f*** the girl police

i think i should just resign myself (like i haven’t been trying on & off to do that for almost as long as i’ve been trying not to have to) to the fact that i. will. never. break. the. code.

let me hear it one more time

it’s not, of course, as if i haven’t tried. it’s not really like i ever do anything but try. it’s just that it doesn’t work. i don’t work. i was born (this has to be it) with the wrong implanted microchips. or something missing. it’s bad enough that i’ve felt like an idiot for a year and a half (and counting) because the cliques springing up around me not only don’t want me in, but don’t seem to even be speaking English when i accidentally interrupt them. it’s bad enough that i’ve had my feelings hurt repeatedly by these girls whose off-hand insults and corrections and criticisms seem to land on each others’ ears like praise-songs i don’t understand. i can accept that i’m the one with catching up to do when that goes on. i can deal with listening carefully for the rhythms, swallowing the things that don’t seem as if they’re meant to sting even when they do, studying new idioms, new facial expressions, new tongues, letting their mannerisms take root in my own repertoire. i can be the ugly kid in jr. high who’s kept around more like a mascot than anything so that somebody will be there to be volunteered for jobs nobody else wants in return for being every once in a while included in the joke or referred to in the plural first-person tense. and then it all goes wrong–again–and i remember how much i suck at this and how good i’ve never been at it.

today i got a “let’s talk” e-mail (that’s code here for “you suck”–is it always? is this something else i’m expected to already know?) from a girl who insulted the hell out of me–at least to me–in class on tuesday, to whom i snapped back at the time in just the words and cadences i’d been watching and copying, trying my damnedest to remember that they didn’t mean to be mean & to play it the way they play it, telling me that my telling her to shut up made her very, very angry, and she doesn’t know “where to go from here,” which i’m reading (but what do i know about how to read these things, right?) as “right now i don’t think i want you to talk to me anymore, and i’m not sure i care if that ever changes.” so of course i, still pretty stung from the classroom interaction in the first place, but still playing it off b/c that’s how they seemed to play, wrote back to grovel & apologize & tell her i didn’t know she’d take it that way, because i didn’t know, but, then, on retrospect, i remembered that most of what they shouted at me about last year was admitting i didn’t know things…

[as an aside, is this really just me? am i the only person to whom being told publicly to “calm down” when i engage in a topic with any intensity whatsoever sounds judgmental and critical? do other people hear that as just a friendly suggestion? was i supposed to know to thank her instead of shushing her so i could finish making my damn point?]

& i don’t know when or if she’s going to write me back–the last time they were pissed at me, i never heard back from any of my efforts to address/redress their accusations–or if i’ll be given the silent-treatment in class for the rest of the term, or why the hell she didn’t say something tuesday if she was mad tuesday, instead of stewing for four days, probably bouncing her concerns & the flattering characterization of me that i’m sure accompanies them off half my cohort in the process…so, yeah. in trouble yet again. it happens whenever i start to get even the least bit comfortable around the women i know. i act like myself. i don’t self-edit nearly enough. i say what i’m actually thinking. i assert my agendas when i feel like they’re being encroached upon. & i get slammed for it, every time. billy-clubbed in the sugariest ways possible, but billy-clubbed just the same. handcuffed. me in the cop car, again, for another infraction i don’t even understand. i only told her to shut up because that’s what she and her friends tell each other. i guess i should have known that the friendly things she’s done and said to me don’t make us friends, that the words are reserved for people actually in the circle rather than just permitted to hover near it. sisterhood and solidarity my ass–she & her best friend have plenty of it, sure, but it’s got fuck-all to do with me.