RODRIGUE: Who are you?

We live in a generation obsessed with trying to define itself. The 60s and 70s had ‘Nam and acid and Haight-Ashbury, the 80s had the Berlin Wall and ‘Thriller,’ and the 90s had Cobain and grunge and a whole new world of coffee. But we hail from a time of rest and impotence ‘-‘- we’re coming of age in a place and time so heavily influenced by so many things that nothing has been able to synthesize itself into one central idea. What are we fighting for? What do we want to change? The best thing about our generation is that everyone in it will answer those questions with something different; the worst thing about us is that we’ll all shrug in unison when asked, ‘But how?’

And if we can’t define what we stand for, how can we define ourselves? Through iPhones and quasi-political neckwear? Through our shoes and handbags? Through our blogs? Time magazine calls us millennials, but ‘-‘- in keeping with the grand scheme of all things defined by pretentious periodicals ‘-‘- that definition is more or less empty and meaningless. Truthfully, we’re all just a bunch of alter egos, transforming to fit some standard or another when we have to, and then becoming something else when we need to. Our ability to morph like this is all at once the watermark, the genius and the crisis of our generation.

It’s no new practice for famous people to acquire alter egos. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust is a legend ‘-‘- perhaps more famous than Bowie himself ‘-‘- and renowned journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote and lived under all sorts of gonzo identities. Recently, Beyonce introduced Sasha Fierce ‘-‘- just when we thought she couldn’t be any scarier ‘-‘- Mariah Carey became Mimi, and even her majesty, Madonna, announced that she sometimes escapes into identity of her fake name, Esther (complemented notoriously by a fake British accent).

Of course, it’s easy to make fun of celebrities who use alter egos. We blame this strange practice on their eccentricities, on the sad psychological effects of a life lived under public scrutiny, and we remove ourselves from them and laughingly reassure each other that we’re ‘realer’ than that, more grounded than that, more secure than that. We have a hard time admitting’ ‘-‘- though inside, I’m sure we all realize it ‘-‘- that we, with our virtual lives and our second lives and our home lives and our weekend lives, are just as detached from reality as they are.

We express it in different ways. I’m Lauren for the most part ‘-‘- tripping on the sidewalks, stuttering in class, assuaging my fears of public speaking with NyQuil, cursing the disappearance of the Autumn Roast coffee at Einstein’s Bagels ‘-‘- but I can’t stop myself from evolving into Pulp Fashion every once in a while, answering my friends’ fashion quandaries with obnoxious third-person sentences that go something like, ‘Pulp Fashion thinks you should sacrifice function for fashion and go for those high-heeled boots, because they really do wonders for your calves.’

And then there are days when I wear my new black Doc Martens combat boots, and other days when I wear four-inch heels, and there are days when I go to class having done all my homework and other days when I don’t even get out of bed. Sometimes I stop for the Greenpeace/PETA/Save the Children people on the side of the road, and sometimes I ignore them. Of course, there are no days when I wear Ugg boots ‘-‘- but you get the point.

But just as I don’t devote myself wholly to one certain aesthetic or lifestyle, I also don’t devote myself to one certain cause, which makes me diverse and every bit the modern, liberally educated millennial thinker Time magazine wants me to be. But it also makes me quite lazy and, at the end of the day, not in any position to make any sort of change at all. And if you’ll allow me to judge you without knowing you, reader, I’ll venture so far as to say the same goes for you, too.

Doesn’t it explain so much about who we are as a youth culture? Why we love Halloween so much, why we thrive on irony, why we’ve taken so well to the idea of non-verbal, impersonal communication like email and text messaging? The further we distance ourselves from reality, the more comfortable it seems we are. Which is all well and good in some respects ‘-‘- we’ve turned fashion into the kind of environment where leggings as pants and fur-trimmed, foam-soled boots are accepted and sometimes encouraged, and we’ve allowed ‘good’ music to now include weird computerized noises and schizophrenic combinations of songs that have already been made ‘-‘- but it also makes us all a little less human. There are so many versions of us and so many versions of ‘cool’ that we’ve inadvertently permitted causes to become trends, individuality to become routine, uniqueness to become redundant and action to become commonplace.

My friend Milica used the pseudonym Ethan Verlaine when she went to concerts in middle school. ‘It makes it easier to get backstage,’ she says, adding, ‘I guess.’

At lame parties where she doesn’t know anyone, if she finds herself standing up against the wall, bored, Daria becomes Iman Lorraine, who falls in love with everyone who dares catch her eye and poses in the background of other peoples’ photographs. And my roommate, Erin, upon being awkwardly hit on by a 30-something businessman at McDonald’s last year, instantly and seamlessly transformed into Roxanna, her aloof Russian counterpart.

The common thread that links Ethan, Iman, Roxanna ‘-‘- and even Pulp Fashion ‘-‘- is the same thing that motivates most of our generation to do most of the weird stuff we end up doing: boredom and restlessness. This isn’t to say that my friends and I are apathetic oafs who don’t care about anything the way our parents did when they were our age. But rather, I’m pointing out a symptom of an overly stimulated generation. We’re bored with being so connected. We anticipate the deluge of opinions and beliefs and trends thrown at us by our peers, and instead of facing it all in reality, we let our alter egos do the work. We blog and Facebook and flaunt and flirt our alter egos into reality ‘-‘- that way everything’s far less obnoxious.

Take, for example, Pulp Fashion, a product of a bored Lauren Rodrigue who was looking for some safe way to outlet her fashion obsession. Pulp Fashion is Lauren minus all the pretense ‘-‘- she shamelessly believes in fashion above anything else, but she doesn’t have to put up a front pretending she’s not materialistic, nor does she have to defend her intelligence the way Lauren might have to. She is free to talk about shoes the way some people talk about God, and as a result, she faces all the harsh criticism Lauren tactfully avoids. But because she’s not real, she’s invincible ‘-‘- she has no spirit for you to break, haters.

So if we use alter egos as scapegoats for our least-desirable yet most-eager-to-surface traits, in an effort to outlet ourselves without risking people crapping all over our actual selves, then doesn’t that suggest a serious problem in our reality? Doesn’t it also hint at a lack of actual esteem for anything important enough not to dance around with fake identities? While our parents, at 20, were living in communes and openly, loudly protesting one universally serious issue, we find ourselves living in the confines of our iPods and computers and dorm rooms, quietly and discreetly protesting not much at all with constructed characters.

How do we rectify ourselves? There’s plenty going on out there for us to care about ‘-‘- that’s not the issue. What we need is an impetus to fend off our alter egos, if only for a little while, and get our real hands really dirty. It’s easy to carry a reusable canvas bag to and from Shaws on grocery day and look like an environmentalist. But to actually actively work for the green movement takes a considerable amount of effort and dedication ‘-‘- more than most of us are willing to give. It’s easy for us to pay $30 for an Obama T-shirt at Urban Outfitters, vote, and then say we changed the world . . . but come on, we all know there’s more we could do. Instead our alter egos blog about change, or post photos on Facebook from Obama rallies, or compete with others at parties over who knows more obscure information about corruption in the Bush administration.

To save ourselves from being dubbed the most impotent generation in American history, we need to muster up a little more courage. We need to be a little more genuine ‘-‘- after all, if our alter egos are brave and snarky and clever and fashionable and revolutionary, and if they’re just extensions of ourselves, then our real selves must have all of those things in us, too. What do we have to lose, aside from some street cred?

I’m taking my own advice and putting Pulp Fashion away for a while. Sure, she’s fabulous and untouchable and witty and shameless, but she’s also just ink and paper. She is silent if you don’t read her, and she can disintegrate if you drop her on the street, and she is ignorable if you’re more interested in the crossword or crime logs. Maybe she’ll reappear here and there ‘-‘- as all alter egos want to do ‘-‘- but not to say the things I should be saying myself. She’s a tough act for my measly self to follow, but I’ll accept the challenge. I encourage you to do the same.