So there we all are, my friends and I, sitting on the dirty utility carpet in the corridor of the breeze-block building that served as our home; wearing hockey jerseys and running on ice; watching television in the common room; clutching cocktails in plastic cups, sophisticates. Here, I am wearing my very best skirt of 2000: it is black angora - yes, rabbit hair - covered in black sequins (it still sits in the bottom of a drawer here in England, waiting for a rabbit hair and sequin skirt emergency). I think it was part of some Y2K collection and I bought it on sale after the fact for $19.99.
My face is a little puffy in these photos; all of our faces are a little puffy, from the cafeteria diet of muffins and pasta and rice casserole with a side of rice. But I look happy and sweet and young, although puffed. And here’s my freshman year boyfriend, not expunged from one photo: the guy who told me that I wasn’t pretty, not at first, but then after a while he got used to my face and hey, I was, kind of!
And I look at that happy and sweet and young face of mine and I wish that 28-year-old Jean could have been friends with 18-year-old Jean, and that I could have pulled myself aside and said ‘f*ck that, Young Jean’.
But as that was imposible, I am sorry to say that I instead spent an awful lot longer in the course of those four years wishing to wake up one morning transformed into some kind of pneumatic blonde. An awful lot longer, in fact, than was either necessary or useful.
