She look'd in the mirror -- the girl looking back at her was not herself

Whenever my hair is chopped off, or drastically changed color, I'm used to feeling, for just a few days, as though the creature in the mirror is not me. This effect can also be achieved by Clinique makeup counters [utilized for prom and other fancy dances back in the day] wherein there is something sylvan and strange looking back at me. Over the weekend though, when I joined a carpool to Indianapolis to check out the new venue Club Therapy as well as the renowned DJ Q-Burn [something something DJ speak], I slipped into the bathroom.

Not only did Lainy and I have positive shock'd faces from the fact that it was CLEAN and WELL LIT and had a NICE MIRROR; but for the first time, the face in the mirror was so out of context [in this gaudy apartment complex]. Here I am, in a Superman t-shirt, too much eyeliner, as a brunette, wearing a long skirt. I look as in place as any one else [surrounded by a curious melange of sorority girl-fashion, hipster-girl fashion, and i-hate-conformity-fashion]. I resemble myself, as much as ever. Exboyfriends and former coworkers or class mates would have known me.
Except that they wouldn't have -- the Lina I am, or was:

the consummate bookworm trapped in libraries for solace,
the church-every-sunday-tuesday-wednesday-saturday girl,
the 4.0-highschoolstudent,
the full-ride-scholarship collegestudent,
the feminist, the anti-war activist,
the stick-shift-pick-up-truck-driving, power-tool operating daughter,
the family avant-garde chef,
the academic with vices, the lucky strikes smoker, the organic-hippie-all-natural foods eater,
the advocate for foreign language education improvement in American schools,
the defender of gay rights and panelist for the GBTLQ group on campus,
the smart Girl Friday in the office,
the cargo-pants-wearing, leatherman-carrying, hair-in-funky-scarves theater technician crawling in the rafters,
an american co-ed studying abroad in France,
a fak'd French girl in Italia,
purple hair, orange hair, platinum hair, blue streaked hair, raspberry hair, golden brown hair, deep brunette hair, dirty blonde hair...

These things all define me in contradictory ways, and although I'm at peace with both my sheltered, uncultured, seriously religious past, and that I've made my peace between academia and culinaria and gay.v.straight, in spite of all the functioning and shaping and working and shifting to better *become*.

Still, to be at Club Therapy, all new and glossy and chic, full of self-defined *cool* people, hanging on the right boy's arm, introduced to all the important people, swapping stories with old friends, dancing with the beautiful people, to be a part of what, to me, looks like cinema, is surreal. Life at times resembles the movies in ways I never imagined it could while growing up surround by small-town-white-suburbia.

I said to my friends the following morning -- going up to Indianapolis is like going to a dream. I'm only ever there between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m., which is curious enough for the diurnal, matinal person I tend to be when left to my own devices. It doesn't really exist as a city, it merely exists as shopping malls and suburbia-tastic giant houses and strip malls and chain restaurants and 465, looping around nothing at all. When I'm actually in the city, I don't believe that it is real.

I'm going to lie down, close my eyes, and pretend that when I wake up, everything will feel like it did before, and the world will be more stable and this constant spinning will slow such that I may find my balance.