So...what DO you think?

I am usually just self-absorbed enough not to care what other people think. At least, in most areas of life that is how I feel. I have to care what my boss thinks - she pays my salary. I need to be wary of what the TSA dudes at the airport think if I want to make my flight on time and without a cavity search. I care what my sisters think because they are (usually) the least crazy of all my insane family members.

And I care what you think. If you exist. By 'you', I mean anybody who may actually be reading my sporadic postings.

When I first started this blog last year, it seemed like lots of people were commenting on what I wrote and I loved it, good or bad. I hit a dry patch at the end of the year when I was finally employed again and working like mad to get my life back on track, but I have been pretty good lately about posting at least a few times a month. The comments section, however, is a complete wasteland.

Did everyone lose interest? Am I just so ridiculous that you can't even be bothered to tell me what a waste of time it is for you to read what I write? Or am I (haha) such a brilliant writer that you feel anything you say wouldn't even come close to expressing how you feel about my stuff.

Do tell. Please. My inquiring mind would like to know what you think.

Defective girl?

A good (male) friend of mine recently observed that I am not like most women. This has been mentioned many times throughout my life, so it didn’t really make much of an impact. I have always taken it as a compliment because for most of my life, I didn’t actually LIKE the female half of the species. I liked being a girl and I love being a woman, but I have never really understood other ovary endowed people.

More and more often, however, I have started to wonder exactly what it is people mean when they tell me I am not like other women. Am I unfeminine? What does that even mean? Do I act like I have a pair of gonads hidden under my pinstriped skirt? Do I lack the requisite ability to play head games? Perhaps I am not enough of a social butterfly. Maybe my pout isn’t sexy enough.

I have to admit, the concept of femininity is probably lost on me. The first things to pop into my head are pink and ruffles – ugh. I have never really been a fan of the color pink. It brings to mind sticky super sweet candies and vapid anorexic blonds shedding angora everywhere. And ruffles – oh man, don’t get me started. I think ruffles were designed as a survival of the fittest test for girls. Whoever isn’t suffocated by them lives to play with their Barbies another day.

So what does it really mean to be feminine? Is it only pastel and ruffly things? What does that mean for someone like me who is more attracted to simple lines and graphic colors? I think Audrey Hepburn was one of the most feminine women in the world, yet when you look at what she wore, you would see there was rarely a ruffle or pink anything in sight. Even Givenchy designed beautiful but simple clothes for her. Watch the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s sometime – she owned the idea of the little black cocktail dress.

What about the gonad thing? Basic biology will tell you that gonads are just ovaries that fell out and made a boy. Well, maybe it isn’t quite that simple. But you get the idea. Mine are still in place as far as I can tell. But I will admit to being the type of woman who isn’t afraid to play with the boys. I like to stand up for myself and know that I can hold my own, even when I am the only woman in a room full of competitive, testosterone laden males. I like that the life I have built for myself is one that is solid and simple and all MINE. I don’t mind sharing it with people that I love and respect, but I don’t need them to do anything for me. I will admit to one area where a nice strong male is a help – I hate not being able to get the lid off a kosher pickle jar. My hands are too small to get a good grip and it is highly annoying.

As for head games, I was truly traumatized by those nasty things when I was a child. Maybe it was just the inevitable inbred cliquishness that occurs while growing up in a very small town, but the girls I was raised with were downright MEAN. Cruella de Ville could take lessons from them. These harpies could befriend you one minute and then publicly humiliate you the next. Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t always the victim. I did learn how to avoid the banshee coalition and sometimes even manage to get a little revenge. What the mean girls did for me was give me the ability to cut through the bullshit of every day life and just say what I mean or don’t say anything at all. If that is a non-girly trait, then hooray.

Most of the women I know like to get together for girls’ night type things. They want to go out and be around and among people. They are social. I am different. I wouldn’t say that I am anti-social, it is more that I sort of hang back. I like people. I like to be around people. I just don’t always want to interact with them. I am perfectly happy and comfortable being at a party in the corner with a nice drink, watching the action unfold before me. It is like being on the set of a Mexican novella, minus the cameras, copious tears (hopefully) and hysterical women screaming ‘porque?!’ at the top of their lungs. Well, usually none of that happens.

As for adult women with pouty lips being sexy, I have to disagree. When I was a child, my mother warned me that if I pouted too much a rooster would sit on my lip and peck on my nose. Logic would dictate that cannot possibly happen, but why tempt fate?

I guess after all of this reflection I have to agree that I am not like other women. Or what I THINK other women are like. The truth is, I don’t really know what they are like – everything I have mentioned could be seen as unflattering stereotypes. I don’t like being stereotyped, so where do I get off doing this to a faceless group of people I admittedly don’t know?

Throughout most of my life, I have always identified more with the male half of humanity. It started in first grade when I played Superman every day at recess with Galen Lang and hasn’t stopped since. I love everything about them (the toilet seat issue can be annoying at 2am when I am half awake and in danger of falling in) and they seem infinitely easier to decode. Men can be messy, too preoccupied with the latest gadget or car, stinky farters, and chew like cows with a major wad of cud. They can also be straight shooters when it comes to what they think – I WANT to know if my butt looks too big in those jeans. I like that with most of my guy friends, what I see really is what I get. I don’t want to sit around talking about how I feel all the time and neither do they. Men are somehow less complicated than women. Not boring, just not aggravating.

However. Yet even so. BUT. The older I get, the more I meet women that I truly like and admire. They are real people – not just a gender, bra size, or shade of toenail polish. These are women of varying levels of education who think about things beyond that cute pair of shoes in the window at Paolo’s. They have opinions on culture, food, politics as well as the best manufacturer of luxury lingerie, what type of jeans looks best with their figure, and whose salon provides a better mani/pedi. These women are well rounded in more ways than one and they are INTERESTING. I actually want to talk with them. I want to go out with them on a girls’ night and I know I will have fun, that I will have something to contribute.

So what is the difference between these women and the demon girls I grew up with? The obvious answer is time – they have had time to experience the world and become strong enough to escape the pack, to become themselves. But I also believe that I myself have changed. I have a serious Peter Pan complex – I don’t really want to grow up because I have always thought that adults lose the ability to just enjoy life. They spend too much time worrying about mortgages, car payments, 401Ks, etc. It is as if they feel that they are somehow failures if they take an afternoon to act like a child – even jumping on the bed is a foreign concept. Maybe in my quest to keep my Calvin & Hobbes lifestyle, in my refusal to grow up, I have continued to act more like a 14 year old boy rather than a woman. But perhaps my ability to connect with other women and form true friendships with them means I am finally maturing myself.

I still feel that the idea that I am not like other women is a compliment. I like to be myself – the truth is that I have never really identified myself as a gender. I am a person. I happen to have mammary glands and a happy hoohoo, and maybe you don’t, but so what? Is being a woman something that is so easily quantified by clothing choices, social activities, and blatant sex appeal? Man, I really hope not. I am enjoying the idea that just like in the Army, I can be all I can be without having to conform to odd ideas that I have never understood. My fingers (and toes) are crossed in the superstitious hope that I have figured this whole girl thing out – finally.

I don't get it...but I hope someday I will

While I was typing up this post, I wasn’t completely sure I would post it. It is very different from what I usually blog about. Rather than being amusing, it is more my musing on something that has been churning in the background of my brain, taking up space. I guess I hope that if I lay it all out in an organized fashion, I can let it go and let something else take up residence. Let’s call it a little experiment and go from there.

All my life, I have been fed the standard party line of how humans are the top of the food chain. We are the best this planet has to offer, we are in control, all the world bows down to us. Hmm. I’m not so sure I agree..

I think it is definitely true that humanity has a huge impact on its surroundings, but does that make us the ultimate organism on this planet? Just because we make a big mess and don’t clean up after ourselves doesn’t mean we rule the world, the same way a messy kid doesn’t rule the house for not picking up toys. In my experience, that same kid usually gets some grief from a higher being, namely the parents.

So if we are the top of the food chain, then who disciplines us for being naughty? God? The Master/Mistress of the Universe? The watchful aliens hiding out on the other side of the Milky Way? I haven’t seen evidence to suggest any sort of beings exist, let alone that they are a) interested in us, b) care what we do and c) have any plans to stop us from being complete morons.

That’s the problem when you are at the very tippy top – there is nothing or no one to help keep you in balance.

My basic understanding of worldly physiology is that our planet is composed of ecosystems. Within those ecosystems, everything has a place. It has a function, a purpose. A point. Not being fluent in the languages of flora and fauna (and therefore admittedly potentially mistaken), I assume that these ecosystem members don’t spend a lot of time searching for deeper meanings or higher powers or plotting to take over their domains. They just grow, reproduce, and die in an unending cycle that I find beautiful.

What, no tv? No music, gourmet food or talk radio? What kind of life is that? It is a simple one with no personal or social confusion that leads to all the crap that humanity dumps on itself and everything else on this planet.

But what about all the wonderful things that humanity has created over the millennia? What about all the distinct cultures, the languages, literature and art? No other organisms on this planet can do what we do – that must mean we are something pretty spectacular.

I agree. I think humanity IS a pretty wonderful thing – when we live humanely. We don’t seem to be able to do that very often. All those distinct cultures? Well they often lead to an ‘us or them’ mentality. They are exclusionary by nature. Language? There is no quicker way to wound another person than by lashing out verbally. Sometimes the mental scars go much deeper and last much longer than physical scars. Well what about literature and art? Sure, these can be wonderful things. They can also incite disgust, hatred, and intolerance in people. Religion – another human creation – uses literature and art to promote messages of redemption, but also (and more often) damnation.

I think the most wonderful and insanely terrifying aspect of humanity is its capacity to think abstractly. This ability is what truly sets us apart from any other living thing on our little planet. It is also what leads us to our greatest downfalls. Who ever decided that gold had value? Why is it more valuable than a clamshell? Somewhere, a long time ago, someone decided it was beautiful (and what is beauty if not an abstract idea) and therefore had value. Someone else decided there must be a deeper meaning to our existence and tried to explain the unexplainable and poof! Unseen religious beings spring into existence. Ideas of social organization are abstract – our country is itself just a big experiment in what humanity should be able to expect out of life. And look what we have done in the name of our number one abstract ideal – democracy must be spread everywhere, like it or not.

Ok, so what exactly is my problem? Why am I so down on people and what they do? Why am I ruining everyone’s day by being so damn depressing? The truth is, I’m not sure I can tell you that. I feel as though I have been living under a Charlie Brown rain cloud that follows me around, dripping one slow steady drop of harsh reality at a time. I guess I look around me and see how in my own relatively wealthy city there are thousands of homeless people on the streets, thousands of unemployed, too many people going hungry. And then there is the social intolerance – who really cares who marries who? Is your idea of marriage really so narrow that you can’t accept how other people find happiness? If my city, a supposed beacon of social reform and tolerance can’t get it right, then how can anyone else?

In my lifetime, I have watched news reporting become less and less informative and more gossipy. And as everyone knows, gossip is only good when it is about someone else’s tragedy. This means that just following the news tunes me in to how messed up this whole planet is, all due to humanity.

I don’t think of myself as a depressive person. I am by no means a bouncy cheerleader, but I like to think I am able to keep a clear head about most things. But it becomes a difficult grind when I begin to feel inundated by all the truly rotten things taking place every damn day. Why is Haiti still a big pile of rubble? Why did 28 American soldiers die in 24 hours in Afghanistan? Why is BP still polluting the Gulf? Why is France, a so-called democracy, trying to ban the burqa? I can understand making it illegal to force a woman to wear one, but what if she herself, in her devout way, really believes that she SHOULD wear one? Have any of those enlightened men thought of that?

I think you get my point – we, humanity, are pretty F’d up. We do horrible things. And no amount of self-congratulatory speeches about all the truly wonderful things we are capable of doing can really counter balance that. So now what – should I just roll over and curl up like an old dead bug, legs stuck up in the air, ready to crumble to dust at the slightest breeze?

I don’t think so. Because, as sappy as this sounds, there is one last truly unique aspect of humanity that no other organism appears to have. Hope. The one thing released from Pandora’s box that can be more powerful than any of the harshest ills this planet suffers from. Everyday I have a little hope. I hope the sun will shine and burn off the fog – I need the vitamin D. I hope my day at work won’t be either too boring or too hectic, but just right, Goldilocks. I hope that my loved ones will be ok. I hope my city will stop running around like a headless chicken and start setting an example of how utopia could be. I hope the citizens of my country will stop pointing fingers AT politicians and start working WITH them to take our overweight, slothful, brain dead, couch potato republic into a brighter era. I hope those same politicians will pull their collective head out of their ass and start showing the world a better side of our country. I hope people on this planet can someday, somehow find a way to maintain individuality without destroying each other to prove superiority. And, most of all, I hope that we can stop taking our planet for granted. I really don’t want to be responsible for the end of the world, thank you very much.

Too gooey mushy slobbery sappy for you? Yeah, me too. But true, none the less. Thanks for letting me vent.