It's been two months of being the only woman on a ship full of men. I have five sisters. I understand women well. I love my female friends. I miss excessive chatting, spritzing new perfumes at Saks, seeing chick flicks, talking about guys, all that girlie stuff, I miss it more than I thought I would.
I'm not a prissy Barbie or anything. I can hang with the guys just as easily. My male co-workers on the boat were surprised at my skills as a wingman -- or should I say wingwoman -- in helping them pick up chicks at the bars. I like these guys and hang out with them even when we're not co-habitating and working together in tight quarters on the boat. They're cool.
However, lately I'm feeling oh-so-lonely for female comraderie. I have no one to girltalk with. All the yachts with female crew members have left for the season. My token non work-related friend here in the Hamptons is gay, which is kind of like haveing a girlfriend, but not quite.
Every time I'm watching one of my shows and leave the room, I come back to find the channel changed to sports. They burp. They fart when they think I'm not around, but it's such small quarters that I'm always around, and I will come down to the crew area and be like, "What the fuck is that revolting smell?" When I got an air freshener for the bathroom, which improves our living conditions one hundred percent, they complained that it's too "girlie smelling." Which it is not.
The guys grunt in monosyllabic man talk. But when I talk in what I consider a normal fashion, with descriptive adjectives and stories, they think I'm chatty. Don't they understand that women like to talk? It's in our XX chromosomal makeup. I have to always edit my thoughts now so I don't annoy them with "excessive information," which annoys me.
I threw away the shitty generic ugly green 99-cent Walgreens hand soap in the bathroom and replaced it with a nice fig-scented upscale brand, much to the chagrin of the guy I share the bathroom with. He was like, "Where's my antibacterial soap? I don't want to smell like a fig, woman!" So I set forth on a mission get him replacement soap, hopefully a manly one that smelled like rocks or sticks or dirt or horseshit.
And our shared stateroom is always a mess. Some of it's mine, but not that much!
Another thing I can't understand is how men can hold so much liquor. I cannot keep up with them, nor do I try. I always end up leaving the bar by midnight or one, having had quite enough in order to get up for work the next morning. Yet these guys will pound drinks until two, three, sometimes four in the morning.
The other night my roommate comes stumbling back to the boat in the dead of morning, trips on something on the bedroom floor, and in panic grabs the privacy curtain that encloses me in my coccoon of a bunkbed. Like a curtain is going to support his two hundred-plus drunken, falling-down pounds. I'm dead asleep, and all of a sudden there's this big CRASH as he faceplants onto the floor and the tension rod rips out of the wall! Startled awake -- and being a girl -- I scream like a little girl. Then I realize it's my roommate, who's like, "Sshhh, sorry! It's just me!" I see he is totally wasted, and I laugh at how funny this is. Then he proceeds to prop his elbows onto my bed and strike up what I can tell is going to be an animated, long-winded, detail-driven drunken conversation, his booze breath wafting in my direction. After a minute or two I was like, "Jesus and you guys give me shit for being talkative? Would you let me sleep? It's almost four in the morning!" And all of this, well he had no recollection of the next day.
Sometimes this stuff is funny. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. I like perfumes and powder puffs and scented exfoliating body scrubs -- so what? I want someone to notice that my freshly pedicured toenails have teeny little Swarovski crystal accents. I want someone to compliment me on my new earrings. I want someone to discuss in depth with me the romantic nuances taking place between Sookie and Bill the vampire on my current favorite show, True Blood.
I realize I will never get this kind of thing with three male co-worker/roommates/drinking buddies. Guess I gotta just get used to it. But will I ever want to watch sports on TV for hours and hours? Hell no.
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