Slippery Structures by Christa Whitney '09

Sometimes I get this very eerie sense that entire systems of values, constellations of attention are occurring around me that I am completely outside of. This feeling can be brought on by something as simple as noticing an interesting outfit someone in my class is wearing. The way I would wear an old worn out sweater would surely not enter this sub-cultural stream of fashionable norms. Hair falling over the eye or a bra visible above the line of a shirt sometimes make me uncomfortable in the same way I am when a word is employed in the classroom, responded to and repeated, and I appear to be the only one who doesn’t understand. Another striking instance of this is dating etiquette. I have friends who seem to follow this very complex unspoken code of rules about how long one must wait after a first date to call for the second, or how many text messages can be sent in a certain period of time, or what is the time frame in which panic can be eluded and when, exactly, the lack of a text or Facebook wall post in reply signifies a grave shift in feeling of the other party, and, therefore, a period of “justified” freak-out can ensue. Herein, I am filled with a dual emotion of jealousy at being excluded from this secret language, and incomprehension at what seems to me a distortion or betrayal of emotions or aesthetics I find innate. And I circle back and around to the question: would my life be more fulfilling in some way if I tapped into these streams of alternate rules of being that generally slip by my peripheral vision in undertone murmurs?