Girls will be boys will be girls will be boys.

Apparently, I am not a girly girl. I think I might be a man's lady. Or, alternately, a dudely girl.

Right?

I love pink. I love flowers. Baby animals. Stuffed animals. Baby babies. Chick flicks/chick lit. Scented candles. Fruity drinks (hi, new love of my life, Framboise). Fancy scented lotions and creams. Skirts. Dresses. Fancy underpanties. Silky things. Nail polish. Mascara. Getting my hair 'did.' The whole nine yards.

But I also really really love blue. Beer. Burgers. Baseball and hockey. Dude flicks (The Big Lebowski remains my favourite, most-watched, most-quoted movie). Robots. Graphic novels. Video games. Simplicity. Pants. Being stubborn. Being confusing. Being stupid. All very dudely qualities. (No offense, dudes, but... you own the patent on those last couple of things. I'll cop to women being crazy (see later on in this post where I elucidate my own crazy) but dudes broke ground on the stupid/confusing/stubborn front, built a foundation, and erected* a skyscraper upon it. Own it.)

When I google-imaged "stupid skyscraper" this came up. Seems pretty apt.

I squee (heavily) at cute things, but I also scoff at people falling down or getting hurt or (especially) getting hit in the nuts. I want a baby (someday), but I want a baby boy first, dammit and he is going to grow up playing baseball in the park if I have to be the best single mother in the world ever**. My hips swing when I walk, but I curse like a sailor, when I'm not at work***.

I have a handful of close-ish female friends, the most I've had since I went to an all-girls Catholic high school a million**** years ago and little to no choice to have at least a coterie of girlfriends (especially ones who had boyfriends at the all-boys school next door, so I could acquire some much-needed dude friends). But my closest friends, the ones I consistently turn to when grumpy, needing a drink, or need help dissecting matters of the heart, are resoundingly male. I grump to my lady friends, but I always feel a disconnect, like they're not getting all of the story because I'm forgetting vital parts of it, mostly because I probably am.

I also don't get invited out "with the girls" as much as I do with the guys, probably due to my propensity for drinking too much beer, swearing too loudly, and making lewd jokes at every opportunity. The retort "This is why we can't have nice things" basically applies to me and intangible things: I will never be able to serenely sip from a Cosmopolitan or Sex on the Beach in a sophisticated dress. I will be the girl in jeans in the corner, playing darts or pool and drinking pint after pint with the guys, telling highly inappropriate tales and guffawing at theirs. I've only recently found a little niche of girls who somehow, for some reason, like me and want to hang out with me, even if I am too loud and too brash.

I do love dresses and skirts, and I use girly perfumes with names like Seductive Goddess, and I like***** being a girl, but I like hanging out with the dudes, because on the whole they are so much fun to be around, except when they are being TRULY dudely and mucking up everything around them. Which is often. Very often.

I might just be metro-Detroit's version of Sweet Dee, only fatter and shorter and browner-haireder. If I found a baby in the dumpster, I'd probably call it DB too.

Last week, I spent a few hours at my friend Darin's house, with a couple other dudes, watching the tiebreaker game for the AL Central Division. I got teased, mercilessly, about something that came up during a no-holds-barred game of Balderdash last year - something highly inappropriate, that I can't even share with you, internet, other than to say that it rhymes with boatmucking, sorta. Anyway, it was crass and crude and I blushed and demurred and fobbed it off ("I still have some decency left," says the girl who once explained something that rhymes with mukakke to a bunch of dudes who, in retrospect, probably knew what it was and just wanted to see if I would get embarrassed talking about it. Note: I did not get embarrassed) but I still took that goodnatured verbal abuse and rolled with it. Because I'm The Girl Guys Can Talk About (Really, Super) Gross Stuff With. I think.

Later that night, though, I found myself out and about with three of my wonderful lady friends, for an event I like to call "lady burgers," if only because it sounds a little bit perverted (again, that's a pretty dudely quality). I'd left Darin's house still on a game high, since it was only the bottom of the seventh and I would've loved for the Tigs to clinch the pennant, even if we didn't stand a chance against the Yankees in the league playoffs. We girls sat in a booth far away from a television and I strained to see the game, while the Tigers struggled through twelve long innings. Not being able to see the score or anything really except for dots of white and grey and blue and black on a field of green, I determined what was going on in the game on the enthusiasm of those seated far closer, and provided such helpful commentary to my boothmates as "They're fighting? I think it's a happy fight. There are people still on the field and they're just standing there so it can't be over." I almost got kicked out of 'Ladies Night'/the girls club when I demonstrated my too-vast knowledge of sports****** ("Baseball was invented in Cooperstown!"), but quickly regained my hold by being adorable. I think.

Basically, it was a weird night. I was almost too girly to hang out with the dudes, and almost too dudely to hang out with the girls. Catch-22.

My friend Jon once drunkenly told me "I don't know why you don't have a boyfriend. You're so awesome. You get along so well with dudes - you're like one of us," and then decided that that was actually probably the problem.

The problem is actually that while I am in many ways, shapes, and forms very dudegirly, I have the unwieldy and totally out-of-control emotions of a girly-girl. A pretty vulnerable girl who sometimes always tries too hard and is a champion natural-born-worrier and invents elaborate scenarios in which people screw her over relentlessly just for bragging rights. I overthink, I overanalyze, I worry 92 hours of the day, I think you don't like me, I think I screwed up, and it's mostly a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bonnie says I have to "rein in the Rebecca." But that Rebecca, she's a headstrong one. It's a dirty job. (PS Mike Rowe, you are welcome to help me.)

I am trying really hard to not let that happen this time. It's a slippery slope, with wicked turns at breakneck speeds. I've gotten "good" enough to know when I start slipping, but not good enough to know how to stop once I've started down that hill. I pump the brakes and tell myself I'm entering a world of pain, a world of pain, but it's no use. I'm there, I'm on it, I ride it out as best I can. I've recognized it this time, and am working on stopping that vehicle of destruction, and I'm trying to chill the fuck out and maintain the best parts of me, both girly and dudely (please see the opening paragraphs) because they are me and I am pretty awesome, if you must know, so if you are reading this, please realize this! I acknowledge my faults, am working to mend them, so hopefully you let my ludicrous overreactiony (but quickly-realized, remember! Remember!) antics get in the way of your enjoying my out and out awesomeness, which is plentiful and intense.

It's funny, because I started this entry a few months ago, with no real idea of where it was going, until the universe spelled it out for me recently in no uncertain terms. Keep being a dudely girl, but chill down on the crazy girly-girl emotion bullshit. Okay? Okay.

Rebecca is trying to abide.

Rebecca abides.

She's calmer than you are.

Far out, man.

*okay, so yeah, 'erected'? I LOL'ed at that when I was typing it, and left it in for comic relief, for myself. For real.
**which will probably happen, as I'm not convinced that anyone will ever be stupid enough to want to marry me, given my extreme levels of fucked-up-ness.
***mostly.
****ten
*****This was originally "I love being a girl" but then I remembered periods and how much they suck and how every month they cost me money, sanity, and normal human contact as I sequester myself from humanity so as not to lose all my friends when my hormones raise their nasty, ugly, many-tentacled heads.
******here is me being a girl: when my friends Ron and Eric start talking about sports (mostly college and pro football) too much around me, my eyes glaze over and I stare off into the distance until I can't take it anymore and just blurt out "sports." That's usually their cue to talk about something different. An acceptable segue is cupcakes, since sometimes they talk about cupcakes in relation to college football, a connection I haven't yet figured out, but might have to look more into. I'll suffer college football for some cupcakes, you know? Mmmmm... cupcakes.