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Work was a little slow on Monday night and I was getting tired of ripping on Big Jack, one of the other servers at the restaurant, for his backward taste in men and for not being as funny as me (this is my new favorite argument, by the way. I say something ridiculous like, “An extremely high percentage of my jokes are funny,” or “People think I have really good taste in music,” and whomever I’m talking to always goes ballistic. It’s a fun way to pass the time.) So we started discussing whether or not we would want to be a woman for a week. Big Jack says no way. I say absolutely way.
But there would have to be some ground rules because I wouldn’t want to be just any woman for a week. Like if I woke up on Monday as a female, but I was that lady from France who got her face bit off by a dog and had to have a face transplant from a dead guy, I would not be happy.
So here are the ground rules:
Borat says that the Order of Importance is as follows: God, man, horse, dog, woman, then rat, then small krutzouli. I do not agree with this. I believe women are more important than horses and dogs, and they’re probably just as important as men, if not more so. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. But I think Borat left out a key distinction. There are two kinds of women: attractive and unattractive. And there are two kinds of men: rich and not rich. So my order of importance looks like this: God, rich man and attractive woman (tie), not rich man, unattractive woman, horse, dog, woman, then rat, then small krutzouli, which is probably a type of fish that lives in ponds and snacks on rusty mufflers.
I wish the order of importance were reversed. At least the top part. Believe me. I would rank higher. But unfortunately, I have no control over how society determines importance, so we’re stuck with a world where attractive women are treated very differently than unattractive women, and I’d rather be in the former category.
Oh, I get it. You’d rather be in attractive women.
What?
You know what I’m talking about.
No, I don’t.
Yeah, you do. You know that joke where the Jewish guy asks the girl if she has any Jew in her and she says no, so he’s like, “Well, would you like to?” That’s you.
Oh, come on. Grow up.
Here’s how the metamorphosis will work: On Monday, I will open my eyes in an apartment that is not my own. The apartment will be in Boston, and it will obviously be a girl’s because it has retro French posters on the wall and everything smells like a Bath & Body Works.
Meanwhile, Adam White will continue to exist, but he will be on autopilot. He will be a robot, but nobody will know. He will continue to go to work, go home, watch TV with Dods, and make jokes that are funny 92% of the time. When the week is over, I will re-inhabit his body, but I will have no memory of his week. I will retain only the memory of my week as a woman, including (hopefully) good sex with the robot. If the sex isn’t good, we will know that the robot was programmed incorrectly.
Why am I making this ground rule? To diffuse the following question:
Dude. If you want to be a woman for a week and have sex with guys, you must be gay.
Wrong. I only want to have sex with myself, which is something I already do.
To be fair to women, this is probably something I should have to experience, and maybe I would agree to endure one cycle of menstroids if I had an entire month as a woman. But I’m only doing this for a week. And I’ll be damned if I’m spending half that time figuring out where the tampon goes.
With those ground rules in mind, I will now go through one week as a woman, keeping a journal throughout (because all girls keep pink leather-bound journals, and on even days they write about how much they love their boyfriend, and on odd days they write about how much they hate their boyfriend). And if you think I’m not listening to “Suddenly I See” by KT Tunstall from the Devil Wears Prada soundtrack while I write this, you’re further off-target than a deaf bat.
Um, you’re probably not going to believe this, but I woke up as a woman this morning.
I immediately took a shower and experimented with my new body parts. It was awesome. But it turns out the clitoris is about one inch higher than I previously thought. Also, a lot of the things I thought would feel good actually feel like invasive surgery without anesthetic.
Some problems I ran into today:
1. How are you supposed to put a bra on without help? The clip is in back. It doesn’t make any sense. Would you make a pair of pants with the fly where your ass is? Getting my bra on took a half an hour, and I’m pretty sure it’s inside out now, because the lacy side is scratching my skin, but screw it.
2. There are roughly forty-seven facial products in my bathroom. Do I use all of them every day, or is there a rotating schedule? I tried to put on makeup, but I ended up looking like a clown that walked through a carwash, so I decided to go sans face paint for the day.
3. For the first time in my life, I understand why women take so long to get ready. I have probably fifty articles of clothing in my closet that would be classified as “tops.” I have around forty “bottoms.” And thirty pairs of shoes. So that makes 50 x 40 x 30 = 60,000 possible combinations. If you had to sort through 60,000 potential outfits, it would take you a long time, too. I finally chose jeans, a sweater, and flip-flops because it seemed the easiest. But it wasn’t the easiest because the jeans were so tight. I fell over eight times trying to get them on, and I had to do a pushup into a standing position every time, which made me tired because I don’t really have pushup muscles.
I wish I could get my roommate’s opinion, but I don’t know her name.
Apparently I work as a consultant because my boss called me yesterday and asked me why I was late and I said “Because I can’t get my pants on,” which was kind of true, but not really, because if I had known that I was supposed to be dressing for work, I wouldn’t have been trying to apply jeans to my legs.
This should be a new ground rule, by the way: I don’t have to work during my week as a woman.
But work I did, and it was okay even though I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. Oh, and one really annoying thing about the office is that any time I try to be assertive, a guy invariably makes a sound like an angry cat and pretends to paw the air. There’s also this guy, Bill, who asked me why I would want to work hard when I was obviously just going to get pregnant and quit in the next few years. He said I should concentrate more on finding a husband and less on finding a promotion. For the first time in my life I felt like slapping, not punching, a man in the face.
Guys keep staring at me. I don’t know how to feel about this. It’s a little bit creepy, but also reassuring, like every time they look at me, it’s a reminder that I’m still hot. I guess the problem is that I only want the cute guys to undress me with their eyes, but at the same time, if they do that, they’re probably a jerk, and I wish their eyes would fall out. It’s confusing.
Tonight I went to the bar where Adam White bartends and introduced myself. I had to sit there for like a half hour while he made the lamest jokes ever. I’d say 15% of them were funny, and I’m using the word funny liberally. I kept waiting for him to ask me out, but he never did, I guess because he was nervous or because he thinks it’s unprofessional to ask out guests or because he’s a queer. Maybe they really did program the robot incorrectly. I finally asked him out. What a lame-ass.
Then I went home and my roommate convinced me to strip down to my underwear, pillow fight, and make out with her. Apparently this activity is super commonplace amongst female roommates. Apparently I use super as an adverb now.
- Went out with roommate.
- Walking in heels was tough and my ankles started bleeding but I looked awesome so who cares.
- Okay, guess what – I’m totally obsessed with drinks that are fluorescent and have palm trees coming out of them!
- Guys kept buying me drinks, which was nice, but I felt obligated to talk to them – the guys, not the drinks – which was not nice.
- I got really drunk after three drinks. I realized this in retrospect after my eighth drink.
- I had to go outside the bar and cry for a half hour while my roommate rubbed my back and told me that I was super awesome. I know what you’re thinking – that I didn’t know why I was crying. But I did know why I was crying. I was crying because I was insecure, so shut up. But I don’t know why I was insecure.
- Then a fight spilled out of the bar and onto the sidewalk. It was between a bouncer and a patron. The bouncer had the patron in a headlock, but then the patron picked up a trashcan full of dirt and cigarette butts and tried to pour it on the bouncer’s head. The fight wasn’t really that entertaining, but it made me feel better because at least I’m not a guy.
Tonight Adam took me to a movie. He made me pay, and when the kid behind the ticket counter asked him if he had a student ID so he could get a discount, Adam actually said yes even though he graduated college two years ago! Apparently this is the only reason he holds on to his student ID. Adam asked me if I had an ID and I said, “Obviously not,” and he said, “Sucks for you.”
After the movie we went back to his place, which is decorated like the room of a twelve-year-old boy obsessed with Batman, specifically those Batman comics that exhibit overt sexual tension between Bruce and Robin.
I will not tell you what happened that night (unless you’re one of my seventeen best girlfriends), but I will tell you that I felt like a slut afterward.
If I’ve learned anything this week it’s that guys are cheap idiots who are only funny 15% of the time and sometimes you should just ignore them and put on a pair of sweatpants and watch the entire first season of Grey’s Anatomy while eating pizza on a Sunday. And, I’ve also learned where my clitoris is.
So I guess you could say that my week as a woman was super educational.
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