judge not.

I was sitting with a friend of Josh's and the friend's girlfriend, Emily, Saturday night, waiting for the band to sort out their technical difficulties and start the show. As often happens at these college town bars, there was a big table of sorority girls sitting beside our own table. To be fair, I do not know that these girls were actually in a sorority. None of them were wearing anything that bore any greek letters, but they were, you know, that type. Before you protest that I should not rely on stereotypes to judge and describe strangers, I would like to point out that you no doubt have a very accurate picture of these girls in your head from that description.

I had already noticed these girls earlier in the evening and passed them off as people that I would likely have nothing in common with. I'm not sure if it was their matching designer clothing, their careful manicures or their spaghetti strapped shirts in the dead of winter. I confess that while I very frequently read books with unappealing covers, I am notorious for being quick to judge people. I'm like rapid-fire, I've already determined an opinion of someone before you can get out the words, "Wow, look at the way she openly displays her breasts despite the sub-freezing temperatures outside."

Emily is fairly regular in terms of her appearance as compared to other girls her age. She is blond, wears some makeup, and buys the things that are on display in the front window of the Gap. But now Emily had taken notice of these girls and she was talking to her boyfriend and me about the absolutely ridiculous way one of them was dressed, one who looked like she wore things that always ended up on the sale rack of the Gap because they were made for women in some other, much more fashionably advanced town than Raleigh, North Carolina.

"Look at that girl's hair. You see the way she's got it curled out at the top, where it's all hairsprayed so it can't possibly move? I mean, that part alone must have taken her, like, hours. And she's wearing that weird shirt that comes down really far, plus she's got this stupid belt thing that's bright gold, but she's wearing it like right under her boobs. You can just tell it took her hours to get ready to go out tonight."

And I just sat there, amused at Emily's altogether correct description of the girl. I felt free to giggle openly, because I am a girl and well, we're catty like that. Except I was not laughing in judgment of the girl at the next table. I was laughing because I had thought very similar thoughts to myself more than once about Emily herself. I had thought that her outfits were kind of silly and inappropriate for the weather conditions and that she probably spent too much time on her appearance every day. Of course, I was showing up in a jeans and sweatshirt, no makeup, after having showered and then taken a nap with wet hair. So Emily was sitting there judging the other girl, while I was sitting there judging both of them, and honestly, they were probably both looking at me, thinking, "Well, at least she showered."

So what's my point? I'm not sure. That we all judge? Yeah. That we are all being judged? Also, yeah. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that we all judge each other so ruthlessly just to feel better about ourselves, when true confidence is not to look around and feel superior to everyone else, but to not need to assess anyone else. It's being comfortable with where you are on the great scale of humanity without having to try and place anyone else. It's not "This is better than you are," but "This is me." Maybe girls like the one in the bar wear their flamboyant fashions to stand out, because she believes that the amount of attention a person gets is directly related to her quality. Maybe girls like Emily self-consciously get dressed every day, blindly hoping that they look socially acceptable, ready to find strength in the fact that most everyone else is wearing approximately the same thing. And maybe people like me are too practical for the whole mess and proud of that, but at the same time we realize that we're not going to get the same kind of attention and instant acceptance that other girls will, so we think, "Well, at least I am comfortable and not pretending to be anything that I'm not like she is." All of us feel like we've won some point over the other two, but at the end of it all, we still look down and wish we were someone else. None of us are even as confident as we pretend to be, and honestly, I doubt that true confidence is ever attained. It's just an ideal that we are all shooting for, though we'd settle for fake confidence if it made us feel better about what's in the mirror.

And you know, all of this was based on the assumption that the girl in the bar was also judging Emily and me, which, of course, might be complete fiction. But I feel certain that she was. She's a college-age girl who obviously cares spends a lot of time and energy on her appearance. Or maybe I just have decided that she was the type to judge others to feel better about the fact that I felt the need to judge her. It never ends.