Guitars and Garters

Being a girl is a strange thing. Especially when you aren't a normal girl.

You watch the normal girls and they do normal girl things. They plan huge weddings and look good in white and veils while on their daddy's arm. They post pictures of their engagement rings and their pregnant bellies and their babies and you stare and wonder why you don't want to do that.

But you're a girl too.

You like pretty things like very large prime numbers.
You like being in love when they give you space and don't want you to need them.
You liked your parents buying you toys like Lego and chess boards.
You like being looked after when you're feeling sick but you're good otherwise.
You like makeup and clothes but you never think of what the boys will think of them.

But you can construct your own furniture and set up your own amp and serenade yourself with your own guitar playing and open your own jars.

And that is not really welcome in this day and age.

Being a girl is a strange thing. Especially when you aren't a normal girl.

A Room of One's Own

Book 19 of 2014 is Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

I've only read a couple of Virginia Woolf books and I love the way she writes. She is a born story teller who paints pictures with words. Now I know that she writes like a "woman-manly." Or was it a "man-womanly"? Either way, it makes her voice unique in a crowd where she is a minority.

This book/essay/speech is one of the most relevant (yes, even now) books that I woman can read.

Of late, life has had me wondering where I belong and what the whole damn point of it is. Belonging is important but it is more than that. The feeling was more about how I belong in a world where I can not see anyone like me. That was my mistake.

There may not be people who look like me everywhere but there are people who think like me, both men and women. This book was like taking a giant sigh after a very long week ends. She said it perfectly.

It is only 112 pages and if you can't do that then at least read the last chapter. She is brilliant. Just that.

I give it 5 revelations without bitterness out of 5.

Should I read this? Women should. Secure men should. Others will not be impressed that someone let her out of the kitchen.
What did I learn? “I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.”

Being Born a Woman

“Being born a woman is an awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”

- Sylvia Plath