***I am in a bad mood. Not helped by hormones, girlfriends, guyfriends and my sanity all playing truant.***
I've always had guyfriends. Like just one guy that's not a boyfriend but I'm closer to than all the other guys that I know. I don't know if anyone else does that, but I've been doing it for eleven years.
I'm hardcore.
Truth be told, I've been in love with all of my guyfriends at some point. But that's not the only reason why I'm friends with them - trust me, I'm sixteen. I've 'fallen' for heaps of assholes, realized they're assholes and then decided that my self esteem's not only not low enough to date them, but not low enough to be in the same galaxy as them. I guess the appeal of guyfriends is that they're not bitchy. I love crude humour. You can be yourself. They don't care if you haven't plucked your eyebrows. Granted, they still stare at your rack and don't understand feelings, which is why I haven't fully become 'one of the boys'. If you don't believe that a guy can check a girl out and maintain pure platonicity, then, well I was having a discussion with one of my guyfriends about another guyfriend who has a notoriously short attention span and this guy casually remarked 'He doesn't listen to me for very long. You have an advantage, there. You've got boobs.'
Lovely.
A minor side effect of having all these guyfriends is that I became very very flirtatious at a very young age. Mostly because that's just my personality - I was a freaking psycho kid, and that's translated into some pretty weird things as I've gotten older. But it's also because all this platonicity was wearing me down to the point where I would have to be so overtly flirtatious to extract even the tiniest response from guys - not that I was necessarily dying for attention, but you know, you feel like a bit of a retard if you do all that for nothing. What I didn't realize is that girls develop much earlier than guys, and so even though both sexes are 'dating' in year six (homosexuality was not really accepted in the snotty white foreshore suburbs I grew up in) for girls it was emotional and love and mushy mushy, but for boys it was like a status symbol. I have a house. I have a cricket bat. I have a football. I have a girlfriend. I am cool.
Oh, and I found out way too late that boys get boners *really* easily. Which I know is a little gross, but seriously - the sex ed stuff gave us innocent, virginal girls the impression that guys didn't get excited unless they were naked and in bed with Miranda Kerr. Apparently that's not the case. I found that out the hard way, though.
So now I'm sixteen and hanging out with seventeen year old boys, it turns out I have inadvertently been far too cruel to some of them. Sorry! Unfortunately, I'm past the point of no return - I'm addicted to red singlets and double entendres. Just deal with it. I'm not that sexy. At most I'm crass with a little extra cleavage.
My first guyfriend was when I was five. He was five too - we were getting on a bit in life. He was a pom with pretty eyes (sixteen year old me has learned it's not always such a good idea to get too friendly with poms with pretty eyes. But five year old me was cheerfully clueless.) He was crazy, I was crazy, it was all good. We would tell each other stories in this big treehouse thing in the pre-primary play yard, and I taught him how to write - yes, I taught my best friend how to write, not to the chagrin of him, he was thrilled, but to the chagrin of the long line of teachers who had failed in that task.
We had a huge fight about God-knows-what (what do five year olds fight about?) and then he went back to England (not because of me! I highly doubt grown-ups take the opinion of a five-year-old girl into account when discussing potential relocation) and that was that.
Actually, now that I think about it, he was not only a pom but a pommy bastard - a miniature one, but still one nonetheless. I think his mother had refused to let me go over to his house because I wasn't white. I picked on her, he became a mummy's boy, and then I was like 'fuck this, I've been through open heart surgery, I don't have to put up with a boy who can't write his s's without my hand over his'.
Oh, I was a good feminist when I was five.
My next guyfriend was when I was seven. It was a brief relationship - actually, to be honest, I only have two really vivid memories of him. He was English - again - and exactly my height, which was about 4' at the time. The first memory was when we had to write word searches for each other and, being OCD, I had put all the words in and then filled in the empty squares with the alphabet - in order. My carefully drawn word search took a seven year old boy about five seconds to complete. He, on the other hand, had the most atrocious handwriting and even worse spelling. His word search has remained incomplete to this day.
The second memory was hiding behind the playground making some elaborate contraption out of sticks, which was, he informed me, a 'Big Sister and Stupid Girl Killer' - 'cept for you, cause you're cool', he added, as an afterthought. I'm not entirely sure if he meant that I was a girl worth keeping or not enough of a girl to be worth killing.
After that he became popular and started having girlfriends. I was neither.
When I turned eight I had a very very brief period of BOY GERMS followed by OMG BOYS ARE UH MAY ZING. I was wrong on both accounts, but it was a pretty weird time. This was also when the bullying - and the boredom with the primary school education system and just life in general - really kicked in, so I didn't have another guyfriend until I was twelve. Someone asked me out when I was eleven and, being eleven and an *idiot*, I said yes. And because I didn't learn and I trip over the same stone so many times it eventually just pulverizes into dust, I made the same mistake when I was thirteen.
Don't worry, three years have passed without another Episode of Monumental Stupidity and Endless Tears On My Behalf.
A lot of things happened when I was twelve and acquired another guyfriend - BSC. I had a far bigger hand than was probably polite in inadvertently breaking up a relationship between my two best friends. I was cornered by a bunch of big hairy athletic girls (his next girlfriend) and told to 'keep my distance' and put up with so much assholery that I lost so much self respect it took several months of angry butch feminism just to become enough of a human being again to face high school.
Needless to say, we haven't exactly been penfriends.
The term 'never go out with your best mate' has never been so relevant than in year eight and all that shit with K. That was a big screw up. I just laugh it off now, because I'm sixteen and not a psychotic thirteen year old. But when you're a psychotic thirteen year old you tend to go a bit...psycho...
The problem I have with guyfriends, apart from friend zoning and people not understanding why you have such hot friends (seriously, concerning no other guy and girl would HE HAD HIS ARM AROUND HER IN FORM go around *so* quickly) is that you can't actually complain about anything they do. Because you're not a girlfriend.
I don't understand the logic either. But seriously, sometimes I just want to go out with my guyfriends for ten minutes just to tell them ALL THE ANNOYING THINGS THEY DO THAT PISS THE SHIT OUT OF ME and then be like KCOOLBYE.
But seriously, everything you try to say that isn't 'hi sweetie' (actually, even that) is taken as I WANT TO BE YOUR GIRLFRIEND CAN I PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BE YOUR GIRLFRIEND - if not by them, then by the general population. Seriously, the students at Perth Mod are like Perez Hilton clones. I never have this problem with my girlfriends, which makes no sense. Like - seriously! We could be gay! You never know.
...just remembered my girlfriend's Christian. So no.
So here's just one thing I want to get straight. Girls - girlfriends, notgirlfriends - are always accused of bieng 'clingy'. I've figured out why.
Boys are fucking unreliable.
It is not 'clingy' if you say you're going to call, you don't call, and then a girl - no matter what kind of relationship you have with this girl - gets just a little annoyed. But boys do that. ALL THE TIME.
They don't even have legit excuses like 'my period's five days late so I ate my phone'.
It's not the call itself. We know you really don't have anything important to say if it's just a call. Only assholes propose or break up by phone. Call, don't call, show up at my door with a bunch of flowers, we really don't give a shit. But if you say you're going to call 'on the weekend', and then don't call - you set a girl two days of I MUST HAVE DONE SOMETHING WRONG HE PROBABLY HATES ME.
It's a legit assumption to make. Well, it's not, but boys make even sillier assumptions, like I'VE MADE A DICK JOKE MAYBE SHE'LL LIKE ME NOW. But the second we try and reproach someone about it, their egos immediately inflate 200 times its normal (already huge) size and assume that we were dying of lack of Gospel of Guyfriend. They don't understand that the mothering instinct becomes very strong when you're friends with teenage boys who seem incapable of looking after themselves. We thought you were dying of multiple organ failure or that your phone and three of your fingers were chomped off by a shark mid-text. My bad.
I have *only* had this problem with guys. Girls are very reliable. The majority of them hate my guts and would only call to try and curse me to Hades.
I guess the major problem is that most of my guyfriends have been - to my eye - somewhat attractive, and so when they piss you off you get the same reaction when your dog has just raided your bin all over your sheets and is sitting in the middle of the snotty tissues and chicken bone catastrophe with big glistening puppy eyes. Part of you just wants to rip them from limb to limb but in reality you go OH MY GOD I HATE...GAH I GIVE UP YOU'RE SO CUTE...
***Disclaimer: I'm in one of those times when I'm watching standup on YouTube and trying to do homework at the same time, I'm very hungry and I'm about to laugh and burst into tears at the same time. I am not usually like this. Stay away unless you have sufficiently satisfactory peace offerings.***
Rational Epilogue:
I love my guyfriends. I have had good memories with each and every one of them - I was just picking out a few examples of assholery for my own entertainment. I just really enjoy male company - and do not take that the wrong way. I've never had a boyfriend and I don't have a brother so trust me, I'd be a *total* nun if I didn't have my guyfriends - so I guess you could kind of blame them (or, well, one of them) for corrupting me, but innocence to experience has to happen somehow. I just know that I can be quite entertaining when I'm pissed (I get trolled all the time. I guess there's nothing funnier than a bright red 5'3" Asian with steam coming out of her Dumbo ears) so I wondered how PMS might translate onto my blog.
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