One of the good things about going on a trip with your girlfriends, is that you never have to be the only one that attempts to care for others.
(Well, of course, there are obvious gender biased stereotypes here when I make such statement. Nevertheless, as an interdependent post-modern feminist female, I still enjoy very much the allure of mutual care, the lovely attention we often got during our strolling, the random strangers' flings and winks, free appetizers and drinks--those were the benefit when you travel with four beautiful girls. (how self-flattering!))
Anyways, four girls with whom I'm traveling all have obtained or are obtaining a PhD. Most of us are sharks at our jobs. Many of us have several publications, at least one or two pieces in some famous journals. We all teach at the college level and conduct several research in different fields at once. We all have friends all over the world, and never forget to party when the right moment comes.
So you must wonder what exactly do four highly educated girls do on their trip (other than those free drinks and irresistible attention I mentioned earlier, could it be really boring because we were all geeks?). Exactly the opposite! We actually did something cool--we went to a tennis match in Rome, hit all the most famous touristy spots all over each city (by foot), ate a lot of yummy European pastries, shared gelato daily, got souvenirs for our loved ones and bargained, climbed the mountains, walked the steps onto the top of Pisa towers, had Parisian meals that took four hours, always had a self-care session for face, feet, and body in the end of the day, and to confirm a stereotype that I feel most ambivalence about, four Asian girls were taking lots of pictures!!!!!
My dear friend J has an advanced single-lens camera that she carried around all the long--she alone took 2000 pictures (that equals to 9 GB of storage room). Well, the rest of us were not so advanced in our photography skills, but each of us had a most mundane digital camera, as most modern women do (lol), so there were a lot of pictures! My very conservative estimates regarding the total size of our pictures, is close to about 15 GB altogether.
Reviewing all the pictures was such a bitch--tell me about it. But I had a sparking discovery while I was trying to go through them last night--that is, my girl friends are all beautiful, beautiful ladies in those pictures that took hours and many stops to conduct, pose, and compose (well, a post-modern feminist theorist would talk about performance here). We dressed in fine attires, not professionally as we were required to at our jobs, during those moments of freedom to self-expression. Those were some beautiful and confident ladies!
And so was I, surprisingly to my 18-year-old eyes. I recognized the most feminine axis of myself among those flashlights, dresses, scarfs, romance, tranquility, and enchantment--one that I would have not realized almost ten years ago when I was beginning to become a woman. But what does that mean?
I used to fantasize having a life of a man, with rationality, complete independence, full control, stunning confidence, inestimable knowledge, and untouchable power, like a real shark. Indeed, I was once a shark, when I worked on my projects, when I gave lectures, when I listened to suffering souls, when I wrote with assertive voices, when I needed to hide my fear and tenderness in order to succeed.
I was once a shark.
And in my imagination, all of my girlfriends are at different stage of their life developmental path, in between a shark and a doll.
The question is, can you be a shark and a doll at the same time?
Can you be a shark and a doll at the same time?
06/03/2012, after returning to P-town (in the US) from Paris.
