Ever since I have been 19, (I moved out of my mother’s house to go to college at 18 and sort of never moved back in permanently) I have had the WORST luck with dryers. Not washing machines. I’ve never had a washing machine act up on me (KNOCK ON WOOD!) it’s always been the effing dryers.

Let’s start with the avacado green dryer in the first place Jessie and I lived together. It incinerated our clothes. The thermostat on it was broken and it would heat up to surface-of-the-sun temperatures and literally melted and destroyed a lot of our clothes. Looking back on it, remembering the wilted and destroyed clothes, being burned and blistered by metal buttons and zippers is actually pretty hilarious. We were able to get the thing repaired and back in working order thankfully with the help of Jessie’s parents.

When we took over my mom’s house when she left to move in with her now husband, we discovered that the electrical work in that VERY old house was actually really scary and needed to be fixed. Somewhere in that endeavor, things got out of whack and the dryer stopped working because there wasn’t enough power going to it. Admittedly, this is not the fault of the dryer, but I still had to make a lot of trips to my in-laws and the laundromat to dry my clothes. Thank goodness we did not yet have children.

When we moved to Washington, our first apartment had a laundry closet containing a dryer that did not heat up. A quick call to maintenance and a later visit from a Whirlpool repair man eventually fixed the problem

When we left that small apartment and moved into the townhome in WA, guess what? That’s right, the dryer stopped working about a week after we moved in! This time, it took the maintenance crew and the Whirlpool repair man a bit longer to fix the problem but it did eventually get resolved.

Now to present day here in glorious Reading, PA. We bought this house containing a washer and dryer. While the washer works perfectly and simply had a cracked plastic knob, the timer on the dryer did not work and I had to manually turn off the dryer because it would just keep running. I put up with it being that way until the stupid thing stopped heating. Of course, this had to happen with two adults and two children who each go through more than one wardrobe change during the day. We called around and got estimates to have the thing repaired and were slightly horrified to find that the difference between the lowest and highest bids was quite sizable. If we bought a new dryer, it wasn’t going to be much more money than the highest bid to get the old one repaired. We got a new one.

Now I hold my breath every time I start this new dryer. I know it’s only a matter of time until the stupid thing dies on me too. What is it, do I have some sort of super power that scares dryers and they are so nervous being around me that they stop working?

No. I know what it is. I just figured it out. It’s the same thing that has the search terms to this site all messed up.

Every now and then, I will take my laundry downstairs in my pajamas and strip right then and there and throw the jammies in with the first load. The dryer saw my boobies. And before my children were born, I walked around my homes naked all the time. The dryers all saw my boobies. It was the boobies. That’s my super power.

Oh my God…..

Most of my life, I have always wondered where I fit in in the “girlie” spectrum. I’m not really a tom boy, nor am I a super pink-wearing girly-girl. A lot of my life has been spent being completely insecure about my place as a girl/woman. I envied those who were obviously a jock or a princess. They seemed to know themselves so much better than I knew myself. They seemed to have their identities figured out.

This personality I have now, this sense of confidence and self-knowledge comes from years of insecurity and self-loathing at not being what I thought I should be. I wasn’t just like my mother, nor was I just like a lot of the girls that everybody always complimented as being “pretty” and “girlie”. It took me a very long time to come to appreciate myself. The fact that I look nothing like models on magazine covers used to make me feel inferior but that is a fact now that I actually quite like about myself.

In place of manicured fingers, I have chewed cuticles and short fingernails at the ends of scarred and gnarly hands.

Instead of straight and shiny hair I have a mass of crazy, sometimes frizzy hair that has it’s own personality and I dare not tame it for fear of losing my “wild woman” look.

I’d rather mow my lawn than go shopping. Unless I’m shopping for kitchen supplies, that is.

I don’t like to watch movies that make me cry. I’d rather watch a movie about people getting mutilated by otherworldly creature than a movie about love and loss. Touchy-feely stuff makes me VERY uncomfortable.

I am terrible at sports. I have the coordination of a drunk person wearing clown shoes.

I have no amazing special talents that can wow people at parties.

I don’t like strange people touching me. Back in my dating days, this was a problem for some guys.

Pink. I don’t do it.

The thing is, as I got older, I started realizing that these features that I kept pitting myself against weren’t typical of a lot of people, not just me. I don’t think I know any one person who contains all of those qualities at once. I learned to stop trying to shove myself into a mold that was too small to hold me.

I realized that not only was I doing myself an injustice by holding myself up to these silly standards, I was also doing other girls/women an injustice by assuming they were singular creatures like that. I love that, as women, we are allowed to me multi-faceted. We can be great at sports but still have a love for wearing pink dresses and high heels. I love that we can cry our eyes out during a sad “chick flick” but then perform surgery on a human being and not get queasy at the blood and gore. I love that we can love and hate, be sweet and terrible, beautiful and vile all at once.

Assuming that we are all alike as the shallow creatures the media would have you believe we are….well, if you value your butt not being concave, I suggest you not assume that. “Girlie” means more than high heels and interior design. It means simply being a girl, however you identify with the term.