Girl Talk

I forget sometimes that I'm 30. I feel like I've been 30 for a long time, and that I should be a different age by now. It also feels comfortable... Like as if I had meant to be this age.

14 was a special age, because the main character in this comic book that I was reading since I was 10 had been that age. I remember feeling special when I reached 14, thinking that I could experience what the main character was experiencing in her life. Of course, I found out that my life was nothing like the comic book. The main character was a blond hair, blue eyed, gypsy who was a girl who passed as a boy in 12th century Europe. Me- I was just a recently transplanted Japanese American living in fisherman town Japan.

Hmmmm... I remember being insanely jealous of my brothers for being a boy... moving to Japan around 10, there was a lot of pressure from my parents, school, and everyone to make me into a girl. I was American, and customs were a lot different-less gender emphasis. I played soccer in America, and in Japan, I was the only girl in the soccer team. I spoke Japanese like a boy-saying 'boku' instead of 'watashi'. In rural Japan, changing clothes to get ready for PE, happened in the classroom, because the school didn't have locker rooms. Yes, boys and girls in the same room. Soooo awkward. My teacher had to tell me to get undressed in a discreet way when infront of other classmates. My teacher had to tell my mom to get me training bras, cuz I was bouncing. Ofcourse I would hate being a girl, it's all so much more complicated than being a kid in Texas. I am glad that I'm past all of that strange experience... But I wonder how much of my own gender identity came from that. My appreciation for androgenous characters probably comes from that.

So I am 30 now and it's, again, not what I expected it to be. Sometimes I think of Sex in the City, especially when I get together with Ruchama and Amy. I think Ruchama's kind of like Samantha... Kelley is kind of like Miranda, and Amy is... Carrie, I'm yucky Charlotte. Yuck! But it's true, all we do is talk about dicks.

These are kind of important talks... I feel like I should have had these talks when I was a teenager... But I'm still learning a lot about sex. My conjecture is that, you learn more about sex when you have different partners than to stick with uno. At least that's the case with me.

What did I learn? Casual sex freaks the hell out of me. It makes me feel like I've done something really really really bad.