2000-06-07

Girl World

We interrupt the usual lighthearted, mildly smutty tone of this diary to talk seriously about girlfriends. More specifically, how I relate to having girlfriends and the concept of girlfriends in general.

To start with - I am, by and large, terrified of girls. Always have been. A passage from Carolyn Chute's lesser-known novel Letourneau's Used Auto Parts always comes to the front when I'm thinking about how I relate to the sexes. In this passage, two women, one an old hippie and the other a new mother, are sitting on the porch, talking about the newborn baby, a girl. The mother admits that the little girl scares her. "Boy babies are more like teddies, cuddly little teddies." The hippie says that girls are scary because they're "more human." "Gosh, that's it," the younger woman says, "but don't it sound awful?"

I really didn't have many girlfriends growing up, mainly because I went to a very stuffy private school where most of the girls in my class had canopy beds and their own phones by the time they were 10. Surely if I had really pursued the issue, my parents would have seen to it that I had me a frilly bed to sleep in, but it wouldn't have solved anything in terms of my complete inability to relate to Girl World. It was much easier for me to run around, hair perpetually ratty and tangled, playing with boys than it was to sit on the bench and attempt to talk to girls. Somewhere along the line, I missed out on learning The Rules� of Girl World. I had no idea that you were supposed to brush your hair more often than that one time first thing in the morning. A girl a grade below me pointed it out when I was around 11: "How come you nevah brush your hayah? Boys might like you if you brush your hayah." This bewildered me. Boys liked me already. I ate lunch with them every day, didn't I?

This, in a nutshell, is my problem: I am completely socially retarded around girls. I actually quit a job several years ago because the other women in the office didn't like me and would actually make fun of me whenever I left the room to get coffee or whatever. While I understand that such an environment is just fuckin' juvenile and I was much better off for having fled, I beat myself up for months about it afterwards: "If I was a Cool Girl, this wouldn't have happened."

In recent years, though, I've found me some very cool girl friends, which leads me to believe that I just hadn't been looking in the right places.

lisamcc at 14:58:43

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