I am going to kick some girl bully butt

....politely, of course. One particular woman in our class has repeatedly been condescending or rude to me, and each time it happens, I go away crushed, I feel awful for about four hours, and then I realize that the problem is her rudeness, not my own worth as a human being.

(that's an awful lot of power to give someone else. I need to not do that, and this is a start.)

When the girl bully is condescending again, I will take her aside and ask her if she knows she's coming across as condescending and rude. (As opposed to what I previously did, which was to clam up and feel hurt.) I will see what she says, but my suspicion is that she's doing it deliberately. If she apologizes and amends her behavior, great. Otherwise, I have fired a warning shot across her bow, and will proceed accordingly, in a withering and dismissive fashion.

This particular situation is one that has bedeviled me repeatedly. I am very happy to finally have the tools and perspective to handle it.

The book that helped me put this situation in perspective is _Odd Girl Out_. I've forgotten the author, and I'm lamenting that my copy of the book is in a box in a storage locker near Lake Almanor, California, near Mom. But I read it repeatedly when I stumbled across it, and it helped a lot. (Briefly, when boys bully, they hit each other. When girls bully, they do it by putting down or excluding another girl... which is much harder to combat. In this particular case, the offending party is rude, condescending, and dismissive, but it's all in her tone of voice.)

I should mention

... that I have a Guy Advice Posse (three guys who ALWAYS have good advice for me) who helped me to understand what was going on with the girl bully and how to deal with it.

Brian, in particular, occasionally says something that fundamentally alters my way of thinking. In this particular case, at my going-away party, he said, "Self-defense is sticking up for yourself in whatever situation you are in."

Yeah, I like having a six-ounce tactical nuke hit my frontal lobes, thanks. I guess senseis are like Moms: Once your sensei, always your sensei, apparently.

In any case, that particular sentence made me fundamentally alter my behavior, because he was right. I can take out a rapist in a dark alley, but I can't always hold my own in a sticky social situation. Spurred on by that sentence, I am learning to do that.