Lately I feel like I have forgotten who I was. Exactly who is this new creature, this girl who reads five books at once for the simple pleasures of solitude and variety? The girl who used to initiate conversation at the lunch table, the girl who came up with topics of the day and lunchtime polls; she is not here anymore. The one who knows the answers, the one who remembers the details; she's gone, too. There is nothing left of the person that I used to be.

What's more, as I try to remember, I find that it is entirely possible that there was no real person there in the first place. I know that somehow I have changed; I am a hundred and eighty degrees from what I used to be...but what was that? And what am I now? I cannot define myself, and that worries me.

I am disenchanted. It bothers me that a member of my physics class doesn't know that there are nine recognized planets in the Sol system. I am pained to hear a seventeen-year-old honor student seriously ask, "Who's Galileo?" It baffles my mind to listen to my English classmates wondering if The Great Gatsby is "a book or what." I am sickened to hear the fragment, "This is pretty...Claude Moanette? I've never heard of him."

Why don't they open their eyes? I want to take each by the hand and say, "Here, this is science, on your left is art, to your right is literature, and down the hall is music." I want to shove Renoirs in their faces. I want to force them to listen to Mozart; I want my friends to be able to at least name all four Beatles (most of them can't). They've never heard of King Lear; they don't know who Walt Whitman is. They've never seen Starry Night.

I don't mean to sound arrogant. I truly only want them to understand that beauty is not a Thomas Kinkade painting. I want them to know why they must gather their rosebuds; I want them to be able to tell Beethoven's Fifth from his Ninth. I want them to see a Degas and act it out to see if the human body can really bend that way. I just want them to understand that this place, this empty prairie, these dirty towns with endless highways; this is not all there is.

I don't know where I'm going with this. This has no point; I am only typing the things that flash into my head. The message remains the same: this is not all there is. If I could only make them see that, then maybe I would finally know who I am.