On Being a Girl......

As a female, I really like having groups of close female friends.  Women are wonderful (which I can safely say now as I finally married in my mid-30s and my marry-extremely-early family can stop wondering if I am a lesbian--not that there's anything wrong with that........), and I actually feel sorry for American men that they just don't form the close friendship bonds that women do.  Only this week I met a girlfriend for coffee and it hasn't exactly been a great year for either of us, but just knowing that and still being able to pause for a bit to relax together makes it easier.  Another girlfriend and I were recently talking about the "yeah, whatever" approach to the holidays so many of us have had to take this year.  We each normally host Christmas parties, but this year she had surgery and I'm having back problems, so we each scrapped them.  The funny thing is we both have the reputation of "dropping" people from parties, so we were joking about ways to let people know that they had not been dropped and that there just wasn't a party without hurting the feelings of those who HAD been dropped but weren't aware of the fact.  Life has so many ups and downs, but when you have people to ride them with, it's much easier to just hang on.

My closest girlfriends locally are sort of in circles.  The oldest circle is my book club--because as a female I'm almost obligated to be IN a book club--and it's a lovely group of women and I enjoy it every time we're together.  The problem is: 

I do not have enough estrogen for chick-lit books.

In fact, I hate them.  So much so in fact that I will no longer borrow library books from unknown female authors unless I know that they've been dead at LEAST since before Bridget Jones was published.  Men can still be lousy authors, but mercifully they don't generally write about 30-somethings recently divorced, trying to put their lives back together, probably with a close group of friends--one of whom is almost certainly to be struck down by cancer.   Not that chick-lit is bad--it's just past my "girl" line.

With every circle of girlfriends I have, I always know there's a line where we don't connect--which we've sort of dubbed the Touchy-Feely line.  It's probably this line that one needs to cross in order to want children, or to have played with baby dolls as a child.  It's definitely the line one needs to cross for yoga.  I have tried it, but when everyone else is getting "in touch" with their center or whatever it's supposed to be, I am planning knitting projects or my mind decides to smack me with something hideous like a continual loop of "Copacabana" or the Gilligan's Island theme song.  If that is truly my "center," we're better off staying out of touch.  

So I am trying to figure out a way to remain in the book club without having to read any more chick-lit books AND without hurting anyone's feeling because I can't stand their book choices.  The back problems have sort of helped as I ended up being too sore to even attend last month and was saved from discussing a book I couldn't even stand to listen to, but it's not a long-term solution I like to contemplate.  I suppose it's too late to claim latent illiteracy problems...................