When went to ballroom dancing school, I would be like,“ooooh this suuucks,” but in my head I would think, “YES.”

Since I no longer work or leave my apartment EVER (unless I head over to my other family’s house and drink white Russians with my BFFAEAE) I’ve decided that I’m going to do a couple posts on middle school life, right around 5^th and 6^th grade because writing about bitchy girls in 7^th grade is probably spot on but trite at this point.

Right before boys were acceptable, my friends and I like wanted to be dudes.

A picture of us wanting to be dudes

This is not a joke or an exaggeration (as the picture probably makes clear). I started thinking about this again when I was reading some more Klosterman. Klosterman is writing a bit about gender roles; he writes, “For the past twenty-five years, culture has been obsessed with making males and females more alike, and that’s fine. Maybe it’s even enlightened. But what I’ve noticed...is that this convergence has mostly just prompted females to adopt the worst qualities of men.” He goes on to talk about how sluziness means being promiscuous like guys etc...and how this is evidence of both sexes becoming “equally shallow and selfish.” Okay, fine, but in sixth grade we wanted all of the other bad things about being a guy—we wanted to wear boxers and big shirts and fucking JNCOS. Do you remember those? These pants were fucking out of control. I cannot believe my mother even let me wear them, and not only that but I had multiple pairs. Each pant leg was so big it looked like a maternity skirt. So we would wear these and then sometimes put boxers on underneath (this only lasted a bit because it was uncomfortable and also weird). The funny thing was, even when becoming a tomboy was the best, I also really liked boys, but I didn’t want to tell anyone. Like when we went to ballroom dancing school I would be like “ooooh this suuucks eeew” but in my head I would think, “YES.”

Being a dude and being cool continued right through our first co-ed Goddard Gates dance and then came to a halt. At that point, Mary-Kate & Ashley made Capri pants and three quarter length shirts the coolest thing in the world—clothing that was only slightly smaller than average size clothing but not actually small enough to be considered a mistake.