Girly Girl

The Face of Evil

I’ve admitted before that I have been known to exhibit some embarrassingly girly behaviour. I don’t think of myself as a particularly ‘girly girl’; in fact I’d classify myself as leaning more towards the tomboy side of things.

But I do have some inexplicably girly habits that I can only put down to some innate feminine reflex that even a tomboy can’t resist. I’m scared of spiders (although to be fair, Australian spiders are well worth being scared of). When I’m feeling down, I feel an overwhelming compulsion to buy shoes. I like sappy, romantic comedy movies that often star Hugh Grant. I can’t resist shopping when I know there’s a sale.

These are all things that I have come to accept, and also to try to ignore. I thought that these things constituted the extent of my inborn girly behaviours. I thought that I knew how bad my feminine behaviour could get. But I was proven wrong this week when I did something so stereotypically girly that I felt overwhelming embarrassment (and shame) – even though no one was there to witness it.


It was a Monday morning and I had arrived at work early – about 7:30am. No one else had arrived yet, and that was fine by me, because I had come in early to try to get some work done uninterrupted.

I was standing at the printer waiting for it to spit out a couple of pages when out of the corner of my eye, I saw a movement. I looked over just in time to see two mice darting across the room so fast that they were nothing but a blur.
A shiver ran down my spine – I’m not a fan of mice, but I wasn’t too bothered. They weren’t near me, they weren’t bothering me, and since we’ve got something of a mouse plague going on at the moment at work, there wasn’t really anything I could do.

Then the two mice popped their heads out from behind the filing cabinet and ran straight towards me. At least, it looked that way, although they may have just been heading for a nearby desk. Either way, I did the most embarrassing thing I have ever done in my life.

I jumped up onto the desk.


THE SHAME! THE EMBARASSMENT! I’m like a 1950’s cartoon wife. Like a silly woman with a straw broom, wearing high heels and a house dress, balancing on a chair, screeching at her husband to kill the mouse.

So that’s it. I’m an embarrassment. I am the girliest girl that ever was. I am a woman who thinks that climbing on a chair will keep me safe from a mouse. I am a spider fearing, shoe buying, mouse hating wimp. Mock me if you will. I deserve it.