guest post: charla.

hello loves:) i'm elsewhere at the moment. i hope you enjoy this guest post,

because i adore charla's blog and i always come away from reading her

with a smile or a new thought. i'm honored to have her writings posted here! :)

♥

I’m going to be honest with you for a moment:

I’m not much for cooking.

Sure, I know how to slap some carne asada on the barbecue, throw some eggs, bacon, and salsa into a tortilla for a breakfast burrito, and one time, I did make lasagna from scratch.  It wasn’t half bad.  But I’m the girl most likely to vote for the simpler things.  If I look at a recipe and see too many ingredients, spices, or measurements…count me out.  I’ll throw some tuna into a bowl, chop up some celery and voila!  Dinner in two minutes.

No, I am definitely not the cook that I know so many women to be…spinning simple ingredients into a beautiful masterpiece.  That’s not me—not yet, anyway.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not still every bit a woman.

I’ll admit that I love shopping, but I don’t love talking about it much.  I’m not like some women I know—sharing elaborate recollections of their mall trips, along with descriptions of all the shoes, purses and designer jeans they were lucky enough to score in their searches.

If I’m being honest, I’d much rather be drinking a beer, watching football and belching along with the guys.  But I’d also have to be honest and say I do pick my favorite teams solely off of how good-looking their uniforms are.

Which is how I know I’m still every bit a woman.

I’d pick a good action flick over a chick flick any day.  Count me in for The Bourne Identity, Gone in 60 Seconds, or Battle: Los Angeles.  Fast cars, guns, and men with attitudes are so much more interesting to me than a cheesy love story or gossipy women in tight dresses.  But that doesn’t mean that in Children of Men, I didn’t cry when the innocent old man got killed.  Or when one of the cops in The Departed got pushed off a building.  It doesn’t mean it didn’t shake me up that the baby’s room was haunted in Paranormal Activity 2 and I can’t promise that I didn’t leave the room while murders were taking place in Zodiac.

As much as I resist it sometimes, I am still, without a doubt, very much a woman.

I don’t like Sex and the City.  I can’t sew.  Once, I attempted to make sugar cookies for Christmas and all I ended up with was a mess.

But I do like hiking.  And fishing.  And demolition derbies.

{you can't see that we were at the demolition derby, but i can promise you...we were ;)}

And there’s something so lovely about getting all dolled up for a night out on the town and catching my boyfriend’s loving glances as we spend the evening side-by-side.

But my honest-to-goodness favorite part of it all?  Coming home and stripping down into my old Rolling Stones tee and letting my hair fall into a mess on my shoulders.  In that moment, I feel the most beautiful.  In that moment, I feel the most like myself.

The truth is

I’ve spent a good part of my life wanting to be one of the guys.

Until one day, in the recent years, I realized that just because I love being one of the guys, doesn’t mean that every cell in my being—from the top of my side swept bangs all the way down to my pedicured toes—isn’t feminine.  And while I would pick a smoky bar over a designer evening lounge any day, that doesn’t mean that I don’t spend large chunks of time watching re-runs of The Hills.  Or that I don’t set aside an hour once a month to soak up the sensations of a long, delicious pedicure.  It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take me an hour to get ready every day or that I don’t feel true terror when a large, disgusting bug is within 100 yards of me.  And just because I have to be strong sometimes does not mean that I want to be; on the contrary, my fragile strength nearly ceases to exist when I am in the arms of a truly good man.

Truly, I am evidence of what Walt Whitman once said:  “I contain multitudes.”

A many multitudes—and not one part of them limited by anyone but myself.

Which is why I consider myself to be a country music fanatic, but that has never stopped me from dressing up like one of those scene girls and jumping in the mosh pits at metal concerts.

I work at a tax firm, but I should be a professional racecar driver--what, with the way I handle my Toyota Camry on southern California roads.

I have recently picked up piano again, dabbled in cross-stitching, and tried my hand at making homemade lollipops (unsuccessfully, but I give myself an A for effort ;).

I can’t paint or draw to save my life and I have never successfully written one piece of music.  But let me tell you one thing: I can rock the heck out of cover songs.

And while I’m 23-years old, I still love a good teenage fiction book…and two of my most recent literary purchases were “Eat Pray Love” and “F U Penguin.”

I have been a Psychology major, a Journalism major, and a Human Services major, only to become an Undecided Major.

And sometimes, I am a well-put together woman in a yellow, vintage-looking skirt.

But that certainly doesn’t mean that around the next corner you won’t catch me gloating loudly while I beat a bunch of guys at the game of beer pong.

Yes, my being is large and made of multitudes.

And if I’m going to be honest with you…

I wouldn’t have it any other way.