There are some things you can't cover up with lipstick and powder
Thought I heard you mention my name, can't you talk any louder
Don't come any closer, don't come any nearer
My vision of you, can it come any clearer...

I live in the best of many worlds. I love my family and our quirky home (even though I truly do want someone to want to do the dishes) and I have an outside job that I still enjoy immensely after five years. (Hey, it’s my first real paying gig since 1978...and probably my longest extended commitment outside of elementary school and marriage.)

What I’m lacking is perspective of a what work life should be like. As a fresh out of college newlywed, I worked as a secretarial temp until Embot was born. That was it, never staying in any one job to get a feel for what work should be like. I have it on the best authority that the office atmosphere I am in is not totally like the rest of the work world.

Outside of the priests and the youth minister, everybody at work (I’m not counting the maintenance men since they don’t have perform most of their work in the confines of the estrogen saturated office that rest of us ladies occupy...do you see where this is going?) is female. And though we are all of a ‘certain’ age (to put it delicately, I’m the baby of the group) the atmosphere often has all the gravitas of a seventh- grade girls locker room. And it often makes me want to wretch. I can’t imagine how the priests can stand having what amounts to a bag of cats in their house. Except that they are men and there are vibes that men don’t pick up on. But I also know a man (let’s call him my husband) who is oblivious to a certain amount of hysteria in four daughters, their girl friends and his wife until it reaches a toxic limit. If I’m glad to get away from the can-I pour-you-another-saucer-of-milk and would-you-kindly-retract-your-claws atmosphere, how much happier must the priests be to see us go?

I get along with everyone. Really. But I just can’t take the girly fluff/back-stabby stuff. I have a few work friends who are tres cool and fun to be with. They, too, enjoy the company of men. But with everyone else it can dissolve into just so much....girl talk. And girl talk often turns nasty. Stupifyingly nasty. How much “she said that she said you are like so...” can an adult woman take? I mean, really, a recording of the women chatting in the rectory would be almost identical with that of the junior high girls on the playground. Well, you’d have to delete the stuff about hot flashes and arthritis, but otherwise very little difference.

Yes, I heard that someone thought I spent too much time talking to the priests. (How did I hear it? Girls talk!) Well, yeah. I work for them. And they also have better things to talk about. They talk about interesting stuff - not about shopping, feeling guilty about what they ate or are about to eat or what new conditioner they found. This sounds so much like I don’t like the company of other women, so let me interject that some of my best friends are women. I am a woman. And I have long been a proponent of gender segregated education. But there is something about being around too many women for too long. It just shakes my nerves.

My mother once told me that she found herself gravitating to groups of men at social functions. She found that talking with women could make her crazy. There are women with whom you bond immediately; soul-sisters - and you can talk with them like you’ve known them all your lives. And then there are the girls that you make girl talk with. Insubstantial at best...like eating cotton candy. At worst...imagine a diet of multi-colored cotton candy.

It's a more or less situation inspired by girls talk
But I can't say, the words you want to hear
I suppose you're going to have to play it by ear,
right here and now girls talk...