Femininity

Yesterday at lunch, we were discussing how one of my friends' girlfriend is upset, because he plans to attend the live game we're putting on. They have a long-distance relationship, so it means he won't be driving 4 hours to see her that weekend. She's upset because she considers it their "anniversary weekend" in that they met at a clogging workshop that is always held the first weekend of May. That workshop is canceled entirely this year (otherwise he would have skipped the live game and gone to it with her), and in 2005 when they met the particular dates happened to fall in the middle of the week (The workshop would have been April 30 & May 1), meaning that the weekend before the live game would be equally valid as their "anniversary weekend". More importantly, he doesn't think that the anniversary is all that important; wedding anniversaries, sure, but not "the weekend we met", especially not when it's not possible to be in "the place we met" at the same time. At one point in the conversation he turned to me and asked for a "girl's perspective" on the matter.

It was sweet and all, but when it comes right down to it: I'm terrible at being a girl. My plumbing is on the inside and every 4 weeks I am held hostage by my hormones for a day or two, but that's pretty much where it ends-- when it comes to all the gender cliches, I'm pretty solidly over in guy territory. I've been known to game with friends (and not my husband) on my wedding anniversary. (What? We had dinner together first, it counts as romantic. It does! Leave me alone.) Last week on Valentine's Day, I went clogging. John stayed home (though he stopped by a store on the way home and ought me Godiva, which was waiting for me when I got home around 11pm). Clearly I am not the person to ask whether a live game should take priority over a hey-we-met anniversary. My solution is for her to come here and attend the live game too, so she can still see him on their anniversary weekend. She doesn't think of it as a "solution"-- more like a "double insult".

Every so often (usually when I'm being held hostage by those hormones) I wish I had a better handle on the "girl stuff". Hand me a hammer and a screwdriver and I'm fine, but hand me a beauty kit and I'm lost. I have no clue how fake nails work. I've tried them a few times, and they always pop off within an hour. The only possible way to keep them on, as near as I can tell, is to become an invalid the entire time you're wearing them and do absolutely nothing with your hands. And that includes not going to the bathroom, because I have lost fake nails while washing my hands. And speaking of washing hands, can someone please explain how to do it while wearing a ring? I can't stand the feel of water underneath the ring. I can't even stand it when my finger is slightly clammy. When I bother to wear a ring I spend more time with it in my pocket drying off than I do with it on my finger. Is it just a feeling I'm supposed to live with (ewwwww), or is there some hand-washing technique I've never mastered?

I don't "get" jewelry to begin with. I get how most of it is supposed to work (except those weird slave-bracelet things with an attached ring, which mystify me), I just don't understand why so many people bother. It's all so annoying. Earrings poke. Rings get wet, and I get them caught on clothing, passerbys, etc. Toe rings flat-out hurt, and make me walk weird to boot. Necklaces hang uncomfortably and get tangled in my hair. Bracelets drive me nuts. I don't even like to wear a watch on my wrist; why would I put something non-practical on it instead?

I do wear dresses, when I'm forced to wear something nicer than jeans and a T-shirt. I have nothing in between "nice dress suitable for a wedding or funeral" and "T-shirt", mostly because I have never figured out what the intermediate classifications are. When I worked at Netrex the dress code was "business casual" and I wore a dress pretty much every day, not because I liked looking pretty but because I couldn't fathom what "business casual" was. I knew I could be fired for showing up in jeans, so I wore the only things I had that weren't jeans. (When I worked for GLTG they were also "business casual" but they'd let us office techs get away with wearing jeans, so I stuck with that. It was much more comfortable.) I still don't know what makes something "business casual" versus just plain "casual". I have tried looking for something that could be described as "nice pantsuit suitable for a wedding or a funeral" but I haven't found anything that didn't look stupid on me, so I'm stuck with dresses.

You know that commercial a while ago for some men's facial product (I've forgotten which one), in which the guy looks in the medicine cabinet, sees all his wife's tubes and bottles and gets this scared look on his face? Then he closes the medicine cabinet, opens it up again, and it's got just one tube in it (of the product being advertised, of course). The voiceover is something like "You can take care of your face her way, or you can do it the guy's way. [Product name], the only [lotion? cleanser? whatever] you need." I totally wish they made a similar product like that for women who are clueless about those bottles and tubes, too. Or I wish I could remember what the product was, because I bet I could get away with using it, too. When I look at the "skin care" aisle in the drugstore, my eyes glaze over and I grab something at random in the hopes that maybe it will do something good. It never does.

The worst part is that there seems to be nowhere to learn this stuff if you're over the age of 15. I can find all sorts of books and guides to putting on trendy makeup styles (the kind only suitable for high school hallways and maybe Tammy Faye Baker), but nothing geared towards older women (until age 60 or so, and then there's a big section of "how to look younger" guides that ARE specific. But I'm 33 and often mistaken for a college student, so I don't really want to look any younger. And yes, I have tried some of the techniques in those books in the hopes that they'd still work for my age group. They don't.) If I want to paint cool stripes on my nails to show off to my teenage friends, there's entire stores full of books on how to do it. If I just want to paint my nails without getting hair marks in the nails when I sleep (yes, I do. Often. Even when I paint my nails 10 hours before going to bed.), I'm on my own. I can find books that will tell me that I should wear reds and yellows if I am a "winter" but blues and greens if I am a "summer" (er, or maybe the other way around), but I have no freaking clue how to figure out which I am. I assume I'm the blues-and-greens one because those colors look better on me than reds and yellows, but then the colors they suggest for lipsticks and eyeshadows and the like look horrid, so I don't know. Is there an option for half-winter and half-summer, maybe "spring"? I'm definitely a spring. Or a guy. One of the two.

Femininity

Yesterday at lunch, we were discussing how one of my friends' girlfriend is upset, because he plans to attend the live game we're putting on. They have a long-distance relationship, so it means he won't be driving 4 hours to see her that weekend. She's upset because she considers it their "anniversary weekend" in that they met at a clogging workshop that is always held the first weekend of May. That workshop is canceled entirely this year (otherwise he would have skipped the live game and gone to it with her), and in 2005 when they met the particular dates happened to fall in the middle of the week (The workshop would have been April 30 & May 1), meaning that the weekend before the live game would be equally valid as their "anniversary weekend". More importantly, he doesn't think that the anniversary is all that important; wedding anniversaries, sure, but not "the weekend we met", especially not when it's not possible to be in "the place we met" at the same time. At one point in the conversation he turned to me and asked for a "girl's perspective" on the matter.

It was sweet and all, but when it comes right down to it: I'm terrible at being a girl. My plumbing is on the inside and every 4 weeks I am held hostage by my hormones for a day or two, but that's pretty much where it ends-- when it comes to all the gender cliches, I'm pretty solidly over in guy territory. I've been known to game with friends (and not my husband) on my wedding anniversary. (What? We had dinner together first, it counts as romantic. It does! Leave me alone.) Last week on Valentine's Day, I went clogging. John stayed home (though he stopped by a store on the way home and ought me Godiva, which was waiting for me when I got home around 11pm). Clearly I am not the person to ask whether a live game should take priority over a hey-we-met anniversary. My solution is for her to come here and attend the live game too, so she can still see him on their anniversary weekend. She doesn't think of it as a "solution"-- more like a "double insult".

Every so often (usually when I'm being held hostage by those hormones) I wish I had a better handle on the "girl stuff". Hand me a hammer and a screwdriver and I'm fine, but hand me a beauty kit and I'm lost. I have no clue how fake nails work. I've tried them a few times, and they always pop off within an hour. The only possible way to keep them on, as near as I can tell, is to become an invalid the entire time you're wearing them and do absolutely nothing with your hands. And that includes not going to the bathroom, because I have lost fake nails while washing my hands. And speaking of washing hands, can someone please explain how to do it while wearing a ring? I can't stand the feel of water underneath the ring. I can't even stand it when my finger is slightly clammy. When I bother to wear a ring I spend more time with it in my pocket drying off than I do with it on my finger. Is it just a feeling I'm supposed to live with (ewwwww), or is there some hand-washing technique I've never mastered?

I don't "get" jewelry to begin with. I get how most of it is supposed to work (except those weird slave-bracelet things with an attached ring, which mystify me), I just don't understand why so many people bother. It's all so annoying. Earrings poke. Rings get wet, and I get them caught on clothing, passerbys, etc. Toe rings flat-out hurt, and make me walk weird to boot. Necklaces hang uncomfortably and get tangled in my hair. Bracelets drive me nuts. I don't even like to wear a watch on my wrist; why would I put something non-practical on it instead?

I do wear dresses, when I'm forced to wear something nicer than jeans and a T-shirt. I have nothing in between "nice dress suitable for a wedding or funeral" and "T-shirt", mostly because I have never figured out what the intermediate classifications are. When I worked at Netrex the dress code was "business casual" and I wore a dress pretty much every day, not because I liked looking pretty but because I couldn't fathom what "business casual" was. I knew I could be fired for showing up in jeans, so I wore the only things I had that weren't jeans. (When I worked for GLTG they were also "business casual" but they'd let us office techs get away with wearing jeans, so I stuck with that. It was much more comfortable.) I still don't know what makes something "business casual" versus just plain "casual". I have tried looking for something that could be described as "nice pantsuit suitable for a wedding or a funeral" but I haven't found anything that didn't look stupid on me, so I'm stuck with dresses.

You know that commercial a while ago for some men's facial product (I've forgotten which one), in which the guy looks in the medicine cabinet, sees all his wife's tubes and bottles and gets this scared look on his face? Then he closes the medicine cabinet, opens it up again, and it's got just one tube in it (of the product being advertised, of course). The voiceover is something like "You can take care of your face her way, or you can do it the guy's way. [Product name], the only [lotion? cleanser? whatever] you need." I totally wish they made a similar product like that for women who are clueless about those bottles and tubes, too. Or I wish I could remember what the product was, because I bet I could get away with using it, too. When I look at the "skin care" aisle in the drugstore, my eyes glaze over and I grab something at random in the hopes that maybe it will do something good. It never does.

The worst part is that there seems to be nowhere to learn this stuff if you're over the age of 15. I can find all sorts of books and guides to putting on trendy makeup styles (the kind only suitable for high school hallways and maybe Tammy Faye Baker), but nothing geared towards older women (until age 60 or so, and then there's a big section of "how to look younger" guides that ARE specific. But I'm 33 and often mistaken for a college student, so I don't really want to look any younger. And yes, I have tried some of the techniques in those books in the hopes that they'd still work for my age group. They don't.) If I want to paint cool stripes on my nails to show off to my teenage friends, there's entire stores full of books on how to do it. If I just want to paint my nails without getting hair marks in the nails when I sleep (yes, I do. Often. Even when I paint my nails 10 hours before going to bed.), I'm on my own. I can find books that will tell me that I should wear reds and yellows if I am a "winter" but blues and greens if I am a "summer" (er, or maybe the other way around), but I have no freaking clue how to figure out which I am. I assume I'm the blues-and-greens one because those colors look better on me than reds and yellows, but then the colors they suggest for lipsticks and eyeshadows and the like look horrid, so I don't know. Is there an option for half-winter and half-summer, maybe "spring"? I'm definitely a spring. Or a guy. One of the two.