Boo! Keep reading. This should eventually begin to make sense.

I recently dyed my hair blue. (The label calls the color After Midnight Blue, but I think it’s more along the lines of cobalt.)

If you would like to meet new people, I’d recommend doing something like I have done. Even total strangers feel at license to approach me to discuss the hue of my shag. Saturday night I was in the bathroom at the movie theater when this teenager reached out and almost touched my hair in her amazement.

Most begin their inquiry by saying something like, “Your hair is blue.” This rather obvious comment has actually been helpful to me. I frequently forget that my hair is blue and wonder why people are staring at me.

At first I always think they must be really glad to see me (if I know them) or that they must think I look like a really cool person (if I don’t know them). Then I realize that they’re just checking out my hair. I must not be as personable as I like to think.

After making their initial declaration, many people want to know when I dyed my hair. I don’t know why anyone cares when I dyed it, but it happened the Tuesday before classes started — bleached, cut and dyed.

Finally, people always want to know why. Why (the “on earth” is implied) did I choose to alter my physical appearance in this manner, they ask.

One of my sister’s high school friends couldn’t believe I had done it. “In school, this was a girl who wouldn’t say boo,” she told someone. Some people in high school thought I was kind of uptight. (I can hear my college friends laughing when they read that sentence.) I would probably have been voted “the person least likely to dye their hair blue,” if that category existed.

So why did I dye my hair blue? I don’t know why. It was more like, why not? Have you ever gotten to the point where your reason for doing something isn’t that you necessarily want to do it, but that it has no severe adverse effects, and it’s just something to occupy you? I feel like I’m at that point.

For instance, I’ve been in the university marching band for two years, and I give tours to prospective students for the Admissions office. I do both for basically the same reason I’m even currently in college: I’ve nothing better to do.

I have some of the stereotypical “gen-X” problems. I’m often irresponsible, generally unmotivated and I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. (Not to mention that I can’t seem to type worth a darn on this particular keyboard.)

As of late, I look at life and it seems vague and unengaging. I feel like I’m riding on a wave of momentum that started when I was about five and has been rolling too fast ever since. I don’t have time to figure out what’s going on. I just watch things as they fly past.

I bring all of this up not to be depressing or to ramble on about my blue hair (although you should see the way it compliments my slate eyes). Actually, I wanted to explain a bit about who I am and what I want to write about the rest of the Wednesdays this semester.

All Christmas break I tried to figure out what kind of stuff I was going to write about this semester. I tried to think of things that other people would be interested in reading, but I couldn’t. I don’t know what other people want to read. I only know what I want to read. I’m sorry. That’s egocentric, but I can’t help it.

In past issues of our fair Daily, I’ve read other people’s stuff about campus issues and college student woes. But I don’t really feel like I have much to contribute to those discussions. When I do my deepest thinking, I usually don’t think about those things much. I don’t identify with them.

When I look around, I don’t see myself represented by the media very much. I’m not trying to assert that I am so unique that no one has been able to depict the essence that is me. (Well, maybe I am trying to assert that, but it’s not my main point.)

It’s okay to be dissatisfied with the world if you’re some punk computer hacker or the lead singer of some distraught rock band. It’s cool to be lost and searching if you ponder the meaning of life while sitting in a beanbag chair in front of the tube smoking a joint and getting sloshed.

I have only a tenuous understanding of computers, my concert voice is less than stellar, my sister got the beanbag, and I don’t drink or do pot. So where is my outlet?

The point is this: In future installments I’m just going to write about whatever I’m thinking. If it doesn’t make sense, if it doesn’t have a poin,t or if you hate it then I’m sorry. But at least me and my distracting, obnoxious hair will be satisfied.

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Juli Hisel is an undeclared sophomore from Richland.