Wrangler Dani

I have never painted my toenails this dark of a color. NEVER.

Speaking of which, I’ve never really done the whole “painted toenails” thing. Or fingernails. Or spas or pampering or “girls days out” which always looked like fun but I could never quite navigate with ease. I had a friend* in 7th grade who wore dark blue toenail polish, went to Westminster Mall every day and only ate fried bologna with mustard for every meal. (She might’ve eaten something else occasionally, like, I don’t know, red Popsicles or something.) She had crushes on boys, watched tons on TV and was a huge gossip. Almost everything she did was totally foreign to me. I remember sitting across from her on her pink bedroom floor as she re-applied another thick, chunky layer of deep blue to her toes, feeling oh-so-out-of-place and thinking, “This is it. I will never paint my toes, and I will never understand girls.”

Luckily for me, my 12-year-old self was wrong. I would paint my toes, and I would like it. I still don’t totally understand girls, but I’m in good company. Roughly 99% of the Earth’s population (us girls included) is either pretending they understand or languidly giving up ever achieving enlightenment at any given moment.

It took a lot of bravery to let myself “be girly”. My roommates like to tell embarrassing stories about my resistance to cute hair and clothes, and pedicures were unexplored territory until last summer. I still love green and brown best of all, and I don’t think that there will ever be a desperately dirty boyish game that I don’t sort of want to join.

But I do like my “sparkly wine red” toes. I really do.

*I didn’t really have good girlfriends until much later in my little life, so any “friends” I had in my younger years were either desperate attempts on my mom’s part to get me some girlish company, or the product of my complete exhaustification of being the only girl in every desperately dirty round of roller hockey. I didn’t understand, then, that most girls my age weren’t interested in playing desperately dirty roller hockey and guerilla warfare and fort-building with a rag-tag bunch of boys.