About a boy

I really don't want to go on about it, but I've been having a good think about the whole Kim situation. I have nothing better to do after all... I don't exactly have any work to keep me occupied. (Just for the record, I have done nothing today...)

Anyway, I have remembered another similarly embarrassing situation, which happened to me many years ago, when I really should have spoken up too..

I've studied a bit of psychology - and am now led to believe that perhaps it was this deeply distressing incident which took place when I was younger that has led to my severe inability to put Allen straight. I think I have been left mentally scarred. We're talking a good 15 years ago now, so I would have been about ten at the time, but I can remember it like it was yesterday.

It was summer, the air was warm and the leaves on the trees were green. My younger sister was out playing with some new kids who had just moved in around the corner. It was like that where I grew up - all the kids knew eachother and played games together in the street. It was a nice little kiddy community which we probably took for granted at the time. Anyway, to cut a long and dull story short, I had to go and get her for some reason. I'd only just taught myself to ride a bike so I proudly rode over to the their house on my second-hand rusting orange chopper to say hello. I stopped to say hi to the dad of the new kids, who seemed nice, and who wanted to know a little bit more about us. My sister and I told him how old we were, what school we went to and stuff, and that we had an older brother who was at home.

"How nice" the man said to us "for your mum to have two boys and then a girl"

I wanted to say "I'm a girl, I'm a girl!"...

...but I kept quiet.

It was easier to smile politely, fight back the tears, and to let him continue thinking I was a boy! Even though my sister was understandably in hysterics as we rode off.

I know that I was as straight as a plank and as skinny as a rake. I realise that my pudding bowl haircut that didn't make it past my ears (that the hairdresser assured me was a 'bob') may have hinted that I was male. I can see how the hand-me-down Spiderman t'shirt and webbed jeans may have compounded the boy-image, and I know that my bike was a rusty old orange chopper (not the racer with a basket on the front that I dreamed of), but I was a girl and it was really horrible thing to happen - being called a boy!

Kim's not a bad name, so it's not a personal insult (like being called a boy most definitely was) but it's still annoying, and I still face the repeated shame of him calling me it infront of people everyday - the fear of which is bringing me out in hives.

Perhaps I will send him a little email tomorrow to address the situation...