girl dates

I've been thinking about how important female friends are lately, pretty much since my best friend left the country last week. Now I don't know how much this will apply to any male readers I may have (i.e. my brother, if he ever bothers to check whether I'm posting), except perhaps in a voyeuristic kind of fashion (again, my brother. Sick bastard that he is), but I'm going to talk briefly (if I am indeed capable of that, which is highly unlikely, and there's NO WAY I'll manage it without parentheses* or having imaginary conversations**) about girl dates.


The great thing about girl dates - at least the kind I go on - is that they can involve pretty much anything. Dinner, movies, ice cream (well I think that's pretty much mandatory, or at least it should be), museums, brunch, coffee, book shopping, live music, shoe shopping...

Okay, that's pretty much mandatory too, even if there are no shoe shops around or the shops are closed. There's always window shopping or my personal favourite, pointing out other girl's shoes.

*just loud enough for her to overhear*Oh-my-God they're SOO cute - look at how they go with her coat! I wonder where she got them? Would it be rude to ask?

*whispered urgently*Oh-my-God check out Skanky-McGrandma over there! Orthopodic toe cleavage is just too much. Promise me you'll shoot me if I ever wear anything half as Irene as that!

Of course you immediately switch into Teen-Speak (i.e. a pseudo-American accent) whenever you discuss random people's footwear.

My favourite girl date friend at present, a fellow librarian and super sexy Irish babe to boot, is, I think, an old hat at girl dates. She's the person who introduced me to the term, though I've actually been having them since I was quite young.

My best friend and I used to go steady when we were preteens, teens, and even into our early twenties - we had our regular Saturday day date Saturday nights were reserved for sleepovers, either of the innocent hair competition variety when we were young, or the not-so-innocent boyfriend variety when we were a bit less young every week if I recall correctly, probably for close to ten years, possibly longer. Certainly it got less set in stone as new commitments - study, new girl date friends, possibly even boyfriends - came on the scene, but we kept up that tradition for a very long time, and I remember it clearly starting in about grade five, it might have been six, when we were allowed finally!! After being treated like children for so long!!! to go to the shopping centre by ourselves.

Oh the fun we had! The hot chips we ate! The vinegar that got SQUIRTED ALL OVER MY FAVOURITE OVERSIZED BLUE yes there was a time when I didn't think blue was the colour of blah itself T-SHIRT!!! The oversized tacky matching-but-opposite black and white speckled geometric earrings we bought from that stand that now rotates as a shoe sale or calendar stall depending on the time of year! Yes Sherlock it WAS the 80s, though the very end, and most of our girl dating years were in the 90s so lots of hair bands gave way to big fringes gave way to that most hideous of crimes the undercut (though neither of us ever got one a short-term-girl-date stand-in got one to supplement her eating disorder... little wonder that budding relationship didn't last), gave way Brenda Bangs (or really a Brenda fringe in our language, but I just can't pass up good bad alliteration) to the Claudia Schiffer bed head look gave way to... um I don't actually know, I think I got less keen on looking like everyone else around that time.

Anyhoo, my best mate and I have always been most into shopping for our girl dates. Something I noticed recently is that she sometimes seems to react to situations that involve having both sexes involved - brunch with the group of friends who have just been to dinner and drinks the night before, will probably be going to have a beer in the pub later on together - by suddenly ducking into a shop with a quick I'll catch up with you guys in a bit, okay? Hey, TravellingLibrarian, come with me for a sec and suddenly we're back in the girl date zone, pointing out shoes or tops or even DVDs that would suit the other but would totally not work on me, so you should try it on! No seriously! It's not my colour and I could never pull off something with that small a waist, I'll take the boob top you're holding onto coz sweetie, much as I love you we both know there's no way you'll be filling that up anytime soon. Maybe when you're preggers, but... hang on, is there something I should know?

See, one of the great things about girl dates is the freedom they provide - that is, the freedom from men - to talk about absolutely anything. The great thing about platonic girl dates - you had figured out I meant platonic by now hadn't you? Coz if not, seriously get a grip a hold control of yourself there buddy - is that they're like a return to childhood, of sorts. Where you talked about everything you could think of - sure, at a certain point that was mostly reserved to clothes, boys, Christian Slater, 90210, and how one day hair dancing would take over the world okay maybe that was just me. But as we grow older we talk about more weighty issues. Fashion, slightly older boys, Johnny Depp, Desperate Housewives... and career choices, whether we will buy a house or more likely unit on our own, or contemplate having children on our own. Whether we'll adopt if we manage not to conceive, or even if we can conceive because we believe in giving children a loving family, no matter what their genetics. What we believe in, what we're afraid of, what we want from and what we want to give back to the world. What we'd give up for love. Things that I wouldn't think of discussing in a public forum so you'll just have to use your imagination or your experience, coz if you're still reading this I'm guessing you're a girl who has girl dates too.

Since sleepovers are now reserved for boys, a lot of the time we spend socialising is in mixed company, and we do a different kind of growth in those environments, and within those relationships. The growth we experience by talking with our girlfriends - and the fun we have too of course! - is one of the most important things, I think anyway, about being a grown-up girl, or as some people like to refer to us as, women.

So when a friendship like that changes, either by distance, a disagreement, someone getting married or becoming a mum, or by the natural growing apart that occurs in many relationships while others of course make up for that loss by becoming closer, it can make you feel like your world is slowly crumbling, or at least like there are some serious cracks that aren't going to be easily or at least not in the long term filled by pretty, shiny shoes. And by a return to childhood I don't mean a return to immaturity. I mean a return to the kind of growth we experienced in our childhood - or maybe more accurately in adolescence.

That quick, intense growth spurt that was insanely confusing, extremely hard and ultimately helped make us into the people we are today, that energy is what I feel when I'm with a close - or becoming close to a new - female friend, on a girl date. But the great thing about having girl dates as a grown up is that you can use that energy - channel it even, to make this post sound even more Oprah-esque - into more than finding the perfect pair of boots as important and futile a search as that is. You can use it to help make yourself the perfect you.

I totally didn't start writing this post thinking it would go here, but now it has it's led naturally to me thanking the women who have helped make me who I am today. Being a travelling librarian is not actually about travelling, or the traditional kind of travelling, as in seeing different places, for me. As I've mentioned before, I'm not a very good tourist. Being a travelling librarian is about never giving up on the search, never giving up on the joy, never giving up on the curiosity about who I am becoming. Who is this person TravellingLibrarian, and how can I make her more of herself? Whether that's through experiencing different cultures or fitting more comfortably into my own culture, through seeing the beauty of the natural world, or the beauty of man-made things... however or through whatever means feel right to me at the time, so that when the light bulb inside me is ready to be switched on, I've got enough power inside to keep it shining for a very long time.

Thank you to all my female friends, those I have loved, do love, and will love in the future. You help to make me who I am. And if one of you doesn't introduce me to my perfect man at a dinner party someday, I'll have to figure out how to find that switch myself. But I imagine I'll need a lot of girl dates in order to figure out how.

Librarian Out.

*I replaced all of my parentheses with pink text. Much less confusing.

**Except when the pink text is in italics. Then it stands for speech.

Well, I can't have a readership who can't think on their feet now can I? I love breaking grammar, but in a fun pseudo-intellectual and definitely sleep-deprived kind of way. And only because I respect is so much.

Pink Librarian Out.