Don't look at me.

I came to a coffee shop because I need to focus but then two Really Loud women sat down next to me, but I don’t mind.

They’re sitting within arms reach - so close I could easily touch them - but I didn’t look up when they sat down so I don’t know what they look like. Not looking up at theses two women is one of my greatest regrets.

“Well she’s having a lot of luck lately.” says the woman closest to me. Close enough for a very loose hug, even, the kind of hug you might give someone at the gym.

“What she does now is go to ComicCon and cosplay conventions and gives out stacks of cards that say I saw you looking at me, and that’s not ok, I’m a person.”

“That. Is. So. Great.” her friend exhales slowly.

“Right? It can be hard to say out loud but people need to know, that even though we look this way, the way we look, it’s not ok to look at us."

I have never wanted to look at two people more.

I wonder if I look up at them if they will notice. And if they notice, will they give me a card.

“That’s so empowering. And important, because looking is harassment. The occult circle in Seattle had harassment problems years ago and it was terrible. It ripped the witchcraft community apart.

As they paused for a moment of silence for the Seattle witchcraft community I looked at them quickly and they look like every other person I've ever seen in my life.

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Don't touch my sports bras.

I wish there were two laundry machines in our building.

If I had two laundry machines in my building I could do loads of laundry at once, or do laundry with a friend, or cut a large area rug in half and put one side in each machine. 

Last week I put laundry in the washer, and came back an hour later (not very long!) and someone had put half my wet laundry in my laundry bag and spread the other half over the top of the dryer. I don't know what your worst nightmare is but that is mine. 

I moved my laundry to the dryer and spent thirty minutes panicking before I went down to retrieve it, hoping to avoid whoever touched it and BAD NEWS. The person who had moved every sports bra I own was standing right there in the storage-facility-locker-sized room with me. It was the mean guy who likes computers. The mean guy who likes computers is usually sitting on our porch with a computer looking mean and busy.

"Oh, moving them was no problem at all," said the formerly-mean and now weirdly-nice guy who likes computers.  "The only reason I moved them is I was going to dry them for you, but then I realized maybe you wanted some of it to air dry, so I stopped moving them to the dryer and put the rest in the bag."

I said something friendly as I calculated how many seconds it would take me to get out of the laundry room.

Our laundry room has a cool feature where the cement floor dips down in a spot right in front of the dryer, so all this gross brown water pools on the floor just sitting and festering and if your hands are shaking because your neighbor is intently watching you pick up socks it’s the exact perfect place to drop each clean sock until none of them are clean at all anymore. 

"There’s no way those are dry enough already," said the nice guy who likes computers.

“Well, yeah, well, somehow, somehow they are.” I said eloquently and casually, as a wet pair of jeans hit the bottom of my laundry bag and made that loud sound soaking wet jeans make.

If I were in a Meg Ryan movie I would have probably thirteen more terrible interactions with this guy before we would fall in love just in time for the end credits and then hopefully I would meet Nora Ephron on set and we'd become friends forever.

I'm not sure what movie I'm actually in, but it's the sort where I dry my laundry on my bed, sleep on a damp mattress for two nights, and completely re-arrange my schedule so I never see this person again. But it's also a movie where even my neighbors that seem mean offer to dry my laundry for me for no reason. And my socks don't smell that bad even though I dropped them in brown water. And one of my other neighbors has a cat with thumbs.

It's not a movie I'd pay to see, but if it's on Netflix it's worth checking out.

Why Being a Girl is Fine.

Here are the facts. Girls aren’t very strong or very fast and they seem scientifically worse at throwing things. No matter how many cross-fit classes I go to or push-ups I make myself do in the morning, that random homeless man who hasn’t been to the gym in ever is still going to have no problem beating me up.

We don’t make Wikipedia articles and we don’t make very much money. We have babies, and we have to sit down to pee, and if life wasn’t bad enough we have to have ten years more of it than boys. I can’t open water bottles by myself.

Being a boy seems so much better than being a girl that if I had gotten to choose, I would have chosen boy a hundred times. Unless, right when it was time to choose they handed out paper and pencils to everyone and then Leandra Medine came and sat by me and was like “Hey I’m putting down girl” and I was like “ME TOO LEANDRA MEDINE. Anything you do I’ll also do.”

I like that scenario because I meet Leandra Medine in it. And she sort of thinks I’m cool, right? I mean, she sits by me. We’re sort of friends in that scenario?

Anyway, I’ve made a few bad decisions but here is the good news: a list of Reasons Being a Girl is Fine.

Girls can interact with strange children.

I can walk up to anyone’s child anywhere and start talking to them, and the kid probably won’t be scared, and their parents won’t either. When boys do this everyone gets in trouble. I’m not saying I want to do this, but I can. If this doesn’t impress you, you won’t love the rest of this list.

I’m pretty sure we don’t sweat as much.

I’m not going to do any research on this, but it seems like we do. Sweat seems mostly bad. It seems a little good, so we sweat a little, but that’s all we need. Which is great news because girl deodorant always contains glitter or mango and is named after gentle birds or whispering. Win win, girls.

I'm not sure what this is for but it's called "truth or pear" and it's definitely not for sweat.

Girls can like anything.

Girls can say “Oh man growing up I was such a tomboy, I loved Legos and I was super into sports” and people think “This is a really cool girl.” Boys can say “Oh, I was obsessed with soap operas and dieting to give myself better skin” and, in a few years or maybe a few months it will be totally cool but society is a little behind right now. Right now girls are the ones who can like anything. Ok that’s a lame reason. But what about clothes, girls can wear boy clothes if they want. Girls have twice the clothing options. I’m trying to pad this list a bit.

We don’t go bald.

If I had to lie awake an hour worrying about balding for every hour I lie awake wording about gingivitis and osteoporosis I would never get any sleep.

Better odds of beating a shark.

Made that one up.

Lotions are ours.

You know how when you hear about to International Women’s Day and you think “cool!” and then you think “wait, does that mean all the other 364+ days are International Men’s Day?” Well, they are, but don’t worry about it, just go to the pharmacy and go to the lotion aisle: eighty different kinds of lotion and maybe three are especially for men. All the rest are ours, girls. It’s like a moisturizing version of that scene in Lion King. Sometimes I worry for a second that I have velvet instead of skin. (Three out of four people didn’t understand this sentence so I’m breaking it down: my skin is velvety soft.)

First dibs out of burning ships and buildings.

This has never come in handy before but it’s a nice-to-have.

Being a girl seems to get more fine every day.

Just 50 years ago we weren’t allowed to wear pants, and 500 years ago we were livestock. Show me a horse that’s in the senate, I’d love to see it, but until you do, I’m going to say girls have getting better best. By the time you get to the end of this list it will be more fine to be a girl than when you started. By the year 3000 it’s going to be insane. And, like I already complained about at the beginning, we live a really long time so we’ll get to hang out in more of it.

How do you afford your rock and roll lifestyle

I love when my apartment is clean but I don't mind it when it's messy and I can explain why in one word: squalor.

Doesn't the word "squalor" sound fancy? Like cool expensive dirty clothes mixed around on the floor with discarded feathers of exotic animals? Like buying a new apartment because you forgot your old address? Like not knowing if that's flakes of cereal in the bottom of your purse of flakes of gold? (It's flakes of cereal.)

I can read the actual definition of squalor thousand times and I still think it sounds like the fanciest thing I've ever heard.

I'm glowing

Once I read an article about a grandmother who lived to 100 and always had amazing skin, and her secret was that whenever she woke up in the middle of the night she’d re-apply her face lotion. 

Lately I’ve been having these insane nightmares that I’m locked in room watching a man eat off his own arms and then lick the bones, and I wake up every few hours screaming and screaming. Every time I wake up I re-apply Neutrogena Healthy Skin with quivering hands and soon I’ll be the most beautiful person in the world.