While I was in college I did a lot of tie-dye. More tie-dye than one would expect from my school. It is a fairly liberal institution, but it’s hardly the artsy-fartsy tree-hugger mecca one would expect from my college tie-dye wardrobe.

For GW students, this tie-dye is readily explained by the amount of time I spent on The Vern in my college career. (Mount Vernon, “The Vern”, is a sort of second campus at my school but its technically “Main Campus” and there are all sorts of rhetorical politics involved in explaining this to you and if you don’t already know what I’m talking about, then I am certain you do not care to know.) I spent so much time there that at the end of my senior year I won a super-legit university award for it. For non-GW students, this won’t make any sense. All you need to know is that I have many tie-dyed things.

The other day I noticed that my tie-dye collection was starting to fade. I have one shirt that was lauded by other members of my student organization (while we mostly planned campus events, I think I can safely say that we also developed a cult of tie-dye and s’mores) as a fairly excellent piece of wearable art. This shirt was an accidental masterpiece and I’m super proud of it. Don’t mock me. It’s awesome, I swear.

I wore this shirt the day of the race in Bloomington and I saw another girl in tie-dye. Her shirt was of the insanely neon store-bought variety, and it made my faded colors that much more obvious to me. So thank you, 8-year-old girl, for the sadness this placed in my heart. That was not a sarcastic-but-serious thank you like the one I gave my mother. That was a strictly sarcastic thank you. I do not even remotely appreciate your shirt and the sadness it inspired.

The other night I had a dream. Now I know most of you are about to completely tune out. I know I would. Many bloggers have dedicated entire posts to chewing out the assholes who feel that their stupid dreams are interesting to other people. They usually aren’t. I know this. As a general rule, I try to make sure only my mother is subjected to the useless babble about the dream where they gave me a lime green SUV which I subsequently totaled. Or all the dreams where I have babies. I have lots of those dreams, and you should all know that I make a damn cute imaginary baby.

But this dream is actually relevant and has a point, I promise. I have a tie-dye pillow. I made this pillow case at the beginning of senior year and it acquired deep sentimental value very quickly. I started crying over winter break because I lost this pillow (it was found a couple months later). In my defense, not long after the event at which I tie-dyed this pillow case, I left that particular student organization for personal reasons. I was unaware, at the time of this meltdown, that I would be rejoining the organization in a couple weeks. Pillowgate was probably a big part of why I knew I had to seize that opportunity when it arose.

In the dream, I am holding this pillow. I look around the room and see several newer tie-dyed pillows. My pillow is clearly quite faded. It isn’t clear in the dream whether or not I personally tie-dyed the others. It doesn’t matter. My dad is persuading me to put my pillow away in storage or donate it or something in favor of one of these newer pillows. This creates a serious internal conflict.

At no point in this dream — or in life — does anyone raise the point that I am 22 and should probably invest in Big Girl bedding instead of tie-dyed pillow cases. This is probably because both in my dream and in life, everyone knows that this is not something I am ready to hear.

I then spent several days (in real life — we’re done with the dream, I promise. That was painless, right?) obsessing over whether or not I should continue wearing these shirts to the gym. On the one hand, I am causing them to fade each time I wear them. On the other, I graduated six months ago and might have some sort of stupid psychological attachment to the tie-dye, which is all the more reason to just throw them away and get over it.

But the tie-dye infatuation has less to do with a reverence for the actual dirty hippy aesthetic of wearing tie-dye and more to do with specific memories and events attached to them. I could easily tie-dye things on my own at home, if the issue were as simple as my need to look perpetually trapped in summer camp. All right, maybe not easily. I don’t think it will come as a great shock that the process exceeds the amount of effort I could willingly put forth — purchasing the dye, and filling buckets, blah blah blah. The point is that it was fun because it was a group thing. It was a silly thing that made lots of kids remember camp and other childhood things that they would rather think about than their exam over nonaligned countries for International History of the Cold War. Or, for me, tie-dye and s’mores felt like the things I never did because I never went to camp. And all of that awesome touchy-feely bonding-with-strangers nonsense that I only encountered in college.

I think that why I cared so much about The Vern and my tie-dye shirts, is related why I like working with kids.

Let me just say that kids are often considerably less awesome than people like me will try to make you think. In fact, I knew this. I knew all about how fucking annoying they could be. I remember middle school and it sucked. I became such a wretched little twat in middle school that my mom pulled me out of school and home schooled me. I had become so annoying that my own mother could no longer put up with me. Middle school kids are obnoxious.

Knowing how annoying kids are, I had long ruled out the possibility of teaching. My little brother used to insist that this is what he saw me doing and I would laugh in his face. Sure, I could babysit now and then. Fine, I tutored kids while I was in college. I never read anything into the fact that I enjoyed that. When the wonders of nepotism offered my unemployed self $100 a day to reevaluate this policy, I did just that.

This job didn’t just involve kids, though…they’re middle school kids. In my mom’s days as a substitute teacher, she had a middle school class light the room on fire. Middle school kids are the biggest demons of all.

But I needed to start working somewhere while I figured my life out. So I took it. Suddenly I found myself getting up early every single day to tell 7th, 8th, or 9th graders about “making good choices.” (Specifically: Don’t do drugs.)

And then I realized that I actually like these kids. I’m not sure how or when this happened. I think about all of the things I wish I could say to my younger self about how I need to calm the fuck down and not take things so seriously. I think about this and I realize that I can tell these kids things, and they actually seem to listen to me. This is the part that consistently blows my mind. I’ve been steadily working on my repertoire of ways to reel the kids back in when I lose them, but it doesn’t happen as often as I thought it would.

In fact, most of the kids seem pretty excited that I’m their group leader. This is probably because the other facilitators look like their parents, whereas they all believe that I am still in high school. I have been asked on more than one occasion if I am 18 yet. This is both good and bad, of course. I have figured out how to work it in my favor in the context of my drug-free job. Our 8th grade program is all about team building, so I spent the day playing games with the kids as a glorifed camp counselor. I have only just gotten started with my substitute teaching gig, and I haven’t quite figured out how to work this in my favor, so I have mostly been investing in more matronly clothing.

As in, not tie-dye. The thing that I have become fixated on in the last six months, is not this idea that I want to still be in college. I was pretty damned excited about graduating. The only reason I miss it is the general terror I feel for all things real-world.

Tie-dye, s’mores, and helping 8th graders devise strategies for building bridges or passing an enormous ball around a circle, are all things that represent the disconnect between “things I want the real world to include” and “things that do not fit my assumptions of what the real world is supposed to include.”

So my long rambling disjointed nonsense about tie-dye comes to this: I have spent the last six months devising vague plans for how my particular brand of adulthood is going to look. For the most part, I don’t share these things. I mention grad school because it’s safe territory. Real grown-ups go to college. The rest of it? It’s all part of this suspicious territory where I think I can maybe pass as a legitimate adult and fulfill all basic responsibilities, while still engaging in as many frivolous behaviors as humanly possible.

To me, Jefferson City is like the anti-tie-dye. There are few people that I know who I would be more loath to share these absurd plans with than the cautious, circumspect individuals that I encounter here. It seems like a bit of an over-generalization to say that smaller towns inherently foster smaller dreams, but it’s so hard for me to look around and not feel like this is true.

But the other part of the problem is personal. It has nothing to do with where I am, but this idea of how things are supposed to be. I call bullshit on that. On myself, I guess. I call bullshit on the notion that it has to be so black and white.

I am going to keep wearing my damned tie-dye shirts for as long as I am still here. It’s a personal commitment to remembering that all of the ridiculous things I love and want my life to include don’t have to be sacrificed. This is the sort of absurd thing that I am reluctant to say out loud, but fully believe, regardless of how stupid it sounds. And hopefully, I’ll be gone and no longer in need of that reminder by the time the dye completely fades.