Lacking the words

The kid who didn’t realise I am a guy briefly talked to me today. He seemed genuinely surprised that I am actually a man. Not a great boost to the old self-esteem there. Of course, its actually just funny that he seems to have difficulty recognising my…err…being a male.

Today has been quite a hazy day, feels a bit like a dream. Pretty crap really. Nothing really happened bad or anything it just feels sort of strange. Everything is pretty much on target otherwise, not much to report to the all seeing internet, although I do have the joy of “looking forward” to the may ball next Friday, no idea how that is going to go, I guess we’ll see.

As I already said on Friday I came to school dressed as a pirate. Now, of course there were no doubt loads of things said about me either to my face or behind my back and I don’t really care as to the nature of these comments or anything like that.  What it is that has kinda stood out to me is when I heard a kid refer to me as a “pirate woman”.  Firstly we should probably consider the irony of that statement coming from a pre pubescent squeaky boy with long hair. Err yeah. Perhaps with the costume on his poor little senses just got overloaded and he mistook me, in a male pirate costume, for a woman…in a male pirate costume? Mhhmmm… Perhaps the stranger part of this is that when he saw me again yesterday he said to his friend something about a pirate woman again. Now here is where I’ve got to start having doubts about what I shall now dub gender recognition. Really, I’ve not had people doubt my gender so obviously since I was little and also had shoulder length hair, which, to be fair, would probably throw people off. Back then I found it very hurtful but now its just odd.

If my slightly-in-need-of-a-shave facial hair wasn’t enough to point him in the right direction you would think my not particularly feminine clothes may have helped. Or maybe my quite broad build. Even though I can tell that this was generally quite stupid of him I can’t help feeling a slight blow to my masculinity. After all, I think most men don’t exactly like being mistaken for the opposite sex.  There isn’t really much of a conclusion to this, its just quite strange…and funny.

Well lets see, last Friday I went to school dressed as a pirate. Now, you must understand this is by no means a normal thing, it’s not normal for me to decide “why, today I think I’ll be a pirate”. No. In fact for me it was quite a big thing really, finally facing head on my self consciousness. I enjoyed it. Sure, there were maybe some things I could have done differently but unlike most things in my life I really don’t have any true regrets.

The response from people was really great, most people just said it was awesome (or some variant) with a few saying I looked stupid or whatever. I can happily say that I have no care for the opinion of the latter, I laughed at most of them actually. It’s a shame I don’t have any pictures of me in the costume, it was a really good one actually, unfortunately my camera decided to go missing so I couldn’t get any.  It’s a nice feeling, being able to laugh at people in that way.  When I was younger I didn’t have that, I couldn’t laugh at myself, not at all. I actually think it almost destroyed me, it wasn’t until I realised how this works (and that actually laughing at myself can be pretty funny) that I recovered out of the shithole I was in at the time. I don’t know who said it but I remember hearing at some point someone said “if you can’t laugh at yourself you really can’t laugh at anything”. So damn true.