The Lady-Bro

Today we are going to talk about an elusive and fascinating creature, the lady-bro.

A few weeks ago my brother and some of his friends determined that I am a lady-bro. Since then I have been trying to figure out what is a lady-bro, why am I a lady-bro, and is that something I agree with.

I argued with them several times on whether or not I should be classified as a lady-bro. This will feed in later to the definition of a lady-bro, but part of the reason I argued with them was a question of their motivation.

See, they also have this game called “bull moose,” wherein if you are drinking using your right hand and someone sees this and says “bull moose,” you have to finish the drink. They had tried this on me several times but as I had never heard of this ridiculous reasoning I was ignoring them, and finally they explained it is a very important game for gentlemen as that way when you are introduced to someone and shake hands like gentlemen, your hand isn’t cold. This only fueled my determination to not play since I am clearly not a gentleman. Probably not even a gentlewoman. And this friends is how it came about that they declared me a lady-bro.

It’s not that I was offended at being designated a lady-bro, it’s that I don’t think I really qualify. So that’s brings up the question, what exactly is a lady-bro?

Urban dictionary has a few definitions, the one with the least typos and ridiculous spelling being:

“A lady-bro is, first and foremost, chill. She is able to hold her own in the company of all males. She can relate to conversation at bro-night and can even offer further stimulation to the gathering. However, this characterization is not sufficient for the definition of a lady-bro!

She is more than just a girl who is refreshingly easy to hang out with. She is the girlfriend of a bro who is ALSO easy to hang out with.”

So right there, I’m out, as I am not the girlfriend of a bro. Nor do I wear tapout shirts or have black & blonde hair as some of the other definitions mention.

But in my mind, a lady-bro is more of a Robin Scherbatsky type of person. She can drink whisky, smoke cigars, and shoot a gun. She prefers dogs over cats and doesn’t do the normal girl emotional thing. Also, she’s smoking hot.

I cannot drink whisky to save my life. Scotch and bourbon are also out. In fact the mere smell makes me want to vomit. I do, however, drink beer. I know a teeny bit about it (like I know the difference between an IPA and a stout and what to expect if you tell me it’s “hoppy,” which in my mind is like the bare minimum of knowledge for a beer drinker but apparently is impressive for a girl to know).  

I realized though that the idea of a lady-bro ties back into the constant debate on whether or not girls can be nerds.

See there seems to be this mental image of girls as cat-obsessed, needy, crazy, calorie-counting, football-hating creatures that spend thousands on clothes, wear makeup to bed, and can’t understand or appreciate anything that men enjoy. Certainly some of these may be true for some people, and that’s okay. I am not here to judge. I just don’t understand why the assumption is that girls can’t enjoy “manly” things.

It may feel like I’m beating a dead horse because I’ve talked about this a little before, but it still irks me. Especially the idea that girls aren’t nerds. Apparently we’ve developed a term, lady-bro, for girls that share some guy traits, but we can’t even acknowledge that girls can be just as much of nerds as guys?

Just the other day I was betraying my nerd tendencies by talking about how I really wanted to name a daughter Trixie Hobbitses. I had a room full of people staring at me because they didn’t get it. My brother is playing WoW again and on one of our phone calls was describing all the ways they’ve changed the game since we last played, which of course makes me want to play WoW again. That would be a bad life decision though.

So it made me wonder, was I classified as a lady-bro because of general deviation from the girl stereotype, and not necessarily because I engage in “bro” behavior?

I don’t know, partly because sometimes I can’t judge what is “guy” versus “girl” behavior. I know in the summer I love to prance about in dresses. That seems girly. I also know I love Archer, and I recently found out that is considered a “guy” show. Really? Why?

Am I lady-bro? I don’t know, but partly because I don’t know whether there should even be a lady-bro designation. Why can’t we just accept that there is no longer a clear-cut difference between “girl” and “guy” conduct? But since we seem determined to stick with those labels, would I be more of a lady-bro than a girly girl? I still can’t decide. All I know for sure is that if you try and call bull moose on me I will slap you.  

A Year in Books

I realized today as I was memorizing my parking spot number (D2) that I’m probably more of a Star Wars fan than I thought (I visualized R2-D2 to remember it of course). However, my primary geekdom remains and will always be my bookworm habits.

Last year my friend Erin revealed that apparently the average American only reads 4 books a year. She decided to track how many books she read during the year to see how it compared. Given my own love of reading and obsessive tracking habits, I decided to do the same.

Now I didn’t actually start tracking the books I was reading until April (since Erin’s post wasn’t until the end of March to give me the idea), so I don’t have a full year’s worth of data. Even with missing a few months I realized there are actually a lot of interesting trends I could determine from the numbers.

Let’s start with the simple logistics. I had two sheets I used to track information. One was my number sheet where each month I tracked the numbers of books I finished reading during the month. Initially I had broken this down in two columns, print books and iPad books. I quickly decided I wanted a third column to track which books were actually re-reads that I had read at some point before. On the second sheet, I simply listed for each month the name and author of each book I finished reading, highlighting in blue any re-reads. 

As the months passed I realized there were some issues with my tracking mechanisms. Because I didn’t add a book to the sheet until I finished reading it, what would happen frequently is that I would read the bulk of the book one month but finish it the first or second day of the month where it was actually tracked. This shows especially in November. I didn’t do any reading in November because of NaNoWriMo, except that I had a book I was reading that I finished on November first simply because I only had like 40 pages left.

The other main issue is that this setup doesn’t capture all of my reading, only the books completed. I’ve discussed before how I don’t really read in a linear fashion, and many times I start a book and then give up. The thing is sometimes these are VERY large books, and I read 200-300 pages before I give up. That’s a lot of reading that’s not being accounted for!

Still, while keeping that in mind, I think nonetheless I gathered enough information to start identifying some of my reading trends in a year.

Let me throw some numbers at you. I read a total of 65 books from April 1 through December 31^st. Not bad for a year. 40 books were print, 7 were on the iPad, and 18 were actually re-reads.

Typically I read about 6 new books a month. I had a least 1 re-read a month as well, although technically it might average out to 2 per month.  

There were 3 months during the year that bucked the trends a bit, and I find it very interesting to consider what happened during those months.

In July, I actually read 12 new books. My first thought was maybe I had started a very engaging new series, but looking back at which books they were, actually only 2 were in the same series.

August was the next month that was a little off. I read far less in August (only 4 books tools). Most of the books were re-reads, I only read 1 new book in the month.

The last month that didn’t match the normal pattern was September. September was split evenly between new books and re-reads, but all the new books I read that month were on the iPad instead of print.

Those 3 months just so happen to be part of our “busy season” at work. Given what I remember of the year and what I see on the spreadsheet, I’ve drawn some interesting conclusions about what happened.

The first conclusion is that when I’m stressed/unhappy I read more. Although August was a little lower that was partially because of people visiting and things like that, but both July and September were higher than the average. As the stress/unhappiness continues, I tend to fall back on re-reading. Looking through the specific books I chose to re-read, I realized I have some “comfort books” and that I turn to them to cheer myself up.

The second conclusion is that despite all my complaining about e-reading, when push comes to shove it works. Why did I have more iPad books in September? I had started the Mortal Instruments series, and I decided to download them on the iPad as other people in my family were going to read them too (we share an account). Plus when I finished one I wanted the next in the series instantly - none of that driving to the bookstore stuff when wincest is on the line! And despite the fact that I was reading on the iPad, which I always say doesn’t feel like a real book and I can’t do it easily at home, I managed to get through 4 books on there in one month.

All in all I think I did pretty good for a year of reading. I’ve started tracking my books for 2014 (2 finished so far), but I still need to think through if I want to make some edits to the spreadsheet. It might be interesting to start tracking the books I abandon and maybe later figure out if there is a pattern to that as well. Plus at some point I should look for a method of tracking non-traditional reading, like fanfiction and manga. I’m also excited to see if trends change year by year. Maybe I start to read less, or read more. Who knows!