I recently went to dinner with my best friend‰’s mother and she asked me how I felt about a certain topic of discussion. I said I don‰’t really have an opinion. My answer was responded with “You should have a strong opinion on everything‰Û. Now, I feel as though I should have a strong opinion on everything.

And who can blame me? Facebook is no longer only a place for me to compare myself to ex-boyfriend‰’s current girlfriends. Instead it has become a forum for counter arguments and counter-counter arguments which continually force me to construct and then deconstruct what I believe. Which is all fine and dandy. But underneath it all, how can we trust ourselves with our own convictions? We so strongly believe in something, be it a feeling or a political viewpoint, until someone possibly convinces us otherwise.

I saw the film “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, in which the heroine promises her drafted boyfriend (and unsuspecting father of her child) that she surely will die without him. Yet, as time passes and a handsome suitor comes into the picture she asks herself “Why am I not dead yet?‰” And so she slowly begins to lose faith in the only truth she previously claimed to know. I felt disturbed by this and realized when it comes to relationships we all epitomize the definition of fair weather fans.

We say I love you only to realize that along with time we fall out of love and begin to love someone else. And the worst part is that we convince ourselves that we, either never loved the previous person at all and just tricked ourselves into believing it was love or demean the value of our past love as lesser to our current love. Yet, in that moment of loving and being loved, we believe that there is no possible way of loving anything more. If we cannot trust ourselves with our own emotions, then we cannot trust anyone with anything at all because in the end we do not even know ourselves.

But, we can trust Cat Power to tell us that we cannot trust ourselves. The beautiful song “Say‰” reiterates how no one ever fully believes what he or she say or know. Instead, every word we speak is drenched in contradiction and confusion. Chan Marshall urges the listener to “learn to say the same thing‰Û, which means to not speak meaningless words for fluff and as silence filler but rather to have the ability to mean everything you say. Further, Marshall sadly and woefully sings “when no one is around love will always love you‰” meaning that no one can fully love another human being because we are incapable of committing ourselves to the words we often times speak. The only thing that can love us back is the abstraction of love we believe, rather than love itself.

Set behind the sounds of thunder, Cat Power’s music taught me that no matter what I strongly believe, be it that I love or that I am happy with where I am in my life right now, down the road I will look back and believe I am currently loving someone more or that I have never been happier. We cannot stand concrete on anything because we contain multitudes of contradiction. The strongest opinion I have is highly susceptible to change, therefore I‰’ve come to terms with the fact that that strongest opinion I have right now is that I have yet to find my strong opinion.

By Michelle Merica