Shock horror!

Another outfit post, how scary. Here you can see me breaking a promise I once made to myself, i.e. never to wear shorts. I really hated seeing girls in indie clubs wearing hot pants and leggins and heels, it was the most stupid thing I could think of. Really. But then I ran into these and they are so blue! Yippie! They're also easier to cycle with. It's not a pleasant experience to cycle past men who bend over to look up my skirt hoping to see my underwear. Urgh.
Hopefully I'll add some muscles to those stick legs now that cycling is an option again.

(There's a rant below this point, so I'd suggest you take a good book instead.)

That would be the perfect intro to write about the talk I had with Wencke today. We discussed girls who are behaving like dolls. I recoil whenever someone as much as mentions gender studies to me because I'm so bored with it, but working in a museum about technical stuff and having sexist friends really makes me consider my point of view again.
You see, I look really girly and fragile myself, so at first people tend to treat me like they don't take me seriously. It's a weird feeling to walk in a room wearing a dress and to just feel that everyone thinks you're nothing but a dressed-up doll with no brains. It makes it more satisfying to throw awesome presentations or general clever remarks their way. If I couldn't do that, I'd despair. And that's just university - real life is tougher. By now I'm fed up with being treated like a clichee, it just makes me sick. With the honourable exception of three wonderful people I always felt reduced to some sort of clichee by all the people I met since I graduated - and not just by boys, by girls as well. It's possibly not those people's fault, it's just that I'm not looking like a skinny version of Paul McCartney anymore, but more and more like a girl/young woman. Anyway, I started hating it so much that I basically started dressing like a boy or a homeless person in an attempt to just be the brains and to be perceived as nothing but the brains.

It was a real eye-opener to go to the Netherlands for a week last summer and suddenly feel, well, good. To suddenly feel treated like a whole person, not just a girl. And not like an old friend either, but like a new friend without feeling you have to first overcome a lot of preconceived notions about yourself. It was the coolest thing ever. It also made me want to stop being friends with anyone who ever made me feel bad which in hindsight was quite radical, but possibly for the best. I never thought people could see both the outside and the inside and treat them equally until I went to Utrecht. It makes me happy just thinking about it.
Then I came back to Vienna and started being friends with someone who miraculously treated me just as well. I'm only realising now that what I liked was being treated not like a girl, but simply as a fellow person who's geeky enough to attend a lecture about Roman epigraphy.
It makes me hopeful. Even if I do sound like Lady Macbeth, writing all this stuff. You know, the one that goes,
"Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. "

Anyway, all of this is the reason why this picture is hanging directly over my bed where I can see it at all times. Featured here are my brothers who just make me feel like myself and Quinten & David last summer. I saw the picture of the yellow car in front of the little house in a newspaper one day, it's by a fairly famous photographer who's name I forgot, and fell in love with it. The whole thing, including the christmas tree decoration, might be one of my very favourite things in my room.



And then there's a polaroid of the lonely streets round my corner and my lonely self right in the middle. Displayed on a picture from a fashion magazine plus the line: "watch it: FORGOTTEN YOUTH" which I found in another magazine.



Rant over. Longest post ever? I know, it's tiresome. Have a video which sort of fits the subject (although there wasn't really a specified subject):



The Shop Assistants - I Don't Wanna Be Friends With You

Good old 80s indie pop! I ordered albums from Orange Juice and The Wedding Present on a whim from amazon yesterday because they are really cheap! They'll be here tomorrow. the internet age is amazing.