I am eating last night's leftover pad si ew and reflecting on what it means to be a girl.
It's not easy to forget I'm a girl. It is, however, easy to forget what being a girl normally entails, especially here. For anyone unfamiliar with UChicago's infamous (lack of) social life, let me fill you in: We're nerds. Nerdy nerdy nerds. We're here because we like to study. And because we're attracted to other nerdy nerds.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm not good at being a girl. I don't know how to do make-up. I don't have various smelly things to smear on myself, only deodorant and occasionally some perfume my mother brought me from Germany. I like jewelry, but never think to buy it and therefore have very few things with which to adorn myself. I've gotten my ears pierced several times, and I always forget to wear earrings frequently enough to keep the holes from filling back in. I can't dance. The list goes on.
Tonight some friends and I had Girl's Night. We ate dinner with fancy cheese and grapes and pita and hummus [Note: the Nile's hummus is amazing] and watched Sex and the City. Watching Sex and the City with friends is a bit of a common thing for me. Even so, watching Carrie Bradshaw strut around in expensive shoes and go into bathrooms to fix her hair was strange. I had forgotten. This is Girl Behavior.
What does it mean when you want to be attractive, but you want to be utterly world-conscious at the same time? The gap between girl-vapidity, even girl-normality, and Real Human Life sometimes looks vast. My mother swears by her millions of Liz Claiborne lipsticks and foundations, her small arsenal of Coco Chanel perfumes. And yet somehow I still grew up on the other side of the divide. Beyond my patterned blouses and one designated pair of Cute shoes (which bloody up the backs of my heels, incidentally), I can't do Girl.
I came home and changed into laundry-doing clothes: a gray shirt with a hole in it that I've had since 9th grade, and a pair of secondhand sweatpants. This is the time T. chose, in his loving-roommate way, to call me beautiful.
There's a reason there's a chasm between Girl and real life. Make-up makes me look like a strange plastic doll. There have been times I've made an effort with it.
Otherwise I look like me, which I think I prefer.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Don't get too caught up in the "being a girl" thing if it has anything to do with getting guys. Take it from me, most guys don't care much about the primping and prepping, the smearing and adorning. Generally, they don't notice, unless it all makes them late, in which case we get rather annoyed. I am sure there are men out there who care about all of these things, but I don't know many of them, and I am not sure that most of them would be worth getting along with, anyway. Wear a new pair of shoes, and all the girls in the room will ask where you bought them and how much they cost. Guys, however, won't notice them.
Men want a woman to look comfortable, for the most part. I mean, being pretty helps, of course, but if a girl is good-looking, or even just cute, then the last thing she needs to be doing is slathering things on to cover it all up.
"T" may have been on to something. I'll tell you a little secret: Guys can't resist a woman in pajamas. Why? Because she's comfortable. I can't really explain it any further than that, but I'll tell you that many of my guy friends agree whole-heartedly with this statement.
It's weird, and it may be hard to understand, but it's closer to the truth than Carrie Bradshaw strutting around in expensive shoes and fixing her hair...
Post a Comment