Three years. If you break it down that is 156 weeks. That number still does not seem that long to make the point I want to make. Further division makes it equal to 1,095 days, 26,280 hours, 1,576,800 minutes and 94,608,000 seconds. Now we’re getting somewhere. Pretty good for someone who struggled passing “math for the liberal art student.”

Just about 100 million seconds ago the stars were aligned to create a force of nature that Greater Lowell has since had to stomach. Sometimes it has caused much indigestion. For myself — many hangovers. Three long, long, long, years ago (did I stress long?) I became my alter-ego, Lowellita.

I suppose it was destiny. I recently flipped through the pages of my eighth-grade yearbook. There I was — bad hair, braces and no makeup. And I thought I looked like Winona Ryder! Must have needed those glasses sooner than senior year of high school.

Next to the picture, I answered a series of questions, one of them: “What I will be in the future.” Even then I laced almost everything with wit and sarcasm. But this was a Catholic school and there was no chance of getting away with a response like, “Dancer with a concentration on the pole,” or, “A writer who exploits the sins of others each week in a column as an act of attrition.” And don’t forget the kicker: “Whose name is a pun on a promiscuous preteen pedophile’s dream.”

My actual answer was, “The next Ricki Lake.”

No joke. At that moment in my life, I was serious. I haven’t exactly followed in the footsteps of the former trashtastic talk show host and that might just be a good thing, since Lake has not even made the celebrity D-list in the past decade.

For the past, almost two million minutes, I have been involved in an internal battle with my public and private personas. Sometimes I win, sometimes Lowellita is victorious. It sounds odd because they are both (essentially) me.

Instead of Lake, could I be the next Britney Spears, strapped to a gurney and rolled off into the sunset? I am sure there are many out there who wish this was my fate. They are the same ones who are grasping a bottle of Tums while sitting down to read this column each week.

Is it Lowellita or me that they want locked away from their children in a padded cell?
I wonder if in 15 years from now, I will peruse my columns and think the same thing about my eighth-grade yearbook — what was I thinking then and where has Britney been?

Should Lowellita post her eighth-grade photo on her blog? E-mail lowellita@lowellsun.com.