Stuff Girls Like

Today I am attending to some biz of the grownup variety (hey, did you know that there’s no such thing as “meetings” in that they exist but don’t actually have to, ever, but we do them anyway? It’s probably the greatest vaudevillian act of the many vaudevillian acts that constitute the adult sphere because there are giant leather chairs, cold bottles of water in plastic bottles and sanctioned unhungry snacking, all so you can sit there and lay way back in the half-dark for an hour and then agree to “decide later”); anyway, I only have about fourteen minutes to jam with you Nuyorican Poets Café-style – aww, Peanut, look how my Canadienne computer auto-accents “café” – about girl stuff, specifically and fun-ly, stuff girls like. Just, stuff. Stuff we like. Girl stuffs! OK? It’s easy but fun. OK? OK. OK?

PUPPIES

A fundamental thing that girls like is anything cute, but it has to be cute in exactly the right way. Like, puppies are so cute, and girls love puppies. Buuuut don’t you also get suspicious about how much humans who claim to love puppies and kittens and stuff soooooo much are maybe faking it, because if they did why don’t they hang out at the ASPCA instead of, say, Intelligentsia, you know? And why isn’t a fun thing to do getting every dog you know together and putting treats all on your arms so you can have an actual puppy party where you’re just like huggin’ and huggin’ and huggin’ them? Why is it more fun to buy stale beer instead? See? Nobody actually likes puppies that much.

FOOD INSTAS

The filthy pornographicisms of the meal you ordered (like, congratulatory slow clap for going to dinner? For ordering? What do you want from me?) reveal themselves within the admittedly liminal boundaries of Instagram. I mean, I’m very interested in the experience of weird, complicated meals and the experience of cooing over them but when captured on your iPhone they invariably look like infected piles of sex and garbage. Also, eating is just pre-shitting. Food is protoshit. NVR4GET.

PERSONAL ANECDOTES

When these start coming down the conversational highway it’s like, blow your bangs back and put on your Boring Seatbelt. Girls the fuck love to tell anyone their first grade stuff! Why! Everybody was the best, then, not just you.

RULES

We don’t have to talk about last week’s Rape Jokes stuff (BUT can I tell you that the best thing I read about it was Molly Lambert’s tweet that “what's cool about Tosh is how he looks like the frat guy in a gay porn, but is 37”? HAAAAAAAxNTH (that means “hilarious for eternity.”) BUT. We do have to talk about how girls are like weirdly desperate for a consensus on what is real, and what is right. Last week was emotionally brutals for me (like Metalocalypse BRUUUUUTAAAAL) because I was busy and getting the majority of my required friendergies from Twitter instead of real life, and the whole convo was about What Is Rape Culture and What Is Jokes and What Is Tosh and watching a zill gay porn frat guys throw their grubby, cum-gummy two cents in about, like, What Is Funny made my heart kind of heat up too fast and crisp up around the edges.

And yet, and yet! We all still and totally gave a shit what Louis CK thought about it and what dudes thought about it and what each other thought about it, about where we were on rape jokes, as if there is a way to decide that (we’ll schedule another meeting about it for next week, how about). It was like an antsy collective choking for some sense of cohesion about matters of girl instead of thinking what you think about a guy whose joke is not about “rape” but about “raping” and how you might toss that around in your hands like a fresh black Superball the next time (like, today) you find yourself in the dark, deadly wilds of it. Like, how we are supposed to navigate ideals and people and desires that are so close together they touch, and so in conflict that they magnetize, and what we think of it? It can’t be understood by all of us together on the internet all at once (in large part because some of y’all don’t like to get hit en sex). It isn’t easy, this stuff. It makes a heart go crispy, then cold. And I don’t know, either, when the censory rules we trade like stickers stop being about, like, kissing, and start being about what is important to have and want, and think and be. Like, fuck every external idea of “having it all” unless you mean a full-time platonic lover, three part-time boyfriends, eternal summer and uncomplicated, enormous cash; fuck What Is A Joke. Fuck what you’re “supposed to” anything.

AURELIE BIDERMANN

I’m especially putting this in so they’ll send me some. SEND ME SOME! I have the arrow stuff so far.

RELATED

My new way of getting things is to go “GIVEITAME!” and just seeing if it works. (???)

MOUTH STUFF

Lip gloss, lipstick, lollipops, bendy straws, joints, Crest Whitestrips, gum, pills, cocks, Pop Rocks, knife edges with apple slices and spit mixed with blood.

“BAGS”

This’ll have to serve as, like, a mitigating factor within this exercise. Bags are retarded. A of all, where shoes and dresses and lingerie are intended to package your actual body in their contours/textures/colours/details, bags are actual sacks which occur in nature only to contain sperms (GROSSIE!) (jkjkjkjk basically in AA for sperms) and, like, gray pus (ask your dad what a “boil” is) and breast milk. So where bags, especially the bigger, sack-ier bags in neutral dead leathers, festooned with tassels and studs and zips, are about a very sad and unsexy post-industrial human need to carry belongings from place to place, shoes are about, like, “See how my muscles stretch into a bronzey-sparkling rubber-band?”

B of all, the whole point of being a girl (if you accept the idea that you can have everything of the job/friends/fun variety in the same way and to the same ends as boys) is to, like, be CUTE. Not cute like aesthetically but of course, that too if you want it, but CUTE like purple-sparkle-gel-pens. CUTE like in the way that everyone, from over-it toughs and hards digging on teenager fiction to mainstream cultural encouragements to fashion pro-bishes keeping those collaborations between grownup companies and pretty-littles happening. CUTE like whatever you want, like having a lock-box of fairy secrets and an ET-finger connection with every other girl, ever, for always. Being a girl, then, is (can be, should be, will be) just like regular life, but also magic. But because all of that is already in you don’t need to de-mystery yourself in your own estimation, to the girls you will be cruising at Opening Ceremony, and to attractive sperm options.

A big sack-bag for your melty gum and ink-slick receipts and, let’s see what else I have in here, like, open bags of almonds and a baggie full of multivitamins and Ativan, and a little perfume solid and spare underwears for when you inevitably fall asleep on a rotating series of couches, and then wake up in the morning going WAIT, WHAT? and find your bra on the kitchen floor where you threw it and you’ll be like “Ahhhhh, underwear.” That’s what’s in our bags, but there is no reason outside of the Collective Desire for udders to carry them. Get pockets. Bags are gross.

WALLETS

I want that Lanvin "Happy" wallet so that I might start to associate something other than diffuse terror with money.

PINK CIGARETTES

Bad seeds with sex on their minds and in their cunt heels love a pink Nat Sherman, non?

“BREAKING HEARTS”

My friend Jake said that. HA!

NEGATIVE ATTENTION

That feeling when a guy you don’t like or necessarily respect but who enraptures you with their goat-ish certitude pays you a small compliment, delivered from the highest stone towers of their arrogance kingdom (oooh you like that baybeeee?) and you know they’re full of it and you’re against “full of it” but this guy’s mild-approval-taps, all drenched in condescension, just dripping with it, are much too closely aligned with the scattered moments of early insecurity – yours expressed so much differently than his, right? – that it just feels so fuckingly overwhelmingly blindingly good. I never hate myself more than ten minutes after I get that nice-nice from a total fucking asshole.

THE FLOOR

I think that some girl-bodies are not, like, meant to sit up. That’s not some shiteous thing about girl-bodies being “meant” only to accept dinkies and expel babies and watch reality TVs; it’s some TRUE SAY about how much breasts are not conducive to being upright in front of a computer. At this point if I’m not wearing a bra I basically wrap my left arm around the front and type with the left, like a really uncomfortable monkey or whatever is an animal with long arms and possible titays? Anyway, if you want to get like girls-deep into the meta/physics of positioning, you’ll eventually find out that stretching waaaay out horizontal-ways and doing that thing where you just look at your legs above you for so long and wonder what your wingspan is all the way out to your eggshell-blue-fingertips and just feel the hardness of floor underneath is the Platonic ideal for girl-bodies, otherwise so packaged into the architectures of little outfits, anchored by insufficient shoulders. Oh, in second place is jumping on a trampoline. They’re democratizing to that nth degree, because everyone looks equally good and perfectly human in mid-air.

Follow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway

Previously - Girls and Being a Teenager