Collegiate Times

Cartoon for he said, she said

HE SAID

T

he strangest thing happened the other day: I woke up as a girl.

The bedroom’s dainty lavender aroma was my first tip-off that something was amiss. That night I had fallen asleep to “SportsCenter” in the man-castle, Firehouse Pizza box on my lap and empty two-liter nestled near my feet. 

There were plenty of smells I’d expect to wake up to the next morning and none of them could be described as flowery.

Something else was odd — my first class wasn’t until 9 a.m. Why would the alarm clock go off at 7:30 a.m.? Unless ... oh no. Was I waking up for the absurd female morning preparation ritual?

The thought of wasting sleep on something as trivial as straightening hair for a 200-person lecture class sent me jumping out of bed in a cold sweat, heart pounding as I took in the scene.

This room did not belong to a man. The absence of clothes on the floor, a neatly arranged collage of beach week pictures and “Grey’s
Anatomy” DVDs on the desk were dead giveaways that I was trapped in a strange, estrogen-fueled nightmare.

A glance down at the large flotation devices protruding from my chest confirmed these suspicions.

The initial shock gave way to an exciting realization: I was where no man had ever been. 

Wasting this opportunity to learn about the female existence would be an insult to millennia of men who spent their lives failing to understand these strange, heftily bosomed creatures.

In honor of my forefathers, I eschewed the hair straightening in favor of an extensive scientific evaluation of my new form, focusing specifically on the mammary glands. Satisfied with their buoyancy and ceaselessly entertaining physics, I decided to continue my first-hand look into the female college experience.

The first order of business was looking the part — my journey into girl world would quickly be derailed if I stood out like a Cowboys player in this season’s Pro Bowl.

Luckily my closet contained the official girl uniform: leggings and a sorority sweatshirt. Rocking my ZBZ pride and questionably appropriate skin-tight layer of fabric, I headed to the bus stop well aware of the irony of my discomfort at the leering eyes following my hips.

The reward for successfully navigating a sea of ogling engineers — and the camera phones of VTNoPants.com contributors — was a class period spent on Facebook. 

My research for last week’s column led me to conclude girls feel obligated to use the Internet to publicly prove their friendship — how else do you explain gratuitous posting between people who live with each other?

In one 50-minute marathon session, I wrote on seven walls, “liked” 15 statuses about the upcoming weekend and commented on the attractiveness of four profile pictures (even a homely one — clearly girl law had buried my snarky
outlook).

I was pretty pleased with myself until finding out that this is considered a slow Tuesday by female standards.

By the time classes were over, I was exhausted from the non-stop socializing. 

There was hardly a minute of down time between the constant inane texting (“miss you roomie,” “miss you more, snuggle when I get back”), Facebook chats and perky conversations with anyone and everyone.

To put it into perspective: My gregarious female instincts led me to induce extended Drillfield discussion with the high school classmate that everyone from my hometown avoids. It was actually more tolerable than expected; my chest did most of the heavy lifting.

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A version of this article appeared in the Oct 22 issue of the Collegiate Times.