On being a girl
The real reason I’m sitting here blogging is because I need to waste some time for my cell phone to charge because I forgot to do it last night.
I was just celebrating the one (perhaps only) perk of moving — finding clothes I used to love but that I’d totally forgotten about until I had to go through three wardrobe boxes and nine multi-gallon storage tubs of crap (that doesn’t include the three storage tubs of shoes). Because the shirt I picked for today? Way cute. Seriously, I am loving me today.
Don’t write me off as egotistical — feeling cute doesn’t come around too often, so we celebrate “The Cute” when it happens!
But this brings me to my blog category about Being a Girl. This is where I get to dump my rants on frilly things and where I get to indulge my habits and emotions. The category could easily have more than 136 rants in it (of the ones I bothered categorizing), but those are the ones I choose to publish. If anyone ever got inside my head and saw the things that go unblogged, that category would have at least 40 billion entries.
Like, the ladies’ room at work. There’s a subject that reeks (literally) of the insanity that plagues women. No, I’m not speaking of the gal who stares at herself for a half-hour on end while her (male) supervisor probably searches the rest of the building for her. And she doesn’t just stare at herself — meeting someone’s eyes in the bathroom mirror is just fucking creepy, so you just learn to avert your gaze. Dude, I was just touching myself — now I want to cleanse myself and I really don’t need to have this moment be a shared one. *squick*
But it does bring me to the bathroom door. In archaic style, we had a combination lock on the ladies’ room, but not the mens’. And even though it was rather easy to remember, I am one of those people who waits forever and by the time I get there, the onset of jaundice typically prevents having any time to spare. I always put in the combo incorrectly, and everyone knows me by my high-pitched shriek of “FUCK!” when I screw it up.
I’ll skip the part of when the lock was broken and someone fashioned a rope handle from a computer cable, and I’ll even try not to talk about the big note on the door to remind us to use the rope (as if we missed the LOCK and DOORKNOB being gone). But I will say that I actually MISS that combination lock.
Why?
Because when I’m alone in the bathroom, I don’t just duck out, straightening my clothes on the way out without the benefit of the mirror. I actually take that extra 30 seconds and ensure that I look the way I intended to when I got dressed that morning. And if the underwear just isn’t working with the outfit, I can do a quickie adjustment without anyone seeing.
So of course this leads to the fact that I have my hands down my pants when someone starts to walk in. And I of course thought I had that full three seconds before they entered, but alas, I have about a millisecond to get the hands above the waist unless I want to be remembered as the flasher. In comparison, having one ass cheek hanging out and trying to “walk out” the wedgie seems classy. 😉
Anyway, I type all this not because it’s funny or even because I had a moment of humiliation. (I slobber when I have dinner with the opposite sex; I have no right to be embarrassed by anything else if that doesn’t mortify me. And it can’t bother me, because it happens as sure as the sun shall rise.)
I just say it because you guys just don’t KNOW how much we go through just to seem normal and cool. It doesn’t come naturally — if you think we seem slightly scattered, I assure you, it’s a victory because we’re completely and totally fucked up, most of the time. We’re always wondering if you notice. Some of us try not to care, but yeah, we always think we did something to offend.
And those of us who’ve been around the block a few times know that half the time, y’all don’t even notice the stuff we obsess over thinking you might have witnessed or even perceived. Then you’ve got the girls like me who wonder whether we SHOULD have been embarrassed by something that didn’t particularly bother us at the time it happened or even for awhile afterward.
Now, if you do something, we usually think it’s cute. Even if it isn’t. 😉 But hey, we come equipped with rose-colored glasses — it’s a birth right. But we only use them when we’re looking at somebody ELSE, not ourselves. So for me to declare today as a “cute day,” I assure you, it took a lot for me to think it and a hell of a lot MORE for me to say it. And all because of a shirt!
But today? I own “the cute.” And it is on a day like today that you will see me and not necessarily know what that special spark about me happens to be — you may write it off as that “je ne sais quoi,” and you should — you might not realize right away that I am confident and happy and ready to take on the world.
But that’s the thing — you don’t need to see all the work that went into feeling that way. You just need to appreciate that I got there, and when you admire the best version of me, I will aspire to be that way more and more until it comes naturally.
If you see someone with an extra spring in her step, smile at her today. It might just be me. …