my mom is hoping to move into a condo in the next year or so, and while she condo-hunts she's sorting out her belongings to make the move easier. she was going through some old photos recently and throwing them out, so i told her "don't throw them out, give them to me". so today at sunday lunch, she had a stack of photos for me and a stack of photos for joy. i don't think i've seen photos of myself as a teenager in quite a while. it was interesting, because i think i was significantly more broody and sullen than i realized. brendan is very sweet, because he gets a lot of joy out of seeing old photos of me. the more awkward and anxiety the better. it seems funny, but any past boyfriends i had were not interested in old photos of me. but then again, most of them made me feel like they forgot about me when i left the room.

i've been thinking a lot lately (maybe because i was reading the book 'annabel') about gender-norms and expectations. i have never been a particularly feminine girl, although i wasn't quite a tomboy either. seeing those old photos of me, reminded me just how unfeminine i was/am. at one point, b pointed out that joy and i were so different. it's not that i was masculine, but most of the time i went for comfort over style. and still do a lot of the time. joy would be in her flowery clothes with her perm, and i would be in a dark sweatshirt with my straight hair hanging over my face. i was thinking recently about how i wore a grey and dark green hoodie for my grade 9 school photo. it made me think that i'm really well suited to sons. if i'd had a girly daughter, i would not have known what to do with her. i think this is partly why i think gender definitions are so useless. i feel that i am a woman, so therefore, anything i do is something "women do", and not the other way round.