so huge, but the universities make me feel like it is. They're like these scary dragons who are waiting to judge me on every little flaw, rather than humans who make mistakes and take wrong turns too. They don't seem like sympathetic professors excited to pass on their love of learning to me.
I've been staring out my office window, contemplating the blueness of the Potomac and the silvery shine of the Air Force memorial by my building. The white marble of the city spread out before me and the grim reminder of the Arlington Cemetery in its neat white rows. It doesn't seem so big in the face of that landscape. I just need to take a deep breath and breathe. I've found meditation actually works in the face of my panic attacks, which seem to be growing as the deadlines approach. But today it's not working. I called my mom and she made me drop everything and go for a walk. I stood in the parking lot breathing deeply and wondering at how my body reacts to this sort of thing, and what will happen when I'm faced with other huge decisions. And I wondered if I should get medication. I think I am going to call my doctor about it because winter is just starting and I only forsee this getting worse. Maybe it will help to take Prozac or some other calming drug.

Things I hoped they might be thinking about me when I was...

9 - What a charming little girl! She's like a fairy princess and so sweet!

11- She must be walking around in that old timey white dress and talking to herself because she has such a lively imagination! Maybe she's talking to fairies. She's probably the time of little girl who will write a book at 12.

13- She is so pretty and cool. I wonder why she isn't an actress in some teen drama. Maybe she'll be discovered someday.

15- It's so cool how she eschews fashion trends and wears those men's pants. And her men's red Doc Martens are so anti-establishment!

16- She must be reading 'The Bell Jar' because she has such a deep and sensitive understanding of our facades as a society. And Sarte's 'No Exit'? She's so intelligent I bet she even knows how to pronounce his last name. I'd go over and discuss his existential crisis if even I knew anything about existentialism.

18- The way she nods her head in time to the rythym of the song she's listening to on her CD player obviously shows that she's got a real understanding of whatever it is she's listening to. She's probably a musician herself. A girl musician, that's so cool.

20- The pictures she's proabably taken with that camera! She's such an artistic soul! I bet she always captures the very essence of the issues. We should invite her to our party, or rock show.

22- It's so cool how she never seems to be concerned about boys. It obviously shows she's self confident enough not to need a man in her life. I wish I were like that!

24- Hmm, the clothes she's wearing say 'young woman going to the office', but she's also reading 'Howl'. She must be one of those hip, young writers or poets paying the bills at the office but is also writing the Next Great American novel. I should go talk to her about Ginsburg. I hope she doesn't mistake my Salvatore Ferragamo suit for being a sign of 'The Man', and let me take her out for a drink.

Charlie Brown as a "Symbol of My Soul"

"This is my depressed stance. When you're depressed, it makes a lot of
difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold
your head high because then you'll start to feel better. If you're going to get
any joy out of being depressed, you've got to stand like this."

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'. "-Charlie Brown

Sometimes I get the 'death moans' and everything seems black. My failures seem great and my goals look more like a wall. With some barbed wire around it. And maybe a spot light. And it's really, really tall. This morning was one of those days. I woke up and sat on the edge of my bed like an old woman taking a moment to conserve her strength before she can stand. My pants looked too short in the mirror and I had stayed up worrying about what my statement of purpose was. Not in a philosophical sort of way, but for my grad school applications. I don't know what I want to study but I'd better come up with something fast. And not too tired.

It could have just been the early hour, or the fact that I hadn't heard back from this boy I asked out, or the fact that I was thinking about grad school while my sister had her boyfriend over, but I could feel the blues sneaking up, undetered by the speediness of the bus, or the oblivious morning commuters trying to impose their comforting humanity on me. I got to work and just felt like today was one of the days I should have called in sick. I should have stayed home and drank tea, watched shiny movies on AMC and felt miserable for myself for no apparent reason.

But life doesn't work that way. Somehow, despite all my resistance I'd be forced out of bed and taken on a cupcake adventure, or a discovery of mountains or to the bookstore to read celebrity magazines (because even though reading them makes me feel like I've eaten too much candy, I always feel better that at least I'm not being photographed at every corner.)

I decided to combat this in the only way I know how, reading. With my blue scarf wrapped around my neck like Linus' security blanket, (how wise I was to put this on, I thought I'd only need it for the physical cold today!) I looked up some quotes about depression and discovered the ones you see above you. And then I got on here to share them, but before I could get to my blog my eye caught this: the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks and I found myself laughing at the witty snarkiness of people who can't stand bad grammar but love irony. And that led me to this one: Crummy Church Signs and I also checked out this one: Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century for my friends Corey and Megan.

After following the advice of Benjamin Gladstone who said, "If you are cold, tea will warm you; If you are too heated, it will cool you; If you are depressed, it will cheer you; If you are excited, it will calm you.", I made myself some tea, and thought about how one good cure for feeling sorry for yourself is doing something nice for someone else, and how I'm going to volunteer tonight and teach girls about literature, and without so much as a warning my early morning blues dribbled away.

Because the Charlie Brown quote reminded me of one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, and because I love quotes just a little too much I'll leave you with this one:

"Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up."

Oops!

I forgot all about the fact that it was Blog Action two days ago and now I'm feeling guilty. But, as my mom has taught me, better late than never. (I'm proving that point extra well today, I overslept and got to work late.) So, in honor of being slow, I present the Slow Food Movement portion of Blog Action Day. What is Slow Food? Is it extra dumb cattle? Or a dim cucumber? According to Slow Food USA we are participating in the Slow Food Movement when we shorten the distance that our food travels to get to us. It's good, clean and fair food. By being informed about how our food is produced we are taking responsibility, not only for how our planet is used, but also for what goes into our bodies. We become a part of the production process, instead of mindlessly consuming our food. It's not just about the environment, but also about what we eat, for our own health, but maybe more importantly, for our own enjoyment.
Ever wonder how we have strawberries in December? Or vine ripened tomatoes when everything else is brown? That's because we rely on our modern methods of transportation to get ripe food here fast, but somethings aren't meant to be enjoyed in winter, they aren't meant to be served fast. Strawberries, for example, have become less flavorful because they must now be produced in a way that makes them heartier, and able to withstand the long distance that they must travel to get to our grocery stores.
Most fresh market tomatoes are grown hydroponically, which enables greenhouse growers to have a longer growing season and produce an average of 15 times more per acre with a greater percentage of marketable fruit (because who's going to buy a tomato that doesn't look bright and red, despite its flavor?) but the taste of these tomatoes are mealy and bland. Think of the tomato you get in your QuarterPunder. You'd hardly know you were eating one. Why are things like this? Two reasons; we want cheap food and farms want cheap labor. Another blogger, at Gristmill says this about why it's so easy for us to ignore the probelm:

"We need our food supply as cheap as possible to feed low-wage people; we need
lots of low-wage people -- farm worker,s slaughterhouse workers, clerks at our
number-one grocer, Wal-Mart, and so on -- to sustain our cheap-food system.
Whatever else it does --and it works pretty well, if you're a major shareholder
in transnational corporations --this cycle consumes enormous resources and, yes,
severely damages the environment."

AND

"Last year the federal government cut checks to commodity-agriculture producers
amounting to $23 billion -- roughly equivalent to Bolivia's GDP. In those terms
alone -- never mind steep environmental and social costs -- cheap food is
actually a pretty pricey proposition. "

He goes on about some more stuff too and I know that's a lot to read, especially if you're not an
amateur chef like me, who cares about the flavor, but even if you just care about the environment, or the people who labor to bring you the cheapest foods possible. If you don't really care about all that above you should still check out The Sustainable Table for ideas about how you can make changes in small ways, like learning how to 'eat seasonal'. When we 'eat seasonal' we're not only cutting down on the damage done by shipping this food all over the country, we're also supporting our local farmers, people who in turn invest in other aspects of our communities. Most of those food subsidies that Gristmill talks about above aren't going to the organic farmer hippies you see at the farmer's market, they're going to major agri-business farmers, like the ones who had the E. Coli epidemic last summer.

I'm guilty of this stuff too, sometimes it's hard to remember the larger costs when faces with the grocery store budget, but in the end the cost is going to be much greater. I just have to keep telling myself that. We're not going to solve this environmental crisis tomorrow, it's going to take little steps from millons of people. We should probably start right now.

contemplating my madeleine

I'm reading a book right now about how to write good college essays as I prepare to apply to grad schools. It has a list to help you prepare to write a personal statement essay and some of the topics to get you thinking are "Describe 3 Significant Lessons You Have Learned," "Describe 3 Memorable Experiences You've Had," "Discuss a Failure That Taught You Something." As I'm reading over these starter topics I peruse my memory for relevant events and then start to wonder, should I use my move to New York as having to do with a Significant Lesson, or a Failure that Taught Me Something. Do I discuss the experience of traveling to Cuba and Kenya? My Internship at Tribeca as an Experience, and my film career as a Failure? Then, after thinking of these past experiences for a moment I get a little sad. Sad because some of this stuff was exciting, challenging things that I have moved past but feel sad that I didn't stick with. While working as a PA and interning at Tribeca I started to realize that film might not be the career I want to stay in. I started to miss the academic environment, where my ideas were welcomed and my assumptions challenged. I missed feeling like I had something to offer, and that I was learning something that made me grow as a creative person. I realized I didn't want to stop learning about and discussing literature yet. And that the world of film, although I love the cinema, and love the stories it tells, might not be the best place for a dreamer like me. I wanted to inspire others to love literature, and I wanted to write stories that had a chance of being read somewhere, not just by an intern in a production house that will write a snarky film student critique and stop my film from being made. Usually I don't regret walking away from the endless amount of work I forsaw. I wanted to be a creative, and I wanted to stay fresh. I didn't want to stagnant. I don't want to stagnant. For a while I oscillated between wanting to be in that world and being a normal person in education somewhere. Finally the desire to teach and continue learning won out. I don't really regret it. But I do sort of wonder what could have happened if I had pushed forth. And if I had stayed in New York. In the back of my head, as I sit in an office editing military briefs that I don't care less about and worry about the money slowing being deposited in my account, and fret about my grad class and the chances of getting into grad school I wonder if I've given up excitement. Or at least for now. It seems harder to come by when you're living in your mother's house in Reston, commuting down to Arlington and not doing much else. I don't think I've given it up in exchange for a paycheck and the chance to sit at a desk. But sometimes I'm afraid I have and that I'm too meek to find my own life, find my own adventures and that they have, or will pass me by before I realize it.

Volunteering

Today I start volunteer teaching at Higher Achievement!!! I'm going to be working with 8th graders, teaching them about Literature. I'm so excited I'm bouncing in my seat. Wish me luck cause I'm also a little scared that I'll be horrible.

This October 15th is Blog Action Day.

A How-To For Investors, From Someone Who's Still Clueless

Last December I did something I never thought I'd do. I sat down and opened a Roth IRA. What is a Roth IRA you ask? I didn't know either, but having finally cracked the book a family friend gave me when I graduated high school I learned a thing or two.

So, in light of recent posts about finances and growing up I thought I'd share what I learned about the big, bad world of stocks and bonds. Please bear in mind that I know nothing about how this all works, don't give any advice about which stocks to buy and when to sell them, I'm just giving you my perspective, as a real, live, young person starting out on this path.

First of all, I decided on a Roth IRA because I was working as a freelance PA in television. As a freelancer, small business owner or anything else where your job doesn't offer a 401K or its own IRA this is a good alternative. With this you don't pay taxes until it's time to withdraw your money, and you can keep it for a long amount of time. I invested $200 dollars into it, with the idea that I would continue to invest that amount of money with every paycheck I get (if I could afford it, of course)

And then, the next thing to do of course, is invest it. You can keep your $200 and save it up, or you can be brave and foolish and use your money to make money for you. What a strange and unusual idea! Who would have thought that you can make money without working 8 hour days for it! Now, I have no clue about how exactly the stock market works. All I think of when I hear "stock market" is guys rushing around on the stock market floor waving fingers and trading little white slips of paper, like in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, or guys in big glass office buildings accumulating loads of money, like Patrick in American Psycho. I get that you invest your money in companies, giving them money that they can use to grow and get better, but what shares mean, why they rise and sink, and how that increases my bottom line I don't know. In addition to the book above I used http://www.thebeehive.org/ to help me figure some of this stuff out.

Before I began all of this I happened to hear a radio report on NPR about socially responsible investing and decided that when I was more adult, and more able to comprehend what exactly a 'stock market' is, I would do that. One more way to save the world without actually having to do much.

Once I started considering stocks to buy I remembered this promise to myself. If you are a person who cares about the environment, gets angry at the way pharmecutical and oil companies run amuck and recycles religiously then why not decide where your money makes a difference by where you invest? And I'm secretly hoping I stumble on the next Microsoft because everyone is so concerned about the environment and energy saving innovation one of these companies has got to be onto something. Here's some websites where they give some good advice about socially conscious investing:

1. The Sensible Investor
2. Rethinking Socially Conscious Investing
3. Social Funds
4. New American Dream isn't exactly about investing but it has really good advice about living green.

So, there you go. I started investing money in Green Mountain Coffee Traders (GMCR), Hybrid Technologies (HYBT), SunTech Power (STP) and Evergreen Solar (ESLR). Green Mountain Coffee Traders is doing the best so far but the others are in the green these days too, literally and in my account (they use green instead of black to show the increases).

I'm getting kind of into it. I love seeing the numbers go up and down, even if I have no idea what exactly they mean. And I can even talk about this stuff and sound knowledgable, at least around my friends who are just as clueless about this as I am. It's funny to see myself doing something so adult like when I feel so much like a kid most of the time. I even got my grandmother's old account for me from my dad and started investing that too.

I've mentioned before how un-adult-like I feel, and how I don't know all of this stuff, but with this I can control it and make these decisions on my own, and it will benefit me later in life. It's one of those things that I am doing to prepare for myself the life I'd like to have one day. I think this whole growing up thing should really just be done in tiny steps. Like a toddler who repeats things over and over to learn how things work.

Spontani -Tea

Yesterday, after we finished up a big project at work we got to go home. I got home at 1:30 on a beautiful fall, I mean summer, afternoon. As soon as I pulled into my neighborhood Aja pulled in behind me. She had recognized my car on the road. After changing my work clothes for playclothes I got an everything bagel with lox at Einstein Bagels with her and Ayana. I also got their green tea, Spontani-Tea, which would explain the spontaneity of the day. We went back to her house to eat our bagels and killed an hour reading magazines on her back porch. She started walking me home when we decided to stop by and see what Mark was up to, and bum a light for a shared cigarette from him.

Mark was playing Halo 3 when we knocked on his door and entreated Subi the dog to let us in. Sitting at the table he mentioned it was Paul's 31st birthday and he was sick. We decided we should do something nice for him. I think it was me who mentioned making cupcakes because I'd been thinking about them all day. So we found the recipe for Magnolia Bakery's cupcakes, made up a list and went to the grocery store.

Our cupcakes turned out delicious, and we iced them in Dusky Rose and Sky Blue. The icing melted onto them and they took on a strange, drippy glazed look. Once we added the black and white striped candles we bought we had cupcakes straight out of Tim Burton's Edward Sicssorhands.

Matt came home from work while we were taking turns cracking the eggs and beating the batter. Once we'd all gone home to eat something other than sugar we returned to take them over to Paul's.

The four of us show up at Paul's front door holding the lit cupcakes and knocking furiously. He didn't hear anything at first and he came down glowering, about to yell at us, when he realized the flames were birthday cupcakes. We came in and ate a few and got sick to our stomachs from so much sugar, but had fun. Paul was pretty happy because he'd been miserable and alone and sick all day. It was a nice way to end a spontaneous kind of day.

Let ME Do It!!

When I was a toddler, my parents like to remind me, I used to assert my independence by saying to them "Let ME do it!" when they tried to help me brush my teeth or wipe or anything else that I knew I could do alone. And that's sort of been my life's philosophy. I'm really independent. I've travelled the world by myself and figured out all sorts of my own problems by myself, sometimes they're problems that I created for myself but I still solved them. But as I get older I realize how much I've been leaning on my parents for help. And that's not a bad thing, but at 24 I think I should be handling somethings on my own. It's hard to let go though. I used to let my dad handle all the red tape that I didn't understand, or want to worry about. But now I feel like if I don't do it I won't know what's going on and how to deal with these things that being an adult involves. The stuff they never warn you about...

I need a primer course in all the red tape involved in being an adult. I tried to fill out my credit report information online because I don't know what my credit score is. They couldn't verify my identity when I tried to re log in so I had to call the number they gave me to verbally verify my information. She asked if I had any student loans and I said I did but I don't know the name of the company because my dad takes care of it. So she said to call back when I had that information. It was a little hard to hear her so before she hung up I asked "So all I need to get to verify my identity is the name of the company I have my student loans through?" And she replied, "Unfortunately we can't give out the information you need because it can lead to identity theft." And I was like, but you just told me, and I'm trying to make sure I get the right information, and when I come back and call you back with it, that I have all the information you need so I don't have to keep calling my father for this information.

What kills me about all of this is that I understand it's "For my protection" and I'd rather not have someone steal my identity, but at the same time I hate anyone having this huge information about me and me having no way to access it. They can easily destroy my life with this stuff and I can't even do anything about it. I hate that someone gathers this information and uses it to judge me, to decide what I can and can't do with my life. I want to be the only one who decides what information is relevant to me. I want to be in control of my life and my history. It makes me feel like this is a sci-fi thriller where someone has a file on everything I've done and it scares me. I don't want to live in that sort of adult world.

Recently I read this interesting article about Harry Potter and the transformations that J.K. Rowling uses in the books. Like how Harry transitions from a black and white world view where the people to be trusted are very obvious, into one where he's not sure who to trust and he understands the motivations of people in new ways. He grows up and into this world where tough decisions, ones that will affect his life must be made, and he can't trust the adults to do the job because they're human too, and have their own fears and hopes and agendas. That's sort of what I feel like right now, like I'm slowly becoming aware that if things regarding my life are to be done they must be done by me. And that's sort of terrifying. Because I don't always have a safety net to fall back on and I'm never quite sure what information I'm going to need or where to find it. For so long I've been running back to my dad who has all the answers, knows my SAT scores and my bank balance, knows what my credit history is like and how to apply for the FAFSA or the car loans I need. Now, I'm starting to do it on my own and even though he is still available I need to do this on my own.I'm also trying to track down my W-2s and my 10-99s so that I can do my taxes for myself. It's hard though to figure out what's necessary, and what's a fair deal when I'm trying to do it by my self for the first time. A lot of it I just try to fudge and hope it's correct.

The Curse of the Empire Waist

This morning, as I was standing on a crowded metro train, just around Virginia Square a man sitting in a seat to my right tapped me on the arm and asked if I'd like to have the seat. Thinking he was getting up at this stop and offering me his seat first I smiled and said 'No that's okay, I'm getting off soon.' Then he remained seated when the train stopped, not getting off, and I looked back down at my paper and realized that maybe an empire waist on a shirt that is slightly fitted is not a good fashion choice.

That's right dear readers, he thought I was pregnant. Not hugely pregnant, or the type where you're not sure if it's body fat or a baby bump hiding under there, but just early stages, starting to show, sort of pregnant. In an ironic turn of events I had already been experiencing morning sickness and thrown up all of my breakfast, but that's because the dog threw up on the kitchen floor and I had to clean it up. Puke makes me puke, especially when it smells like dog poop, which is probably what she'd been eating.

What could I do? I had already responded politely to the man and it was a crowded train, not much room to move, people had obviously heard him ask and me respond. What else to do but push out my belly a little more and pretend I was in my fourth month, or something. My secret smile had less to do with the "life growing inside me" and more to do with my amusement at the situation.

I thought it was funny, I obviously wasn't huge and so couldn't regard it as strictly an insult (even though I'm not walking around with washboard abs here) and I'd rather him offer his seat to a (truly) pregnant lady instead of being afraid to insult her. Besides, it's strange to realize that I am at an age where that possibility isn't out of the question. I think it's funny that I could actually be pregnant and people would only smile and think, 'She glows!" ( I hope.) But at the same time I don't want people to think I'm pregnant when I'm not, so the empire waist has got to go.

I Hate That Stupid Freud

I've been sort of pining away for some one. I hate that phrase too, by the way. I feel like a corsetted, soppy Victorian miss when it is used. I haven't been pining way. I've been moving on and enjoying everything a lot lately, but sometimes in a sneaky voice I hear, 'It'd be nice if we were still friends. If you could talk to him about his thoughts on Kerouac and your paper.' or something else equally undermining.
Even with the confusion of not knowing exactly why he forgot about my existence (I chalk it up to the fact that he wasn't ready to date after his last relationship, despite his objections to the contrary.) I don't really care anymore, not much anyway, and I think I've forgiven him, in my mind. And hanging out with some old high school friends, gossiping about things we've learned about our former classmates in the intervening years, helped too. I learned some stuff that I had sort of known already but not really acknowledged about him. I'd ignored it because it didn't fit into my picture of things. But now I was faced with it and decided that now I really didn't care about him. (just for the record, it's not something that hurt me, so Aja you don't have to plan any revenges.)

And of course, after deciding that, I go home, go to bed and have a lovely make up dream about him. The kind that makes you wake up and think for half a second before remembering it was just a dream, 'Wow. He likes me again!' Not the sex dream kind, but the sweet dream kind. Those are so much more devious.
That damn subconscious. It always knows where you're most vulnerable, even when you don't. And because you don't know it's there, silently biding its time, how are you supposed to supress the thoughts it can take advantage of? You can't know what it will and won't use.
Stupid Freud and other psychiatrists figuring these things out. Thanks a lot, subconscious!

All Dressed Up

Ubiquitous Starbucks coffee cup in hand, I stood staring at row after row, aisle after aisle of shoes, wondering which ones defined me. Which one would I buy so that another facet of my personality would be revealed to the world? Which shoe would tell everyone I met that I am elegant, but fun, sophisticated but still young? Something classic, but unique. I was looking for black heels for work and a slip on shoe for everyday wear. Who knew there were so many choices when it came to black heels, but so many of them inappropriate for work? All I wanted was a black heel with a certain amount of height, but not too much. I do need to be able to walk, and I don't need to pole dance. One shoe was patent leather, yuck. One had too pointy a toe, making my feet look like long, black weapons. Another was too rounded. Finally I found the perfect pair-- Micheal Michael Kors, the Charlize pump. Elegant and simple. But they didn't have my size. And it was $89.95, more than I had decided I wanted to pay. (It would have used up all my babysitting money!) So I didn't get it.

Then it was on to finding everyday shoes, this task proved to be harder than the black heels. Even more than what heels defined me for work was the conundrum of what casual shoes defined me the best. And whether they would stand up to repeated use. I really wanted a pair of white loafers. Not off white but white. My mom has a pair that are surprisingly cool. I feel like a hip mod when I wear them, or a preppy yachter. But there were no women's loafers to be found, much less white ones. There were some great men's loafers, but again none in my size. So I ended up without shoes.

For years I have been using clothing, music, books and my other tastes to define me. Ever since I began school at Lake Anne in the middle of the sixth grade and insisted on a perm, (looking back, a very bad idea, I'm not cut out for curls) and wore a sweater over my very cool-at-the-time black stirrups. I began a life long quest to define who I was, and how people thought of me based on my clothing. For a long time I didn't want to be defined exclusively through my clothing, and so wore men's trousers and a variety of shirts and sweaters, all trying to achieve a certain rebellion against fashion by devising my own version of the beat look. Obviously what was more important than my clothes was what I read and thought and did. This in itself was a form of dictating how people thought of me in terms of what I wore, as in "Don't relegate me to that group of girls--I'm independent of that, can't you tell by my thrift shop digs?' And of course I still believe that, but I also recognize that the way we look is important to how people percieve us, as unfair as it might seem, it's true. And we can use that to define ourselves, and better understand who we are. So even though I still dress to stand out from the normal suburban crowd at the mall I try to do it in a way that expresses who I am, and what I like.

But as we grow older who we are and what we like, and who we have to become, in the workplace, with friends, everywhere else we might go in life, grows more complicated. For instance, right now I am an employee in a corporation. I have spent years rebelling against the idea of 'business clothes' and 'business casual' because even though the models look so pretty in their Banana Republic clothes it didn't feel comfortable to me. I didn't want to be beholden to a code that dictated what I could and couldn't wear. As long as I thought it was appropriate and clean and neat then who else cared? It felt like a violation of my First Ammendment. Now that I do have a 'real job' I try to balance my love for costume jewlry and unusual clothes with a sense of business casual that my boss can understand. I can't dress in what I feel to be the typical boring work clothes, I wouldn't feel right. But neither would I wear torn jeans, so what is so wrong with wearing what I want?

Women are so often told what we can and can't wear in this world, and we soak it up, we're always so certain that we must be doing something wrong, our hair out of style, the wrong dress, why else wouldn't we have the life we're shown in the advertisments? We let these depictions of life define our roles for us, telling us we should be sexy and also virginal, and smart and also a great mother and stylish and put together, but also free to be ourselves that it's no wonder some people drop out of the race altogether, or some like Britney Spears, go insane.

I can only foresee this continuing, my struggle to define myself as I change throughout life. Who will I become when I get married? How will I dress when I have kids, to show I am cool but still a good mom, but also independent of the stereotypical soccer mom? And where are my role models for aging elegantly? We seem to only have a few versions of old women that we allow slip through the mainstream. Right now it's great to be young and feel free enough to chop my hair into bangs and a short bob like I did on Friday, or wear ridiculously high wedges with my silk trousers. I don't want that to change, but things inevitably do. Growing up allows us to dress in a way we couldn't when we were younger, either because of our parents' censure, our lack of money to afford the clothes we wanted, or our own inhibitions about our bodies. But just when we can wear whatever we want we also start to censure ourselves, either because of work, or the roles we play that seem to dictate a dress code. I don't want to ever forget, as I define who I am as a woman today, and navigate this world as an adult, the sense of freedom and self that my clothes allow me.