We were at a party with actual adults. I consider myself a semi-adult, at best a struggling adult. I don't do my laundry with any frequency and my rent always wanders into the mailbox late. I don't own a suit and I can't stand red wine.
Upon walking into the Upwardly Mobile Party, I immediately noticed the wide variety of striped button-down shirts. I felt like slipping into anthropological narration and discussing how the vertically striped wardrobe of the prowling male is meant to transform him into the safe conformity of looking like a barcode - the added bonus being to elicit the inert materialistic impulses in ovulating females.
Taking in the scene, my cohort Mark began without warning introducing me as his friend "Tejada." We wanted to shake up this gathering of Mikes, Ashleys and Steves. What option did I have but to be the best fucking Tejada in the history of Tejadas? Riddle me that. To match with the tongue-twisting name, I developed a mind-twisting life story. Mark kept pushing the legend forward, dropping even more ridiculous details as the night progressed and the keg lightened. I was a Texas cowgirl born on a ranch in Guatemala. I had two horses named Tijuana and Starr (the two R's seemed very important.) When my parents bought their latest ranch in Mexico, the village came with it. That's how I met my previous boyfriend who fought bulls in our ring as a matador.
No one called me on the story because most successful young professionals don't actually listen. Their quiet moments while you're talking are just pauses between their self-love monologues. I should know. My monologue is up for a Tony Award every year.
Fearing persecution as the only underage people at the party, when the soft red and blue flickers of a police siren shone through the house's front windows, Mark and I bolted for the bushes. We literally dove into the foliage. We leaned against a collapsed picket fence and began a very serious conversation.
"You know, Mark, when we leave these bushes everyone is going to think we hooked up," I said, imagining the inevitable rustle of shame as we broke from the greenery.
"Maybe, but it's not all that realistic because I don't get with girls who aren't from the global south," he replied. I hope you, dear reader, are reacting the way I did:
"WHAT!?"
He coined himself an affirmative action dater. His lucky ladies must be minorities and they get bonus points if they're from the Third World. Mark is an ethnic Chinese Malaysian who grew up in Australia before moving to the U.S. He remembers squeezing the sides of his adorable, wide-set nose as a child to make it grow narrower, straighter, and "more white."
Okay, I can understand trying to defeat the colonialist taint in one's own mind by making anti-white choices. But, I believe that because culture is composed of individuals, love and attraction should be based on someone's uniqueness, not their uncontrollable birth into a belief system. And besides, isn't it a truer colonial rebellion to love people purely for themselves, not as products of class, race or even gender?
This is what I tried to explain through a cloud of white guilt. I'm pretty sure I came off as a sullen member of Team White Girl who was upset every man in the world didn't consider her the ultimate prize. C'mon, Mark, admit it, I am God's gift to the natives/heathens/brown people.
And then I realized I was really upset because I wasn't Tejada. Despite my amazing taste in clothes, I am a generic, boring American girl with as much culture as a cable television package. I'm a European mutt with a name that's impossible to mispronounce: Molly Norris, a.k.a. Blandy McBlandBland.
I was pinned between a party full of people trying to climb the social ladder and a good friend refusing to mate above a certain rung. Where's a girl who wants to be fabulously successful and socially conscious supposed to fit in? Apparently, next to the punch bowl. I tried to eradicate the stark new feeling of isolation. I woke up back in my land of no adults, and sadly, no Tejadas.
-Valley of the Molls runs every Thursday.
