OPINIONS
My humor is too cynical and sexual, my tact too under-developed and my family experience too dark. I am what you would officially call damaged. And I can’t help but blame the majority of it on junior high and high school, when I occupied the lowest of financial brackets. I grew up in a world different from the comfortable one that many Chapman students belong to.
It’s not a problem, but it’s hard for me to not be awkward in certain situations.
As I sat in a hotel ballroom watching the same skinny blonde girls prance, with slightly altered facial features, I felt like Meg in “Little Women” when she goes to the party with rich people. Wearing a dress that was not mine, in a crowd of people used to fancy gala-type dinners, I felt like a rag doll who had been dressed in the proper garment, but underneath made of a coarser material than the delicate china dolls gliding gracefully around me.
I sat at a candle-lit table with not only his parents, but his grandmother, cousin, uncles and aunts and a few women I don’t remember, barely six weeks after we had started dating. His sister was one of the high-schoolers being honored for completing a large number of community service hours.
We learned each girl’s school activities, a couple quirky descriptions meant to convey a personality and her favorite memories with her happy and complete family.
I thought about the girls I had known in high school who had raised a child, survived a rape or had to work graveyard shifts. Surely none of them ever had a day to primp and polish and then a night to stroll down a catwalk to the adoring eyes of a content, well-fed and groomed audience.
Why shouldn’t girls who suffer in the shadows be spot-lighted on the stage and feel beautiful? Even amid this glittering world of fine wine and delicate shrimp cocktails, even in the midst of the accomplishments, I managed to like the parents. They were friendly and understanding. They were real.
That’s how my two years of Chapman have been. Though there are a lot of people who seem like they would pop with the slightest prick of reality, amid the blow-up dolls I’ve managed to run into real people. They are the ones who pick up the phone at midnight on a Tuesday to console me. They are the ones who would kidnap me on my birthday and drag me to dinner, and still smile even though I only sulk in the corner because I hate my birthday. They are the ones who bring me a 12-pack of cherry coke in the middle of the afternoon because they know it will make my day.
That’s how this glitzy world of Orange County doesn’t make me crumple – because beneath the facades, there are the people who anchor me back to reality.
Contact this reporter: michelle.thomas@thepantheronline.com
