Read below to see another installment of “The Eclectic Corner,” a posting topic created by 21CCCS student, Rachel Durs

The blog post I sat down to write months ago is very different from the post you see before you now. After my first installment of The Eclectic Corner, I was buoyed and couldn’t wait to begin my next musing – an analysis of culture and how the mostly-wholesome winsomeness of Harry Potter seems in short supply nowadays. But then life happened and months dragged on before I could get back to blogging, and when I tried to explore a new final topic for my last blog entry, I found myself realizing that my Eclectic Corner – my grand experiment! – had been frighteningly short lived.

So, suddenly, I had to think about how I wanted to end this blog. What thoughts did I want to put in here? My mind returned to what I had wanted to talk about initially, but with a twist. For my last post, I’m not going to lament the current state of culture from an eclectic point of view. I’m not going to talk about how we change the culture either. No. In light of graduation (which will uproot me from the comfortable life of grade school-dom and whisk me off into the real world), I’m instead going to talk about how we, the Eclectics, can go out into the real world and place ourselves on the forefront of the culture. Hey, people like me, who walk in the shadow of human pop culture, deserve a place on the front lines like everyone else.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been told all of your life that being strange is not a selling point and if you want to succeed in the world, you need to put on the mantle everyone else wears. But in my life, I’ve learned that’s not at all true. Instead, the fact that we rule the not-quite-there and not-yet-so region of human consciousness is our greatest strength. This is probably the biggest difference between Eclectics and Hipsters. Hipsters are removed from the mainstream by choice; Eclectics are removed from the mainstream by design. For Eclectics, the mainstream and our viewpoints just don’t mesh.

But as I prepare to leave my comfortably small circles for bigger real-life ones, I’ve realized that we don’t have to push back against the mainstream until we change it. We only have to push against the mainstream until we’re standing right there in the middle of it. I’m a firm believer that when something presents a problem, you don’t try to cover it up or kill it; you give people other options.

So as many of us – including yours truly – leave this great school, I want you all to remember that you have a place in the forefront of the world too. This world and its culture don’t have to be entirely racy and violent and mindless, but it also doesn’t need to be re-forged until it’s obscure and lofty. Instead, there should be a mix of the two – an option to pick which one works best for each person.

Maybe in the future, I’ll see you guys again (I’m taking a gap year between high school and college and would absolutely LOVE to blog about the life of a gap year girl, so…). But if I don’t see you against the backdrop of this school, I hope I see you out there in the real world, standing on the front line and showing everyone that a little weirdness is a great thing.

Thanks for reading and stay eclectic! – Rachel