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newer-older-profile-gbook-notes- e-mail-dland in progress. 04.26.02 at 10:32 pm 0 comments so far see: catie curtis, "i don't cry anymore" see: kim chernin, "my life as a boy" makes me think of a girl i once loved. yes, she was a girl, not a woman. and i loved her as a boy would love a girl. but i lost because i was a girl. "i've watch boys take off. i've seen them on bikes, skateboards, motor scooters, sliding on a piece of waxed cardboard. they fly down the middle of the street, cars going fast uphill, downhill, do they care? the direction of a boy is straight out the door, down the hill, out of the neighborhood, into the world. no second thought at leaving people behind, leaving them to fend for themselves as he takes off, hellbent for his own future without them. "i've seen girls on skateboards and girls on waxed cardboard, but i never saw a girl who did not look back and wonder. not ever. because there is always someone standing at the door, someone waiting for you to come home, someone who will be happier when they hear your key in the lock. girls are always aware of this and boys are not. "�of course, these days girls are almost everything boys are. but if you are a woman at that dangerous time in your life, when you have just lost a reason for going on being the way you've been, if your kids have gone from home, or someone ill or aging you've been caring for has just died, it won't do you much good to turn into a girl, not even a tough girl who can kick a ball, who knows how to fight when a good fight is needed, can curse, will race her brothers and sometimes beat them. it won't do much good because this tough girl must not cry. if she ever wants to get away from home, to leave, to have a future of her own, she has to sacrifice the soft and sensitive romantic yearnings the boy can keep for a time, can even use, to get him out into the world. "there he is, standing in the rain outside his girl's window. tomorrow he will spot a woman on the bus and take off, passionately, desperately, into the world to follow her. the tough girl cannot allow herself so much need for another person. the boy weeps when his girl lets him down, walks through the park all night in his bare feet, renews his love by plunging himself into an ice-cold baptismal woodland pool. he is young but he will love her forever. the tough girl has got to prove that she needs no one. "the tough girl, under this pressure, may come to have more in common with a hard man than she has with a boy. in the girl and in the man, something infinitely tender has had to be crushed to achieve a semblance of autonomy. the boy has not yet had to make this sacrifice. for a brief, endangered season of grace, he remains a creature of accomplished paradox, holding simultaneously the capacity for profound attachment and the ability to break it off, when he must, to follow his own course." [p. 4-6] "�i wondered how our lives might have turned out if i had behaved more like a born-boy, less like a crossover boy�"[p. 202-3] "the boy, as i have always said, is a transitional figure. when he arrives at the supreme moment of his fulfillment�the capability to act, the freedom to take, the license to choose his desire�he has just bumped up against his own future. if he is the sort of boy who is constantly moving forward, his future will exercise a more profound and compelling erotic power than any singular act of possession. why should he accept one woman when he can have them all? why should he put up with repetition when something new is about to take place? as a boy, he senses inn the inexorable thrust of his own development the promise of power, liberation, license, opportunity. things can only get better. he won't settle for less than everything he might have. "what will happen to him then? will he go on being a boy forever? will he turn into a man of sensibility or even into a woman? perhaps there is a new kind of woman that comes to exist only by passing throught transitional phase of a boy." [p. 203-4]
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