Outsider Sketch
Wrapped tightly in a dark blue-green comforter, she snuggles up against the oversized pillows on her dorm room bed. The shades are drawn and only the red and green glow from tiny lights on those ubiquitous little electronic devices breaks the near darkness in her room. The music is low but she can just make out that Pandora is apparently playing a Bach fugue -- or is it Mendelssohn, Beethoven, or perhaps Wagner? It sure wasn't hip-hop or Bob Dylan.
While the "cool" clique of teenage classmates (that she finally was accepted into only to eventually realize it was a counterfeit collaboration) were frolicking about at Friday night beer parties, she preferred the safety, sobriety and seeming security of solitude. She really tried hard from elementary school on up to high school to fit in, to blend in like blueberries poured into a bowl of Aunt Jemima's pancake mix before it hits the hot skillet. Still she felt like an outsider.
Even when she was surrounded by the beautiful...
Everest alone or surfing in solitude on the scenic waves in Hawaii. It just wasn't a good fit. Her daydreams to be accepted by this grand group turned out to be nightmares trampled by phoniness and vacuous conversations.
Her first read of Gatsby was of course an assignment in AP English; she enjoyed it and got an "A" for her final take-home essay. Reading through Fitzgerald's masterpiece a second time was a kind of emotional nirvana for her. The novel was like a wake-up call. It was like mom bringing a cool damp washcloth to soothe the forehead of a teenager with a fever -- like a cup of herbal tea with honey served as a daughter gains her strength back after a bout with the flu.
But the second time through Gatsby she related in a far more intellectual and psychological sense to the narrator, Nick Carraway.…
