Mid Morning.

Haven’t even made my morning break, yet. Maybe I’m not more special than this. Who’s to say? A fleeting feeling that I have sometimes? Pshaw. Maybe I need to accept that this is my life. That it’s a decent life (even though I can’t make my bills).

I don’t feel like working. I feel like reading something interesting. Hello? Is there anything out there that I can read that will fill some time? No, I don’t think so. A quick glance of MSN will just waste valuable Internet time, now that I want to be the internet/worker secret agent. Need to keep my net time low. Make it seem like I’m working, even though my productivity has fallen off a cliff.

Ah ha! I’ve stumbled upon no less than 3 slate articles that I will consume like a starving man eating a ritz cracker. Ok, interesting read over, now back to work. And so I stare out my window at the passing cars, and the people parking in the lot across the street as they head off into school. I work across the street from the Bryman School. Ya know, it’s odd to me how these people (who I assume want to be nurses, but could be any number of possible jobs in the medical field) wear scrubs—even during school. I mean they aren’t going to be cutting up bloody messes, are they? Eeew! Perhaps they clean teeth, but that can’t be that messy, can it? Why, why, why do they have to wear uniforms?

I guess this is a bigger question. I absolutely loathe the idea of uniforms. I mean I get that police wear them and firefighters and military wo/men must wear them (there is a certain psychological response and respect that follows not the person but the Uniform). But school kids? And I know that parents love them, because with the price of clothing, etc. gone so crazy that this way they all wear the same thing, saving money. Except then the kids want $250 sneakers, but I digress. I once mentioned that I didn’t like the idea, and AB said to me, “Why? School is not about being individual. School is training on conformity.” This struck me as very true, and I dropped it. Because I couldn’t argue. School, at least grammar and high, was training for a life of ordinariness. It was like a giant rock tumbler for young people, take the rough edges off so you don’t stick out, go with the flow so you can fit in so you don’t get crushed. In high school, I remember feeling that I should just stop fighting and go along . . . work around the system and fit in as best as I could. But I was very individual, and I did just slip along. There was nothing remarkable about my grades or performance. I did not belong to any groups or clubs, but I was an unremarkable reporter for the school newspaper. As a matter of fact, I completely dropped out of high school my senior year, suffering from a deep depression that my parents never knew about.

If everyone wore a uniform we’d have no Breakfast Club. No Molly Ringwald in her little boots and long skirt, no Ally Sheedy in her all black and certainly no Judd Nelson looking like a boy I used to date. That is a portrait of high school. It isn’t always accurate of who we are going to be, but it is a snap shot of us, trying to find our place, trying to locate who we want to become.

I didn’t wear a uniform. And look where I am now. I never became the person I wanted to be, but maybe someday I will. I gave up cheap shoes (my personal passion) for more expensive (and ugly) Birkenstocks.
And I look out the window and wonder why those adults choose to wear a uniform--before their life has really dictated who they are going to be. Are the scrubs just scrubs or are they those students way of smoothing off their rough edges so they don’t stick out, going with the flow and fitting in?