But I don't LIKE ruffles! (January, 07)

I have been working all day. You know, sort of. It's New Year's Day, and although I went to bed at 5:30, I managed to drag myself out of bed at 10:30 to go have brunch at 11, which was a lot of fun. My hair is still up from yesterday and I'm wearing old mascara, but that's because I liked it and really don't care, today. But the point is that when I got home again, sometime in the early afternoon, I started slowly cleaning my poor shambles of a house, and I really haven't stopped yet. It's after 7. I feel like I could actually live here. The sleeping bag was still out from the power outage 2 weeks ago, the dishes were impossibly old, and so on. Just now I realized that I was feeling seriously ill from lack of food and finally started eating some soup, which was fun because I can use most of my table again now. (Plus, it's lentil soup, which I've loved since I was four years old.)

My table has Christmas presents on it. (Yes, it's January.) They are for my girls, and aren't wrapped yet. There are pretty home-made soaps, and pretty tea, and pretty coco, and so on. The labels are frilly. They fit in my house, and I like them. That probably doesn't surprise you, but it surprised me; I keep assuming that that kind of thing wouldn't fit, with my house or with me.

I grew up with a mostly-subconscious secondary perspective, which asks, not what I think of any given thing, but what a respectable straight man would think of it. This has of course influenced quite a lot of my life, and in many cases I have absolutely no problem with that. But it's been odd, the past year or so, consciously allowing myself to be girly, or cute, or even silly. I have inhibitions about all of that. A group of people went ice skating a few weeks ago and I was wearing my hair braided and had on a lot of makeup, because it was more fun. But to myself I looked like an ice skating sex kitten, and when I heard that the group would be mostly girls, I was—very relieved. I also have a diary entry which consists entirely of the following: "1:38 AM, July 18th 2006. I have come to the terrible conclusion that I like ruffles." And I usually don't like pastels. Anyway, you get the idea.

I bought these particular pretty, feminine gifts in Spokane at the shop/deli where my mother works. It is green and purple and full of cute soup mixes and baskets, and huckleberry syrup and cookie cutters shaped like teacups and moose, and so on. I was there with my father and brother; we'd stopped to say hi and stayed for lunch, and I bought some things. The topic arose (Ok because of me—I'm interested in this stuff) of WHY all this stuff was particularly female. Because of my double perspective, I have a slightly negative reaction to places so one-sided, even if everything is what I personally actually would like, so I wanted to ask the actual men who were with me.

Sitting at my own table, today, I am thinking of this conversation. Why, actually, would a row of adorned packages of coco and pancake mix be repellant to a man? At least stereotypically, it would be. Posit: decorations, especially non-functional ones on food, would have to do with the home, in a realm where traditionally a man is less comfortable and isn't in charge, so they would be signs of a different territory than his, which would be threatening…. Well that sounds lovely, but it isn't what my father actually said when I asked him. I don't think he said anything about feeling uncomfortable, just that he was completely uninterested. Here is a row of pretty bean soup mix. Here is a shelf of empty baskets. He said it just held no interest for him at all, which he pointed out was a bit odd, since he's a generally curious person. That's not being threatened, that's boredom.

So much for all our feminine theories. We think there's something interesting behind it. We only think so because we don't know. It's an old observation, but girls' magazines are all about boys, and boys' magazines are all about cars and sports. To quote (as everyone always should) Dave Barry: It may seem like men don't like to open up, that they don't share the deep and hidden emotions, but if women could only see down past the pretense and the deep obsession with the 1978 World Series, down to his very core, they would find—an obsession with the 1978 World Series.

And the thing is, while I love that quote, I might have gotten the year wrong. Why? Because I don't know anything about the World Series. Why? Because I am a girl.

Excuse me while I find my feather boa—I'm going out for coco with my girlfriends.