The color was Midnight in Moscow by O.P.I., though without the right lighting it could easily look black. It was that lighting I was trying to find as I wiggled my fingernails under the lamp while my mother looked on skeptically. As I tried to point out the flecks of purple, she shifted her eyes to mine and said, Feeling a little Goth
are we? No matter how much of an argument I made for dark-painted nails being very vogue she was convinced I was going through a phase. This, too, shall pass.
And it did. I arrived at school in the fall with dark nails and dark hair with deep red highlights, and by winter my nails were pearl white and my hair was a lighter brown with blonde streaks. Is this column about my hair and nails? No, though I could go on about them forever. It's about what college is about ' finding yourself.
Even if you're only a freshman, it's a safe bet that there is at least a little difference in the person you were two quarters ago who marched from the Convocation Center to College Green and the person you are now. Give it a couple more quarters, and you'll be different even then. College offers a four (or more) -year test drive to figure out just who you are, who you want to be and, maybe most importantly, who you do not want to be.
We've been trained from our high school years that the label is to be avoided. This makes perfect sense; what could be worse than to be lumped in with a huge group of people? The problem is, in our effort to avoid being labeled into one group, we inevitably fall into another.
The pink hair, the piercing and the tattoo did their job in shocking the hell out of your parents and making them regret not sending you to a good, Catholic-based college, but they can't compete in a college town. Try as you might, you can't convince people that the dark eyeliner and fishnet gloves aren't Goth or punk. No one's buying your argument that really, you're making a statement that democracy has failed us and anarchy is the new black. Really, you're doing what everyone else is doing: trying to fit in without being grouped.
What we need to do is understand that labels are necessary for society to operate, and the best way to be rid of their negative side is not by spending our lives trying to avoid them (which could be extremely tiring), but by realizing that just because we fit into a category does not mean that we are defined by or limited to that group. Think of it as customizing your label, just like you would your pizza.
Life is like a box of crayons. Not the standard 10-pack, friend, but the 96-count Crayola box that we craved at least once during our childhood. Now, these days crayons have gotten out of hand like everything else and there are, in addition to every color imaginable, glitter crayons, twistable crayons and scented crayons, because we need something else for today's youth to sniff.
Point is, all of these crayons have a home in the original non-scented, non-glittered rainbow. For example, the sky-after-a-rainstorm-blue crayon still belongs to the blues, and the macaroni-and-cheese calls the yellow group home. Or maybe orange. That one always got me.
Instead of spending so much energy avoiding labels and the stereotypes that come packaged with them, maybe it's OK to just accept that, hey, maybe you're one of the green crayons. But don't let that get you down if you were aiming for blue ' teal's an option. Or maybe you're wilder than grassy knoll green; shoot for granny smith, my dear. Chenee Castruita is a junior journalism major. Send her an e-mail at cc282705@ohiou.edu.
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Chenee Castruita
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