A pinch and a punch

A pinch and a punch for the first day of the month, my friends.

Geeez. i'm glad i got that childish behaviour over and done with for another month. Ahah!!! nobody came back with, "a hit and a kick for being so quick..." did they?

Or perhaps you did. But because i'm in blog land, you can't possibly kick me as hard with your school shoes as i used to do to any boy who dared to pinch and punch me in grade 2! That said, i didn't really need a reason to kick them. Or hit them. But kicking was my favoured method of inflicting pain on the scoundrels.

Up until the end of grade 3, i was at a co-ed school. I have only recently seen the wisdom my parents showed by putting me into an all girls school after this, as much as i disliked it towards the end... (9 years in an all-girls school is a VERY long time...). For I was somewhat of a tomboy (please don't fall off your chairs in shock at this admission...). Whilst i was a tomboy, it was really only because i was taller, stronger, faster and smarter than almost all of the boys.** Not really being the wallflower-type, i felt the need to show off my talents at every chance I got: "little-lunch" and "big lunch."

Kiss chasy was my favourite game. Not because i liked kissing, or even being kissed, but because when someone else was it, i would let them catch me, and then run away before they got the chance to kiss me... thus i was It, but didn't have to endure the childish peck on the check. However, once i was It, the real fun began. I would catch the boys (remember the faster and stronger bit...) and promptly give them a quick kick in the shins; much more fun than kissing back then, let me assure you!

Now i think these few years in the school yard set the tone for pretty much the rest of my life... playing with boys was just more fun. And it still is. Many of my friends are boys, almost all of my very very close friends are boys, and i generally get along better with boys in general... This creates a couple of issues:

-First: whilst i do like to be considered "one of the boys,"I don't actually want to be treated like a boy ALL the time. I'm sure that sometimes the boys i spend time with forget that i actually AM a girl...

-secondly: when i meet new girls, especially girly girls, i don't quite know how to act around them. Sometimes i just downright feel like they're going to steal my boys away from me... I guess this is because this does happen. Not that it's stealing... because they're not mine... but slowly these boys disappear off the radar... they spend more time with their girlfriends, less time with their friends, especially their friends who are girls...

To me, this raises the "can girls and guys ever really be truly close friends" flag. I find myself fervently hope they can, because otherwise my true friends-list is shortened considerably. But many girlfriends are, by nature, suspicious or jealous of their boyfriends' friendships with girls... especially very close friendships. So where does this leave us girl-friends?

Don't get me wrong... i love most of my guy-friends girlfriends... it's the ones i don't know yet I worry about.... and i wonder what's going to happen when all my friends are grown up and married...


**please note that i was not the MOST tomboyish girl in the grade, one of the girls actually may as well have been a boy. She played cricket, and brought her own cricket bat to school. I at least still played on the monkey bars.