There’s a plethora of lifestyle choices available today that conveniently offer the opportunity of neatly packaging one’s sense of self into a fixed and marketable identity. New Aged, redneck, Goth, surfer, academic, valley girl, Republican—you name it, and it could be the new look for you! This is an exciting idea for someone like me who was born with a sort of personality A.D.D. I want to be them all. I have to be them all. . . though I think I’ll go ahead and skip over Republican.
Politics aside, I have taken on the feat of defining myself through a series of identity crisises strung together like a chain of paper children holding hands across the ceiling of a pediatric waiting room. Each link in the chain (my nerdy stage, my “I only wear black” stage, my crazy sorority girl stage) comprises who I am today. Right now I’m hooked on Zen and veganism, which is not to say that the fact that I understand this to be a phase demeans those who actually adhere to these strict regulations for life. I do take it seriously. . .now. But like most of my personal stages, I know I’ll look back and chuckle at the silliness that is my search of self. At least now I get to enjoy a mind and body stage that will likely leave me thinner and less temperamental –not to mention way more respectable than my novelty key chain and leather pants stage that occurred sometime back in high school.
Like most of my stages, however, I botched that one as well. Sure, I was successful in collecting the most annoying of key chains. You know, the kind that say, “I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it,” and “Talk to the hand.” But it was the pant-thing I messed up seeing as I didn’t have the pleasure of wearing actual leather pants, which in retrospect is probably a good thing considering I’m now a vegan with this whole “animal rights” complex. But let me tell you, the gap between real leather pants and imitation leather pants on the coolness scale is an astounding fabric knockoff phenomena. One set beckons a ride of the backs of hot, fervent Harley’s and (most importantly) hot, fervent men, while the other favors screaming I’m broke, and Mama wouldn’t help me pay for the real thing! Which, really, is just about as un-cool as it gets. Louie Vuitton and Coach knockoffs are usually fairly respectable as they are a confident display of both a sense of fashion and a reasonable understanding of personal finance, but my pants had no such defense. I was cheap and out of style. Period.
They weren’t even a vinyl kind of pleather. They were more like pleather’s pleather, and the shame of acknowledging that I got them for $10 at Ross didn’t even hit me until a few years later when I was watching a re-run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That was the look I was going for the whole time—slender, ass-kicking, David Boreanaz screwing— but little did I realize that my big-boned, straight-A, virginal high school self was not one to be compromised at this time in my life—even had I got the pants right.
