jeans and t-shirt girl: part 1 of 6

I haven't always been a jeans and t-shirt girl.

There was definitely a long period of time somewhere in there (think, birth - 10 yrs) where I wore pretty much nothing but pink, and most of my outfits matched completely. My favorite was this: pale pink oxford with slightly darker pink sweater-vest and even darker pink corduroy pants. This was still the early eighties, so believe me when I tell you that there was some serious flaring at the bottom of those cords.

Dad and Grandpa tried to fix it, in vain - dressed me in their t-shirts mostly, so I would toddle around on the sidewalk outside the house in a navy blue number that read "LOCAL 151" in white block letters larger than my entire body.

In the third grade I gave up on pink a little. At this point I was reading at college level and sneaking Sweet Valley University home from the public library in my backpack (book #2, Love, Lies, and Jessica Wakefield featured on it's cover Jessica Wakefield and a dashing young man with floppy nineties hair wearing only bathrobes and smiling at each other in the bathroom mirror - my mother considered this FAR too risque for her youngest child and only daughter). My favorite outfit that year was a pair of capri length spandex bicycle pants, black with a neon pink stripe on either side and a black t-shirt covered in glitter and splatter paint hearts: pink, blue, green.

I was in. I was watching what the other girls wore, sneaking a 12-color eyeshadow palette into the bathroom at school in the morning, scrunching my socks down over the tops of my sneakers. I wanted to be a woman, I wanted to wear silk shirts and pinch roll my jeans (these options were denied me until the fifth grade, when mom relented and bought me both).

Enter 1997. My freshman year of high school saw me entering a particularly vicious world. Tipton High School, with it's overwhelming population of 500 students in four classes, would never be kind to me. And I was fourteen, that worst of roughshot adolescent ages for a girl. My father had died four months before, and my two older brothers had left imprinted on every wall and locker a legacy of cool that couldn't possibly be upheld by the shy third child, sulking in a corner and scribbling angry poems in a red notebook. You should understand about Central Indiana that we follow the coastal trends at a leisurely pace (surely influenced by confusion over daylight savings time and a need to ensure the corn was in fact knee high by july 4th), and so things like Courtney Love and ball-chains had only just entered my worldview.

I learned to apply black eyeliner and wore to school every day a pair of drab green cloth pants whose bottoms measured 54 inches in circumference, but could be cinched by a drawstring for maximum skateboarding ease (I never skated, but oh did I love the boys who did - I still kind of do). I was listening to X103 - Indy's New Rock Alternative! - as a matter of course, because I couldn't claim street cred without knowing all the words to The Verve Pipe's "The Freshman" or Nine Inch Nails' "The Perfect Drug," a song I still love.

In geometry class, I was staring longingly at the back of Bryan Small's closely shorn blonde head, surreptitiously displaying my perfect test grades in case he wanted a tutor. He had offered me a warm hand on a cold playground one day in winter, two years my senior yet not embarrassed to play Red Rover at my side, and spent two years unfailingly not noticing my presence until the first day of my freshman year when he looked me up and down in my green skater pants and black eyeliner, gave me a curt nod of acknowledgement and walked on. He wore a Sebadoh shirt to school one momentous day and the next afternoon I drove a half hour to the nearest music shop (Sam Goody in the Kokomo Mall) and bought a Sebadoh album for myself. I listened to it religiously for six months before realizing that a) I was terrified of his girlfriend and wanted nothing of this crush to become public, cause bitch would KICK MY ASS and b) I was saving myself for Gavin Rossdale. I let the pants rot in the back of my closet and concentrated instead on wearing as much black as humanly possible.

I went through a few more phases between then and now - one most notably recorded by my friend Bobby who, senior year of high school dressed up like me and pulled it off with glorious accuracy (this was during the: wear as many colors as possible at once phase), complete with a name tag that read something along the lines of "I am Lindsay. I think Doug is in love with me." But Bryan Small, he was the beginning of the end. And each of those regrettable clothing phases was sincerely punctuated by the ubiquitous jeans and t-shirt. In fact, my closet is bulging because I haven't stopped wearing pretty much anything I bought past the age of sixteen. Because no matter how many days in a row I wore those green pants with my Airwalks, no matter how thick I laid on the eyeliner or how many test questions I let him copy, he wasn't going to be into me.

Thus I realized, eventually and only partially, that a woman is not what she wears. A hard idea to shake in this society that I live in, but at the very least, the kind of woman I hope I am is not what she wears. I wear my jeans (yes, dark and flared and tight) with pride, and my 3 for 7.99$ black A-frames without irony because they're comfortable and I feel sexy when I'm not parading, a point driven home the other night when I realized that I swing my hips in a particular pair of well fitted jeans but stumble uncomfortably in anything that could be considered "business casual" or dressier. It throws me off, makes me fumble for my words. I can't eat or drink through lipstick, and I'll suffocate my cat before squeezing into anything in the stocking family.

I bought that Sebadoh album again a couple of years ago and loved it - it's good stuff, music I'll put my word behind. And so far, my least complicated, most tenderly passionate and enduring relationship has been with black eyeliner. I think you have to admit that all the coolest girls have a gimmick.