Being Cool at Art School

When I was sixteen, I went to a boarding school for the arts.  But before you picture me doing something all art-schooly like using petrified chipmunk bones to scrape organic paints onto aluminum car parts, you should know that I studied ballet there… and I didn’t exactly fit in.

It’s not that I didn’t have friends.  I did, and they were awesome.  It was at art school that I discovered that I could do strange things like compose passionate slam poetry about chocolate, or cheerfully say “hello” to squirrels, without anyone so much as batting an eye.  At first it felt liberating.  I had shaken the dust of suburban paradise off my Ugg boots and arrived in a world allegedly unaffected by superficiality.  I was an angst-ridden teen, and it seemed like, for the first time in my life, I didn’t have to try to be cool.

But I soon learned art school had its own standards of what was and wasn’t cool.  Doing risqué yoga moves in public areas of campus and spray painting “Drop acid, not bombs” on the cafeteria wall?  Definitely cool.  But I’m fairly certain no one at my school actually dropped acid... thank heavens.  They were all too busy being miniature Mozarts and Vincent Van Goghs. 

Nevertheless, I was disenchanted.  So what if I didn’t have dreadlocks and I liked straightening my hair?!  Impeccable hygiene is important to me!  And I just couldn’t afford the Free People clothes that, worn in many layers, would allow me to rock the homeless person look.  My money had been spent on the Abercrombie shirts and Ugg boots that were now so very uncool.  “So screw it,” I thought.  “I’ll wear my Uggs and straighten my hair.  But maybe I’ll do things like listen to French jazz and bake my own granola, too.  I’ll be myself!”

One year later, after deciding ballet was no longer my calling, I went back to suburban paradise feeling tortured and misunderstood, wearing my black leather jacket, and quoting Christina Rossetti.  I thought everything was “cliché.”  Everyone was “shallow.” 

I was intolerably pretentious and annoying. 

Eventually I came back alive again.  I started incorporating colors into my wardrobe, and not so many years later I even started listening to Justin Bieber.  So though I carry a bit of art school within me and I still eat granola, art school did no permanent damage.  I always did talk to squirrels, and I still sometimes do, because I think they’re adorable.  And I still wear my now painfully out-of-style Uggs.  Because gosh darn it, they’re the comfiest things ever trod upon, and I challenge the man who states otherwise.