Things sisters do

Being a girl is occasionally a very weird thing.

And by a girl I, of course, mean being an independent and self-reliant women.

And by weird, I mean that as an independent and self-reliant women, I sometimes find myself in the strange position of doing things that one could define as "girl stuff."

I say this having spent half my life railing against the injustices of the male-dominated world.

I say this as someone who has, for as long as I can remember, scoffed at soap operas, ignored rituals like pedicures and trips to the hair salon (except for when my mom takes me to the fancy one in Lincoln) and vehemently rejected the oodles of products peddled to reinforce female insecurities about themselves.

I say this being one of this women who hates most everything that's made for women -- and who has otherwise chosen to believe that most (if not all) of it is simply the product of misguided corporate dicks deciding what it is that women want, so they can sell it to them.

But, after spending three months with my little sister, who stopped off in Guam before heading home from Thailand, I can only conclude that there's some sort of chemical reaction that happens when you get into a room with another girl and you know that there are no guys around to make fun of you.

During Heidi's stay I found myself doing all sorts of unconscious and uncharacteristically girly things.

Like, for example, going shopping for a book only to emerge from the mall(ish) shopping area with the same pair of impractical shoes, in different sizes. Or, you know, going to K-Mart in the middle of the night to buy ingredients for chocolate chips cookies, and then giving up on baking half-way through so you can eat the chocolate chip cooking dough raw.

Or making elaborate, multi-ingredient, multicultural dishes and then taking pictures of them.






























Or simultaneously humming the Poirot theme song, because we'd spent nearly every night watching episodes of PBS Mysteries that you have stacked up in your Netflix queue.

Or pretending like we weren't going to cry while talking about that really sad episode of Futurama where the dog waits for Fry on the corner for a millennium.

Melting things, and then eating them with ice cream seems also to be something that happened more frequently in each others presence.




















Or going to the animal shelter to in-no-way-whatsoever adopt a dog, and then adopting the most ticky worm-infested emotional manipulative (and adorable) dog on the planet.
















I would blame this on some kind of familial defect, except that the women in my family tend to be of the self-contained temperament, more likely to calmly cynical, perhaps bordering on bitchy, than hysterically sentimental.

I am, or was, to some degree, the exception to this rule (except for the bitchy part). But my emotional outbursts have usually been relegated to melodramatically prostrating myself, launching into political tirades, or running in the rain to throw myself up against some poor, unsuspecting boy whose steely heart I was wooing (you know who you are).

While neither Heidi nor I seemed predisposed to this type of behavior, together, however, it only took us minutes before we started eating chocolate and drinking wine, while watching above-said Poirot, only to find ourselves moments later trying on dresses in front of a mirror and surreptitiously comparing waist and boob sizes.

Which, again, is weird.