Carolyn Explains it All: Girls just wanna have fun, too

Top 10 Behaviors of My Roommates, or: Why You Can Dress 19-Year-Old Girls Up, But You Just… Top 10 Behaviors of My Roommates, or: Why You Can Dress 19-Year-Old Girls Up, But You Just Can’t Take Them Out to the Cheesecake Factory:

1. When five of us put on our finest and went out to eat last week, we ate more than football players would. I mean each and every one of us ate more than several football players.

2. The conversation was largely dominated by bathroom humor.

3. When we weren’t making inappropriate and immature jokes, we were making grotesque comparisons – both verbally and physically- of how much our waistlines were expanding as minutes went by.

4. While we did ask the waitress to take a nice picture of us smiling, we also took several immature pictures of ourselves chewing with food in our mouths and coming onto each other.

5. We took pride in our burps – especially their volume and duration.

6. We cracked jokes about the goofy customers sitting around us.

7. Instead of politely asking each other, “May I have a bite of that? It looks delicious!” transactions went something like this: [Roommate No. 1 places shrimp on Roommate No. 2’s plate] “I’m giving you a shrimp. So give me some pasta.”

8. When our waitress kindly brought five separate checks to the table, she brought only one pen to sign them with. Since more than one of us paid in plastic, we had two options: patiently pass the pen around the table until everyone had a chance to use it, or rush each other along with such kind sentiments as, “Who has the freaking pen now?” and “Seriously? You’re still writing?” Guess which option we chose.

9. Even though we couldn’t finish our slices of cheesecake in the restaurant, we did find room to shovel the remaining bites into our mouths within minutes of getting home. Patience, we lack.

10. Laugh at our lack of manners the whole night long, as if we were making our mothers proud. The concept of “being a lady” is, like, so lost on us! (Cue fits of giggles)

But here’s where the joking ends. Yes, we really did all those things and we really did giggle about it like a bunch of hyenas. In all seriousness, though, why is it so implausibly ridiculous that a bunch of young girls would act like a bunch of young guys?

It’s not.

We didn’t cause a scene. We kept our behavior confined to our booth – none of our antics were loud enough to be heard by other guests at the restaurant. We genuinely had lots of fun that evening – even if we weren’t quite sophisticated, we basked in the glory (oh, yes) of just being ourselves. For those two reasons, I have no regrets.

I never once stopped to wish that my roommates and I were more refined, more ladylike. If anything, amongst all the mascara-applying and hair-curling and shoe-shopping we do to mask our gross personalities, we could probably stand to be even less so because frankly, I doubt we’re fooling anyone.

It shouldn’t be the case that when five young women go out to eat, they feel they should sit demurely with ankles crossed and discuss pantyhose. I would like to think that society, that big bully, has come a long way from those expectations and all I can say on that subject is thank goodness. I don’t know what we would do with ourselves otherwise.

If a member of the previous generation were dining with us, surely they’d be horrified. (Although just about everything going on in today’s world seems to horrify the previous generation, as the case will probably be for all of time.)

But not all of us were born to fit the traditional definition of feminine, and that’s not an embarrassment. So it shouldn’t be so terribly, unbelievably, oh-my-gosh-ew strange that we are just as open about our digestive systems as some guys we know.

We’re not superfreaks (the kind you don’t take home to mother). We’re modern women.

In my opinion, the rules go something like this.

Behavior that is not acceptable in public, by either gender, even in the company of friends: Disturbing those around you, including the waitress. Making a huge mess. Projectile vomiting.

Behavior that shouldn’t be a big deal, for either gender, in the company of friends: All that stuff I said in the beginning.

I take a certain amount of pride in the lack of femininity that we demonstrated that night. We may never saunter into a restaurant or store wearing backwards baseball caps or even tuxedos, but there’s lots of middle ground between there and the demurely crossed legs, and we’re aiming to cover it.

Next week: the Four Seasons?

Email Carolyn about your uncivilized adventures in public at ceg36@pitt.edu.