The Same But Different

I have been thinking about being the Other, having considered some feedback I got on my work in my online writing class.  It's a classic story line, the not fitting in, the underdog, the foreigner, the half-breed.  The thing is, as Americans, we might all want to be Other.  We want to be different and individual and unique.  We all have our stories about how we were Other and how hard it was to be that way and isn't it great now that we have grown up and realize the asymmetry of our own snowflake is the very secret to our beauty?  But the thing is, everybody identifies with that story, our Otherness is a commonality.  I wonder if in other countries, they don't necessarily want to be Other, they might want to be a certain type or they might want to be same but different.    

A friend of mine is getting messages from a Colombian dating site because there is somebody with the same name as him out there who is into Colombian girls.  I was fascinated by the way the Colombian girls described themselves as a particular type.  They were either "affectionate and sincere" ones or "uncomplicated" ones.  The hot ones apparently describe themselves as "happy."  Also there are "little" women.  Are these types that actually exist or are these some kind of defensive declaration against a preconceived notion that Colombian men have about Colombian women being crazy, depressive, and gadunkadunk?  I don't know!  How do women declare themselves here?  I glanced through Salon personals just now, and we appear to want to be both of everything.  We are girls next door who are sexy too.  We are many-sided diamonds in the rough.  We are stripper librarians.  Super complicated, cool, funny, serious, adventurous, home bodies.  Me too!

Which reminds me, our neighborhood version of Christina Ricci cat came the closest to me that she has ever dared.  She is a wild thing, always having babies and not being catchable enough to be fixed.  Can you tell that she's pretty?  She's difficult to photograph and perhaps pregnant again.

The other thing about the Other is that we get all huffy when there's another one of us around.  That's why there's a Charlotte and a Samantha and a Carrie and the other one in your group of friends.  It's hard to have the same type in one gang.  You are much more liable to run into another you when there are more people around, like in school, which is why you might recall all those evil twins and frenemies from your youth.  Even if you have eliminated other you's in your adulthood, they are all still out there, in the world.  I never felt so demoralized as when I was trying to be an actress for a year or so in my twenties, and I'd audition for a part as an Asian news broadcaster, and there would be a hundred other me's, all with our Connie Chung hair and crepe suiting.  I didn't love acting enough to live like that.

But now, as I'm trying to craft stories, maybe all the other me's is exactly who I should be thinking about.  Maybe it isn't that I have to stand out as a special me.  Maybe what I want is for everyone to relate.  You know what I'm talking about.