The other day at school I walked into the bathroom at the passing period. 'Uh... this is the girls' room,' someone just leaving said. 'I know,' I said. 'I'm a girl.' Cue the weird, embarrassed stare. Either they apologise profusely or they look at me like I'm insane, but whichever it is, I don't really care. I'm used to it.

For a while, now — at least the past few years — I've made an identity for myself out of straddling lines. I'm a girl, but I look enough like a guy that I can be mistaken for one. I get good grades and toe the college applications line, but my language is foul and my outlook irreverent. I prefer the lunchtime company of teachers, but I have at least a few good friends my own age. While I spend way too much time doing pointless quasi-academic research, the fruits of it are seen when I send my history teacher an email in the middle of the night to tell him how the outlawing of marijuana in the US was a political manoeuvre by the robber barons.

I have a feeling I shouldn't be telling you all this, lest my reputation as a model member of the National Honor Society be damaged. But in perfect keeping with my constructed identity, I define 'cool' as 'nerd with a sense of humour', and that runs the gamut from scholarly research on taboo subjects to existential conversations over the internet at midnight to weekends lying on a friend's couch and watching a movie.

If there was a thesis here, I lost it. But right here is all you need to know, because it's Sunday night and I'm losing a thesis instead of writing the essay that will get me into college. I lost the thesis for my essay on Slaughterhouse-Five and the slightly more metaphorical one that would tie the confused threads of my calculus homework together. But it's just because there are too many things going on, too many things to discover, and I want to discover them all, which unfortunately winds up meaning that I don't devote enough care to any of them.

I've been reading a lot of Beat literature lately. I'm in the middle of On the Road and Naked Lunch, and I've fallen head over heels in love with Allen Ginsberg. That's what I was reminded of, just now, as I keep losing the thread of my so-called thesis as my mind wanders off in search of something that makes a little more cosmic sense than the 'author’s message'.

Here, I'll try again.

My name is echomikeromeo. I'm 17 years old, and therefore a teenager. I read, I write, I question and I learn. It's not always in a productive way; the times I've skipped my homework in order to research some arcane point in the history of Olympia Press are limitless. I try my hardest not to play by the rules of the National Honor Society-inducted population. I think on my own terms, I write on my own terms, my resumé is my own. For that reason I am very proud to have lost track of this so-called letter's thesis.

If only such diversions would get me into college.