I know this is a subject I’ve ranted on about before on many occasions, but this time it’s not so much about how my attitude towards this particular long-standing adversary has changed, but how she herself has, unbeknownst to me, become a completely different person over the last year or so. It’s surprising that I hadn’t noticed it sooner, but it is as if she has had an entire gradual personality transplant since round about August, in all probability to the same extent as the one which transformed her into her larger-than-life Ditzy alter ego not so long after the very beginning of high school.

I first began to notice this change not by the addition of character quirks, but by their absence. Suddenly being around her was no longer so grating on the ears – that horribly affected nasal quality and the sheer volume of her voice had been turned down several notches. Gone was the barely-decent schoolgirl skirt, now down to a length with which even the most strident uniform Nazis could not find fault, along with the endless primping and fixing and posing in front of the hallway mirror, or any semi-reflective surface, really. (Gone, too, was my fiendish desire to switch on the projector whenever she checked her reflection in its mirror, but that’s another story altogether…) In fact, the old Ditz had been replaced by a much more subdued version overall, having been stripped of the last vestiges of the aggressively layered hair, the inch-thick pancake makeup, the bright pink lips and defiantly painted nails – all the hallmarks of her former loosely-moraled desperado self. Even the T-barred shoes, the last remaining fuck-you to the establishment favoured by those endless primpers with their collars fastidiously (and completely ridiculously) turned up on all occasions, have quietly been replaced by the squarest (in every sense of the word) plain black lace-ups you could ever hope to find.

I don’t know whether she’s just mellowed with age, but she’s become a whole lot nicer as well. So okay, flattery wasn’t what killed the cat, and a little bit of sucking up never hurt a girl, but you know what she said to me the other day? “I feel honoured when somebody gets mixed up and mistakes me for you.” What on earth?? Besides for the fact that she would have nothing possible to gain from such blatant flattery, it was said in such a sincere, guileless manner that she seemed, to all intents and purposes, to have genuinely meant it. The Ditz of old would never in a million years have deigned to say something that was so… well, nice! It made me wonder, for the longest time, what exactly had gotten into her?

Like many a zealous Jesus-loving religious reformer would do, I, the hard-bitten opinionated atheist, am forced to concede that this remarkable change has coincided somewhat with her conversion to Christianity. One can hardly fail to notice her palpable presence in the Bible Club, especially during Jesus-orientated events like prayer breakfasts and Easter assemblies (in which the Bible Club outdoes itself every year with increasing elaborate song-and-dance numbers, and the annual tying of a hapless Year Nine pretending to be Jesus in a toga to a cross for thirty minutes while someone else reads out the relevant passages from Matthew and the aforementioned Year Nine slowly asphyxiates). And who could forget her shining moment of pious glory, when the school chaplain decided to feature her rambling speech on her road-to-Damascus moment in his address in the weekly newsletter?

(This is just calling for a disclaimer before I continue, lest I be charged with accusations of Bible-bashing: even though I personally don’t believe in the existence of a God of organised religion, I never attempt to impose my views on others – and also think that that should go the other way too…)

I’ll be the first to admit that religion has its benefits. A several-times-removed distant uncle in America became a committed Christian after a prolonged stint in prison for a crime which the whole family refuses to mention, and although Daddy Dearest would very much like to tell him he’s wasting his time sending us a veritable avalanche of church-approved literature (which must cost enough in postage to single-handedly keep Australia Post in business for a year), there’s no denying how much it’s helped him deal with all shit that life has thrown at him. And although it may be a little far-fetched to compare the small-time rebellion of one high school girl to doing something that would land you in jail for twenty-five years, I see the same kind of transformation occurring in Ditz. Seeing that faith can affect people in such a way reminds me of the tremendous capacity of religion for good as well as evil, and occasionally, very occasionally, I wish that it could happen to me, too. (I had a mini-epiphany once – something terribly banal like the fact that baby Jesus really did die on a cross to absolve all our sins – and for fifteen crazy seconds I thought I had the capacity to become a Christian, until I realised again that everything in my upbringing and personality protested against my ever being so credible.)

A lot has changed about Ditz, and yet a lot has managed to remain exactly as I have always known it to be. She is still prone to making incredibly dim comments, still sings off-key, and her spelling and grammar remains atrocious. She’s no smarter than I remember her being, although full credit to her for trying ten times harder. She still associates with her old crowd of try-hards and rich-girl wannabe-rebels, but she doesn’t go to their horrid parties and binge drink and get completely wasted every weekend anymore. It’s great for her, of course, the fact that she’s going to come out of it all with tonnes more self-respect than most of those tragic skanks (harsh but true, you know it really). I guess I’m just not used to being surprised like that, to having the entire image I’d formed of someone tipped completely onto its head. That probably says more about my own narrow-mindedness than anything else.

It’s probably good that I’m being made to question my inbuilt prejudices towards those I always thought I had all figured out. But who knows? Next thing you’ll be telling me that Snape really ISN’T evil and that Santa doesn’t exist after all…

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