... About Discovering I Used to Be a Girl After All!

I had a very productive morning, Reader. And by "very productive" I mean "not at all so." It started much the same as yesterday morning, and the day before that. Which were very much the same as the first few days of every month since I started this job - I've spent hours upon hours over the last three days sorting, stamping, stuffing, and stamping our monthly customer statements.

Well, this particular morning, I was getting pretty tired of sorting, stamping, stuffing, and stamping. So I took a quick mental break and checked my personal email account. That's when it all started. In my defense, the events that followed were simply a result of pure animal instinct. Reader, remember what happens if you give a mouse a cookie? Or give a moose a muffin?

Well, if Kristen is bored at work and her boss is gone, she'll probably check her email. If she checks her email, she'll probably notice that her inbox has 13 pages worth of old messages. If she notices that her inbox has 13 pages worth of messages, she'll probably go through and start deleting ones she doesn't want. If she deletes the ones she doesn't want, she'll probably find some of those funny forwards and want to read them to see if they're worth saving. If she reads funny forwards to see if they're worth saving, she'll probably move some of them to her "Tidbits" folder. If she moves them to her "Tidbits" folder, she'll probably realize she has a lot of stuff in there not worth saving (and/or too hard to find to justify saving) and will want to give it a thorough cleaning. If she realizes she has a lot of stuff in there and wants to give it a thorough cleaning, she'll probably end up getting distracted and reading through 5-year-old emails for the better part of an hour.

So basically, email is to muffin as Kristen is to ________

a) moose
b) moose
c) knitwear
d) moose

But despite the rather extensive waste of time, I actually learned something from reading all those old emails. Reader, you'll probably never believe it, but I used to be a girl. And not just in the most literal sense of the word (that part's still true, pardon the pun). I used to be so silly, so overwhelmingly twitterpaited, so irrational - in short, so FEMALE!

It was such a long time ago, and for the past few years I've managed to convince myself that it never happened. I'm not going to lie to you, Reader. Part of me felt a sense of pride that there was truth to all those times I've been told I'm "not like a real girl," but part of me always wondered how my life would be different if I were a bit more girlie.

But right there, stored in my email, unraveling itself from all the 0s and 1s, is the proof that I was once just about as ridiculously girlie as one can get. You see, there is a series of emails spanning from May 2003 to about September 2004 - emails I sent to my female friends, my male friends, my brother, my guidance counselor, and possibly the Prime Minister of Canada - in which I went on for paragraphs upon paragraphs about how aghast I was about boys! Five distinctly separate boys, as far as I can tell. Five boys! In just a year and a half!

And oh, how very pathetic and whimsical I was about these boys! In one particular email, I described in great detail to all the incredibly patient friends I sent it to a story about how I had called a boy using a phone card so he wouldn't recognize it was me on the Caller ID, just in case he wasn't home, hung up on him when he answered (because I didn't want to have to explain why I was calling with a phone card), and waited for two hours to call him back so he wouldn't suspect it had been me the first time.

See? GIRL! You can't possibly be a bigger girl than that!

So I was trying to figure out where it all changed. I know that this girliness was actually more of a phase than anything - Picasso had his Blue period, Sting had his Reggae period, I had my Girlishness period. I know this because of an email from a good friend during this time in which he asked what was wrong with me, and why I was acting like I was over a guy when he had never known me to behave like that before.

Let's be honest. It's not hard to figure out what put me on the path to girlishness (any fool who knew me in high school/freshman year of college knows that one). But what turned me away from it again? I've thought about that today, and I think maybe it's because when I think back to these five boys, I automatically think of the five different heartaches they left me with. It's hard for me to remember the happy giddy twittery feelings. In retrospect, all I can really remember is the hurt.

But now that I realize that, maybe I can use that knowledge to be a mite more proactive about letting myself open up again. Because even though it hurt then, it doesn't anymore, at least not in the same way. I no longer think of myself as 'scarred' by past crushes and loves - just changed. It's amazing how a simple thing like wasting time reading emails can give you a new sense of self.

You know what else I've realized? I could really go for a muffin right about now.