music: "Waterloo Sunset," The Kinks

I'm a superhero girl:
Babysat tonight. It was the two kids I always babysit for and whom I love so tenderly and fiercely it sometimes scares me. I didn't used to understand or even like kids, mostly because I was one, but now I see what it's all about. Ah, parenthood! Not any time soon, mind, just...eventually. But anyway, the kids: Robert (5 yrs) and Mary Anne (2 yrs). Robert and I were playing "superheroes," as we often do, running around the house like crazy foo's. I was Cama, this guy that Robert made up who can, quite kickassedly in my opinion, shoot swords out of the soles of his feet. Robert was, as usual, Buzz Lightyear. I suspect Robert likes to play with me mostly because I do the best dying scenes of anyone this side of the Milky Way -- spasms; feeble attempts to drag by broken body along the ground; violent, bloody coughing fits and all.

And we somehow got into this conversation about how there were no superhero girls, and I said, of course there are: do you think there's any difference between boys and girls? And he replied that yes, there was. Boys played superheroes. Girls played dolls. An irrational spike of anger at Robert lanced through me; this was quickly replaced by the sadness I always experience at how slowly we all actually evolve. It only goes to show, we can force things just so much. The rest of it has to take root in an organic way. Anyway, I said you know, Robert, girls can play superheroes and boys can play dolls, too. He said that no, that wasn't how it worked, though to his credit he acknowledged that there were sometimes exceptions to the rule, as in the case of this girl, Hayley, who had played games with he and his friends at preschool.

To tell the truth, the whole conversation left me with that familar, hopeless, bitter feeling: when will we ever learn?