Boys will be Girls....but only for a little bit.

I've decided Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, because dress-up is pretty much my favorite game. I love figuring out what I want to be, coming up with the design in my head, and then finding all the perfect accessories. I love putting on fake eyelashes and I love spending hours to get ready and I love taking pictures of it all.


This year, Halloween was just as fun as it always has been. I try to dress up in as many different costumes as possible, so on Friday I was Minnie Mouse and on Saturday I was the girl in the song about apple-bottom jeans. Thanks to Kelly for giving me a red-and-white polka-dot dress last year and Nicole for the apple-bottom jeans!


On Friday, Caitlin, AnnaLisa and I went to the stake party with some boys from our ward, and on Saturday, I went to Pirate Island with Winnie, Jackie, Christine, Kristen, C.L., and a few of their friends who I don't know as well. One of the people in our group was a boy named Dallin who dressed up as a Playboy bunny. He wore a short pink tutu, a midriff-bearing black shirt, lacy pink knee-highs, and a curly blonde wig. I don't think I've ever seen anyone so excited to be wearing a skirt.


All night, I watched as he pranced around, twirling his blonde hair around his finger, fluffing his pink skirt, batting his fake eyelashes. When we took group pictures, he felt the need to be in the front, so everyone could see every part of his costume. He wasn't pushy or obnoxious, just excited. Everyone else found him just as hilarious as he found him(her?)self, so we didn't get tired of him or anything. Still, it was obvious that he was proud of the costume he had put together and he wanted as many people to be aware of it as possible.

After the dance at Pirate Island, we all went back to Winnie's apartment and watched a scary movie. Dallin changed out of his costume into some more comfortable basketball shorts and a t-shirt and seemed happy to at last be out of the wig. From observing all of this, I was reminded that being a girl is a pretty great thing.

Despite all the disadvantages that a lot of girls like to bring up occasionally when they are feeling particularly gripe-y or pms-y, I love being a girl! I love the role that I have been given to play by society. I love that I am expected to look pretty and speak kindly.

I love the relationship that I, as a girl, have with boys. Maybe I shouldn't like it so much, but I really like that boys are supposed to be strong and protective and good at math. I like that, when the vaccuum breaks, my roommate txts three different boys in the ward to get them to come fix it instead of asking any of the girls living next door or below us. I like that boys wanttt to fix things for girls. Maybe it's an archaic way of thinking, but personally, I think that I got the very long end of the stick.

Towards the beginning of the night, while Dallin was parading around in his tutu, I thought that he must have discovered how fun it is to be a girl. But at the end of the night, when he had reverted back to his manlier ways, he seemed much more comfortable. When I went camping over the summer with some of my friends, we tried to act as manly as possible. We grunted and made manly jokes and did a manly fire dance. It was fun, but when we woke up the next morning, we were all ready to shower and put on our makeup and be girls again.

And I think that's the beauty of Halloween. For one day, or two, or three, depending on how much you celebrate, you can be whatever you like, even if you wouldn't want to be that thing forever. I believe that the girl described in "Low" is actually a stripper, or at least a pole dancer, which I certainly am not. But I wanted to dress up like her, so I did. It was fun to wear big hoops and put shimmery eyeshadow on up to my eyebrows, but I wouldn't want to dress that way on a regular basis. It doesn't accurately portray who I really am, but on Halloween, it did a great job of portraying who I'm not.

Halloween means that a little blonde girl can dress up as a super-ghetto shawty if she wants to, and a bench-pressing, deep-voiced man can go out all dolled up like a playboy bunny is he wants to.