I rode back to Oxford in the company of an incredibly trashed interracial student who had just turned 20. Dressed in a pseudo-co-ed outfit for going out, with Asian features in an English setting (she was originally from Hong Kong), I learned a bit more about the Other Side. The Other Side were those preppy kids from our high school days, always wearing the latest outfits, laughing the loudest and staring daggers at people like me, the "losers". She used this term freely. The "cool people" and the "losers". At first our talk was pleasant, until she started sinking into the doldroms of the alcohol, and I started seeing through the cute co-ed mask she wore. Two weeks ago, a friend of hers was shot and killed in New York. As a result she was questioning her life and its direction. Constantly pushed to get good grades, she was struggling, painfully, to get a degree at Oxford which she didn't even know if she wanted or not. But as a little rich girl, she was too scared to do her own thing because that would mean "her family wouldn't buy her things anymore." I tried to talk to her, aware that I was coming from the other side of the tracks. I was the "loser" and therefore I was completely and totally wrong for everything that I did. She said she worried about how we would raise our child to be a loser like us by not insisting that television, the latest clothes, the latest music, was the most important thing to do in high school. "It's armour to be able to say you know all sorts of things that you don't care about, because otherwise you aren't cool, and that's what high school is all about." She then demanded to know what made the losers so very important that I would insist upon living that way instead of being cool. "What did you bitch about then, as losers? About us cool kids, right?" I had to think about that for a moment, and then I replied, "We didn't bitch. I didn't have those kinds of friends. The friends I had were the ones who were getting sexually assaulted by their fathers or brothers. They were suicidal and their knuckles were carved up because they sliced them with razor-blades to dull their internal pain. One was gay and died of AIDS, and spent a good portion of his high school year getting beat up by cool kids for being gay, and then going home and getting beat up for being gay. One summer, five kids committed suicide, one after the other. We didn't talk about tv, about music, or tried to sound like Valley Girls, because we knew that didn't mean a damn thing, when the only thing we were concerned about was whether we'd manage to make it to the next day, and then the next. We didn't have a future. We only had a tomorrow." She wouldn't look me in the eye at that point, and just stubbornly, drunkenly muttered, "You don't understand." Oh yes, girl, I do. I understand all too well, Spoiled Little Rich Girl. Mum and Dad are going to let you loose on the world, to earn lots and lots of money doing things you don't want to do. Instead, you either want to sit at home and become an alcoholic housewife or run away and become a surfer on the beach and party all the time. In the end, it doesn't matter which one you're doing, but they're both one and the same. We all have our Armour, apparently. LuCyFurr LuCy
I rode back to Oxford in the company of an incredibly trashed interracial student who had just turned 20. Dressed in a pseudo-co-ed outfit for going out, with Asian features in an English setting (she was originally from Hong Kong), I learned a bit more about the Other Side.
The Other Side were those preppy kids from our high school days, always wearing the latest outfits, laughing the loudest and staring daggers at people like me, the "losers". She used this term freely. The "cool people" and the "losers".
At first our talk was pleasant, until she started sinking into the doldroms of the alcohol, and I started seeing through the cute co-ed mask she wore. Two weeks ago, a friend of hers was shot and killed in New York. As a result she was questioning her life and its direction. Constantly pushed to get good grades, she was struggling, painfully, to get a degree at Oxford which she didn't even know if she wanted or not. But as a little rich girl, she was too scared to do her own thing because that would mean "her family wouldn't buy her things anymore."
I tried to talk to her, aware that I was coming from the other side of the tracks. I was the "loser" and therefore I was completely and totally wrong for everything that I did. She said she worried about how we would raise our child to be a loser like us by not insisting that television, the latest clothes, the latest music, was the most important thing to do in high school. "It's armour to be able to say you know all sorts of things that you don't care about, because otherwise you aren't cool, and that's what high school is all about."
She then demanded to know what made the losers so very important that I would insist upon living that way instead of being cool. "What did you bitch about then, as losers? About us cool kids, right?"
I had to think about that for a moment, and then I replied, "We didn't bitch. I didn't have those kinds of friends. The friends I had were the ones who were getting sexually assaulted by their fathers or brothers. They were suicidal and their knuckles were carved up because they sliced them with razor-blades to dull their internal pain. One was gay and died of AIDS, and spent a good portion of his high school year getting beat up by cool kids for being gay, and then going home and getting beat up for being gay. One summer, five kids committed suicide, one after the other. We didn't talk about tv, about music, or tried to sound like Valley Girls, because we knew that didn't mean a damn thing, when the only thing we were concerned about was whether we'd manage to make it to the next day, and then the next. We didn't have a future. We only had a tomorrow."
She wouldn't look me in the eye at that point, and just stubbornly, drunkenly muttered, "You don't understand."
Oh yes, girl, I do. I understand all too well, Spoiled Little Rich Girl. Mum and Dad are going to let you loose on the world, to earn lots and lots of money doing things you don't want to do. Instead, you either want to sit at home and become an alcoholic housewife or run away and become a surfer on the beach and party all the time. In the end, it doesn't matter which one you're doing, but they're both one and the same.
We all have our Armour, apparently.
LuCyFurr
LuCy
