One day my younger sister woke up and decided to be social. Not that she was a particular breed of recluse before. She was simply more comfortable at home watching The Disney Channel all night with a bowl of popcorn in her lap. She liked heavy metal, enjoyed a solid game of Mario Kart and saturated her mind with thoughts of horses in the form of books, television, computer games or, of course, riding.
My family always said she “marched to the beat of her own drum,” a subtle euphemism for the fact that she was a little quirkier than your average idiosyncratic Jane. Sometimes I considered her peculiar — like when she ran around the house whinnying like a horse, despite the presence of my dignified family friends. Other times I relished her creativity — like the time she made a Marzipan cake in the shape of a ghost the size of our Labrador’s head. She always had a rare and interesting perspective on people and situations; however fickle, they were was of little importance to me.
Her first endeavors in social interactions were awkward and bipolar. She met people whom she loved the first day and hated the next. I played the role of supportive sister extraordinaire, making up catchy songs about her arch enemies, only to retract my offending words when those whom she supposedly spited slept over our house the following weekend. Naturally, my sister and I became closer. Since we’re less than three years apart, finding a common denominator was nothing close to impossible — until she began to steal my identity.
Those who have siblings know what I mean when I say she was the surreptitious thief and I, the vexed victim. All of the sudden, she listened to my music, shopped at the same stores and even coined my all-time favorite dessert. None of this was verbalized of course, but it was hard to ignore when my sister ordered Crème Brule instead of her beloved cheesecake.
My mom, like all good moms of petulant older siblings, told me that she was just jealous of my ways, and I was simply setting a good example. I accepted this, changed my favorite dessert and tried not to get upset when my sister and I went to school wearing the same shirt. I thought this would be the end of personal identity and character theft. Unfortunately, this was not so.
As she worked her way through the Chicken Soup for the Teenage Souls, her need for acculturation intensified. Suddenly, she watched The Simpsons twice a day and became a broken record of overused quotes that were never that funny to begin with. When she realized that everyone watched Family Guy, and that Simpsons references were “so last year,” she completely abandoned Homer in favor of Stewie’s entertaining antics. When I gently lectured that she didn’t have to ditch Lizzie McGuire and The Distillers for The OC: Mix 3 and My Super Sweet Sixteen to fit in, she insisted she made these changes on her own initiative.
But her belittling statements about the “weird” kids at school coupled with her newfound love for short skirts — she used to hate skirts — made it clear that she had abandoned her former unconventionality for some sort of popularity. Though disappointed, I wondered: At what point in our personality does authenticity give way to popular culture?
It’s rather intricate to separate fictive from genuine desires. To render whether our interest for something was aroused internally or influenced by our surroundings is much like the chicken and the egg. At our age and at this point in life, making a distinction may seem inconsequential.
After all, it shouldn’t make that much of a difference if our characteristics become muddled with those of our teenage American compadres, should it? If you want to retain a strong sense of self throughout your life then in fact, yes. It’s impractical and ethnocentric to rely on others’ expected knowledge of socially accepted and ubiquitous mannerisms.
If your fun and comical personality centers on references to Family Guy, what would happen if you went to a foreign country or even a very remote part of this country where Family Guy was unknown? Of course there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s simply healthy to discern its role as an extension of your personality.
The best way to define your own desires is to mentally remove yourself from your social strata and test whether or not your normal ambitions remain appealing. It’s a process of stripping off the layers you have accumulated over the years, the slight mesh of flexibility required to create meaningful relationships: compromise. Although compromise is entirely helpful, it also creates a sort of build up that is nearly impossible to relinquish after it becomes imbedded within your personality.
Look at everything in the light of independence. Would the signature of a dignitary be as important if there were no one to show? Would you wear those clothes if no one could see them? Watch that movie if you were alone? And would it be your favorite, like you say it is right now?
You can tell yourself that you have your whole life to rekindle the things you love that were once purely yours. Once you graduate, it becomes much more difficu< you have to know yourself. But by all means, invest as much in popular culture as it invests in you. It's part of our way of living, and it certainly is fun. Just keep yourself in mind along the way. Hayley Sher is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences and is an Assistant Photo Editor.