i want to be bad.

i've always had a fascination for bad boys and party girls. books, movies, and TV are rife with the stereotype. leather jackets and leather pants. motorcycles. tattoos. weed for breakfast, cigarette for lunch, alcohol for dinner. black eyeliner and blood red nail polish. the boys brood, the girls are heroin chic. both the bad boy and the party girl are always a little bit of rock and roll. kate moss is the queen and pete doherty the king. they hate authority and authorities hate them back. in high school they skipped class to smoke up in the bathrooms. in college they skipped class to smoke up in their own rooms. they come in different varieties and varying degrees, but you get the point.

i think my fascination for the "bad" stems not from wanting to be like them. or wanting to be with them. it's really more of a twisted curiosity of what makes them them. what makes you live so much in the moment as to have complete disregard of the future? as someone who analyzes, overanalyzes, thinks, and overthinks most anything, living life at the whim of your most basest instincts is a mystery that is perpetually intriguing to me. at 23 i have discovered and resigned to the fact that i do not have a wild child's bone in my body. can't say i haven't made any feeble attempts at being one though. here are a couple of examples:

attempt #1: hitch hiking for weed at 17. it was easter sunday. a south african, an american, and i were in pisa and bored out of our minds. we had planned on staying for 4 days but on day one had discovered that all pisa had was the leaning tower and pretty much nothing else. we get a call from a friend whose dad owned a house somewhere in the middle of tuscany. come, he says. it is only a 2-hour trip from where you are and there is porchetto (a bland, italian version of our lechon) and my uncles and cousins have a weed garden. they are here, too, he says, referring to the 3 guys he always hung out with. and so lured with promises of pot and boys, the south african and american dragged me along. as instructed, we took a train to a town called orvietto. it was all good except what we were told was a two-hour train ride turned out to be five. we get off the train, called our would-be host, telling him, we made it. how do we get to your house? weelll... actually, he said. my house is still 2 hours away but there are no trains to there. take a bus. and so we went off into the streets looking for buses only to be told by strangers that this was italy and neither buses nor cabs run on easter sunday. that's how we ended up hitch hiking. it wasn't as bad or scary as i initially thought and 3 cars and 4 more hours later, we were finally where we needed to be. after having gone through that much trouble to get here, the south african and american smoked up with a vengeance. the house used to be part of a commune. dreadlocked musicians played the drums and guitar as barefooted, long-skirted girls danced around a bonfire. it was an atmosphere quite conducive to getting high. i had never smoked a joint before, and when they offered me one, i thought, hmm... maybe i should try it. after all, this is what we traveled 9 hours for. well, it took me all of 5 seconds to say no. no inner struggle, no flipflopping, no maybe's, just no. i knew that one puff would be perfectly harmless but i had heard that pot was something "bad" and therefore, something that should not be done. in my mind, it really was as simple as that. that night, as all of my friends got high on pot, wine and life, i watched, ate some porchetto, and tucked all of them to bed. needless to say, the only "bad" thing i did that night was go to bed without brushing my teeth.

attempt #2: after a few more failed attempts not very different from attempt #1, i decided that if i couldn't be "bad" i would get a boyfriend who was. i initially liked him for several reasons: his half-aussie,half-italian roots made for some good genes. he was an amazing soccer player, an incredible surfer. he knew how to paint. he wore designer shoes. his mom helped costume design for the matrix. i thought he was the paradigm of cool. then he told me that he used to be part of a gang and he once ended up in juvy. some jail time made him want to get out of the gang and his uncle ended up paying thousands of dollars just so he doesn't get severely beaten when he makes his exit. his parents never found out. after i heard the story, i liked him more and thought he was even cooler. dating him made me feel like i was fulfilling my bad boy fantasies without actually having to deal with one. i liked the fact that i was dating a reformed bad boy so i can pretend there was an element of danger involved even though there really wasn't. the problem with this whole scenario was that he was in this i-want-to-be-a-better-person phase and to go along with his new image, he wanted to be with me, the good girl. that would have been fine except that was all he saw me as. because of that, ironically enough, my dating a bad boy turned out to be some of the most boring 5 months of my life. i am with a good guy now and i can tell you that it's a whole lot more thrilling.

sometimes i wonder if i will wake up old one day and regret not having done anything crazy or stupid when i had youth as an excuse to fall back on. all my attempts to be "bad" were done mostly because i thought i should get all that out of my system while i'm young. but what if it was never in your system to begin with? i have nightmares of looking back at my life and lamenting at how unadventurous, safe, and sane my choices were. i imagined me telling myself, "i'm 60 and i don't even know what it feels like to be high." i thought about it and realized, yeah that sounds boring, but you know what? i think i can live with that.