GIRLS

You strap on those high heels, feeling like one hot female. That feeling quickly dissipates as regret crashes down with that first wobbly step. As each step after brings an increasing pain in your heel, and as the pain intensifies it manifests into one heck of a blister that remains for weeks; ladies, I hope it was worth it.

It was a long day, face it. The last thing you want to do is drag your body into the bathroom and begin the meticulous twenty-step process of taking off your makeup, washing your face, moisturizing, brushing your teeth, etc. So you waltz yourself into your room, fall onto the bed, laziness taking over your nightly routine… and then the next morning happens. You know what I’m talking about. The zombie apocalypse has arrived in the form of this teenage girl.

The dreaded part of your day has come: Physical Education. You panic as you realize you forgot a sports bra. Crap, crap, crap! What do you do?? It’s the mile; you can’t run without one! You want to cry as you realize, yes, I am going to have to run the mile without one. You accept your fate: a mile of holding your arms around your chest, your own body becoming your protection.

Summer is here, and you forlornly look at the leg hair you have to painstakingly shave off. You don’t want to accept this task, but it must be done. There is no choice. You pick up the razor and accept the fact that this is your life now for the next six to nine months.

You decide you want to look nice today, so you enthusiastically grab that straightener and twenty minutes later, bam! You have yourself a beauty. You walk outside and your enthusiasm is quickly lost as the rain causes your still-warm hair to poof and frizz. You begrudgingly put it up.

It’s warm out. Skies out, thighs out right? So you go girl, put on that skirt and cute cropped shirt. You get to school and sit at your desk, feeling good. The heat escalades, becomes too much, and yep, the boob-sweat has arrived. You send out a “WHY??” to the universe as you regret that cropped shirt. You try to move in your chair to air out, but nope. Your thighs stick to the chair – stupid skirt. So you remain sitting completely still, not an inch of you moving in fear of sweating more, and tell your sweat glands to cut it out.

Guys know it happens. But do they really understand? Understand what would cause a girl to curl into a ball until a cramp passes? Or always keep a stash of Ibuprofen with them? Do they know what it’s like to have no control over your own emotions? The period grumps are real, fellas, and you’re not allowed to laugh. And if we’re having a bad day, you can’t assume, “oh, it’s that time of the month for her.” It is possible that we’re actually having a bad day. So lay off kapeesh? Kaposh.

BOYS

Any and every chair, no matter how comfortable, holds the capability to ruin a man’s sitting experience. If you’ve ever seen two magnets of identical charge repel each other, you’ve seen an accurate representation of how a chair reacts with a man’s boxers. One can never get them to be perfectly aligned; the basic laws of science do not allow it.

It could be breadsticks at Red Robin, or it could be foie gras at Cavern on the Green. It could be a two-dollar movie, or Book of Mormon on Broadway, but the bill always seems to drift towards his end of the table. He always does it with a smile, and may say that he doesn’t mind, but after a while four dollars adds up.  In the world of relationships, I suppose ‘splitting the check’ is a foreign concept.

While many women disapprove of unwanted attention, specifically the sexual harassment one woman may face from walking on a random street, many good-looking men walk down random streets yearning for those unusual comments. Women may call them disgusting, but if men received random/creepy compliments from women out in public, we would call them pleasant surprises.

After finally gathering enough courage to ask her out, he is now presented with the possibility of utter failure and humiliation if he makes one misstep. He now lies within the crucial, first impression phase, and the girl (along with all of her interested friends) expects every guy to be a Casanova with the English language. He did his best and flirted a little, but often couldn’t land in the sweet spot between cute/flirty and creepy/eww.

Boy likes girl. Girl likes boy. What does the girl do? If the time is not within the roughly 5% of the year dedicated to MORP, she waits at home for her knight to send a text in shining armor. The two people could be as in love as Romeo & Juliet, or Kim & Kanyé, but he must initiate the conversation. If he doesn’t, the relationship has no chance of ever happening.

Now he and she are going steady. They went to Homecoming with each other and had a picnic or two, but now she wants the relationship to be ‘defined’. What does that even mean? He’s gotten this far, no use in stopping now. He sits her down and talks for a while about his feelings. Apparently he stepped over some invisible line that she made in her head because she feels uncomfortable and needs a break. A struggle in itself is the pure understanding of females.

Media helps to confirm stereotypes about what men and women consume. There are gender-neutral drinks like water, orange juice, and Carnation Breakfast Essentials. Then there’s Mountain Dew and Pepsi, which tend to be viewed as drinks for ‘guys’, and the typically ‘girly’ drinks like Shirley Temples. In order to avoid getting questionable looks from restaurant patrons, men are forced to stick to the Coco-Colas and Root Beers, but what is the problem with enjoying the refreshing fruity taste of a Shirley Temple? Because, let’s face it, Roy Rogers isn’t a good name for a drink.