I care a lot about appearances. This may come as a surprise to anyone who has seen me walking to class, well, ever. I follow a very specific formula: baseball cap, gym shorts, awkward duck walk and pony tail adjustment every few feet. Not the sexiest combination ever invented, but it accomplishes my one great daily goal: to look like I don't care.
Looking like an eager 15-year-old boy while trekking to class is just one of the many ways I care about not caring. There is something about "not caring" that is universally appealing to stressed-out, high-strung college kids. We envy and attempt to emulate those people that walk around with such ease, be it in a potato sack or an Anthropologie dress. It's the ease that is so fantastic, so attractive. When everything seems to be so hard, all we want is for it to look like we have it all under control, that for us, everything is easy.
It's easy to care. It isn't fun. It isn't desirable. But it comes as naturally as breathing. Not caring takes a tremendous premeditated effort: Today I will look like a bum and walk into my class late and spill coffee all over my notes and not even blink.
Once I've taken about half an hour at home perfectly tucking my locks under one of my three choice baseball caps, I pour some lukewarm coffee into a coffee mug - who has time to care about fancy to-go cups? - and race out of my apartment because I am running late, again. I didn't have time to check the weather because I was so busy getting the perfect outfit together so I didn't realize it was 35 degrees instead of 55 degrees and my shorts and sweatshirt look great but do nothing for my body temperature. Oh well. Such is life. I won't regret my decision all day or shiver in any of my classes or wish I had a top to put on my coffee mug because it has already jumped out and attacked three innocent bystanders. No, I won't care at all.
I think we all can see that the premeditated effort behind not caring kind of belies what we're trying to achieve. Not caring about caring, or caring about not caring, it all amounts to a very vicious, confusing cycle. Is life really so terrible? Are we always caught in the abyss of perfecting appearances? I certainly hope not, for my sake as well as for humanity's. There are times when we are happy enough and comfortable enough in our lives that appearances are exactly what they should be - surfaces. Surfaces we can look at but not absorb, surfaces which are so paper thin that they cannot and should not run our lives.
When do I not care? Certainly not when I'm getting dressed in the morning or when I'm walking to class or when I'm in class or when I'm studying or partying or eating crunchy salads in the stacks. I think I only can achieve this perfect harmony with myself and my surroundings when I see someone else doing the same. You may have seen this harmonizing before, because it happens in the open, for everyone to see. Because we don't care. My sister and I, in our ever regressing maturity, have developed a new way of greeting each other. It involves a lot of twirling and posing and leg-stretching. It happens when I'm on one side of Rugby and she is on the other. It happens in the middle of the library when we didn't realize the other was around, and then do, and celebrate this unexpected meeting. And it happens when we part ways, leaving each other for the world where caring matters and appearances take on a new kind of depth, the world where we can't put each other at ease.
I don't care about framing my disheveled world in the perfect way when I'm with people I love. Because they don't see appearances, they see me. At home I can be completely transparent about my worries and concerns, as uncool as they appear, because someone is there who doesn't even recognize the magnitude of my uncoolness. My brother sees my fun college tales I weave and my mother sees my English essays I read and my father sees a girl who never will be an engineer but who is getting by nonetheless. Everything is effortless, and when I dress up to go out to dinner and end up looking like a girl who cares, I don't even blink.
At school we don't have the luxury of being surrounded by people who have known us for all of our lives. We make more acquaintances than friends and the friends we do make usually don't know the little secrets which run beneath the surface that control our every move. We structure ourselves in such a way that we appear to be those fantastically uncaring people, and no one can ever see that we care so much about their approval that they never get to see us at all.
So keep caring. And let it show. Don't mask your mistakes and triumphs with a laissez faire attitude. Don't try to imitate people who look like they don't care about a thing in the world. Because those people don't exist. Embrace the times when nothing matters except for the something that allows you to free yourself from your concerns with the world. Because sometimes things should be easy.
Mary Scott's column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at m.hardaway@cavalierdaily.com.
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