Transplanted Life
Friday, March 24, 2006
 
Sometimes, doing the girly thing is mortifying
I wussed out on a movie that my boyfriend wanted to see because it looked gross last night. I didn't think it was a big deal at the time until I was IMing with Maggie this morning. Alex and I had just seen the Bill Plympton program at the Boston Underground Film Festival, and the next thing on the schedule was Modify, a documentary on people who, well, modify their bodies with surgery and tatoos and such. I didn't think of it as any big deal at the time; near as I can tell, I've always been squeamish about that. I had a friend in college who worked in a tattoo parlor during breaks and had a fair amount of ink on his skin, and even he would look at stuff in body art magazines and be saying "this is too much. Why would you do that to you penis?" I probably shouldn't be surprised that when I saw him at the last reunion, he was living in Salt Lake City, married with a kid on the way, as he wound up being way more conservative than he thought. I wonder what they make of him in Utah. Anyway, that's my big beef with that sort of thing; aside from it never making someone look better and risking infection and needless pain, you're going to be in a context where it works against you.

And that's before you get the thought that someone else could wind up stuck with the band logo injected into your shoulder or the metal jammed in your nose if you have my life. There's plenty of ways to express your personality without breaking the skin, I figure, so why screw around with self-mutilation?

Anyway, I didn't want to be a total buzzkill, so I mostly deflected us away from it without complaining about it being squicky. I wanted to get my stuff at the comic shop, which killed fifteen or twenty of the forty-five minutes between shows, by which point it was almost 9:30 and, hey, I hadn't had time to eat before the first show. Besides, it would be quarter past eleven by the time it ended, and while Alex may not have an hour on the bus in the morning...

Shameless, really. It's amazing what lame excuses a woman can get away with when a man is still worried about missing his chance to sleep with her. It's a good thing we get horny, too, or else the balance of power would tilt so far in our favor it's not even funny.

So, I mentioned some of this when Mags IMed me this morning, and she's all like, aw, we'll make a real girly-girl out of you yet. No amount of "hey, you dated Martin, you know this attitude toward messing with one's body doesn't just come from the female brain" could sway her. Or saying that it's not like I wanted to go into Crate & Barrell to look at cookware or Jasmine Sola to look at clothes (to name a couple places that are closer to the Brattle theater than the Million Year Picnic); we went to the comic shop. And it wasn't like I was calculating that he'd choose an eventual chance to score with me over seeing a movie; I was just trying to run out the clock.

Sure, she types, make a sports metaphor. That you didn't think about it just shows how ingrained those female instincts have become. She also said something about guys having a herd mentality so that if I was still a guy, I wouldn't have balked at seeing the movie because that would have been an admission of weakness.

Now, granted, she said it with a bunch of smiley emoticons, but, still, does it matter why I wound up doing the girly stuff if the upshot is I did it? Not that it's a bad thing, per sebut I don't know if I really want to be just another girl. My first thirty years of experiences should matter, darn it, and make me unique.

-Marti
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
 
So how 'bout that World Baseball Classic?
Didn't expect much from it, but it wound up being pretty darn good. I have to admit, I was disappointed Japan got in over Korea. The ROK team was surprisingly good, and as much as I like Ichiro, the smack he was talking about the rest of the Asian teams wasn't cool. Besides, I've got an irrational fondness for Byun-hyung Kim (or is it Kim Byun-hyung?); he really saved the Sox during the summer of '03 and got about ten times as much crap dumped on him than he deserved when things went wrong. I don't really believe in chokers, and think it's unfortunate that people remember him giving up home runs and not his arm being slagged the previous game.

That game kept me up late enough to make me late for work this morning. First time at this job. Not actually late, I guess, but in after nine, which means staying until almost six if I'm going to get a full eight hours in, then it takes an hour to get back here...

You know, the first time I was in my mid-twenties, I think I was more ambitious. Of course, it was the whole dot-com boom back then, but I was glad to work ten hours a day and come in on the occasional weekend. I tell myself that I was motivated by the whole stock option thing, where the harder you worked the more you built the value of the itty bitty chunk of the company you owned, and now I know better, but I wonder sometimes if it's a brain thing. How ambitious was Shelley? The impression I get sometimes is that she wasn't lazy, but didn't exactly live to work.

As much as I like being a little more relaxed, I don't think I quite want to be that girl. I'd like to build toward something. I hope I'm not hard-wired not to.

I suppose I should talk to Telly about this, but we haven't talked much the past couple months, and I don't know as that's the conversation I want to start with.

-Marti

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Note: This blog is a work of fantasy; all characters are either ficticious or used ficticiously. The author may be contacted at JaySeaver@comcast.net