codeword trendy

I watch trailers to these movies. And they are hip. They are cool. They are “indie” which is this new code word for trendy. And if they are by default trendy because they are indie are they really indie? And these movies are supposed to capture my generation. They are suppose to speak to my generation…speak to me. I watch quirky male characters who would not be called handsome, cute, or good looking if they weren’t so indie. These male characters have crises and pick the wrong girl and then decide to pick the right girl. Or they don’t have a girl and want one. Or they have the girl and want the boy. And all the time there is Snow Patrol or Imogene Heap or some obscure indie soon to be trendy band singing about love and living life and lost love and wasted life in the back ground. And I love Imogene Heap, I love Snow Patrol, and Death Cab for that matter, and all the bands a hip mid-20s girl like me is supposed to love. But this life they describe is not mine. I do not go on cross country road trips spreading my deceased father’s ashes all the while listening to mixes made by a girl (boy) I met along the way. There is no one who is handsome because he is awkward and true struggling to confess his feelings as the flight attendant announces the imminent departure of his plane. And these stories are not about me because I am not the quirky, lost, boy next door type in faded Converse low-tops. But I have this mid-twenties post-college crisis. I live far from home struggling to make home where I am when nothing is familiar and I don’t even have a room of my own. Just borrowed space above a desk that isn’t mine, what do you think Virginia? Where is my room, where is my story? Somewhere in here, inside. And if I write is this all some attempt at being indie, being trendy, writing the untold story which is really the story of at least thousands of other mid-twenty, late-twenty, early-thirty women? And in telling it, in writing it I wonder if we all just saw the title and secretly hated Dave Eggars for stealing that title first. Because that is my story, my indie, code-word trendy, novel I am writing with characters so closely based on reality it is hardly fiction at all. Because what can I write but what I know? Who can I write but myself? The people I see everyday. This little attempt at creativity is merely my desire to be recognized, remembered, called significant by someone other than my mother.