It is not necessary to inquire whether a woman would like something for dessert. The answer is, yes, she would like something for dessert, but she would like you to order it so she can pick at it with her fork. She does not want you to call attention to this by saying, “If you wanted a dessert, why didn’t you order one?” You must understand, she has the dessert she wants. The dessert she wants is contained within yours!
Bear in mind also that she wants you to keep pace with her and prefers you to eat at least half of your dessert because she does not want the responsibility of having eaten most of it.
3. Their Entertainment Needs. Unlike men, most women are not endlessly in search of opportunities to watch things crash and blow up. Women tend to prefer movies teeming with human intrigue and personal foible to movies where someone breaks through a plate glass window with a car, or breaks a plate glass window with his fist, or breaks someone’s head with his fist in a car, or breaks someone’s fist with a plate glass window. We’re just wacky that way.
4. Women’s Ablutions (and why they take so long). The amount of time a woman takes to prepare for a date with a man is in direct proportion to the amount of time she has spent observing that man staring saucer-eyed at other women who have put in at least the aforementioned amount of preparation time on their date. If a man would like to see one decrease, so too must the other.
5. Their Plumbing. How much should you know? Women are the ones who do not have a penis and did not even have to undergo painful penis-removal surgery to accomplish this. As a result, they will require more frequent stops on a long car trip.
Once a month women find themselves strangely depressed and taking a long hard look at where they’ve made a wrong turn in life. They will ruminate over such dilemmas as “Perhaps the reason I’m depressed is that I really need to find a better job, but I guess I’m afraid to change because I have such low self-esteem, which comes from my childhood when my mother always used to tell me blah blah blah blah blah.” Then they realize they have just gotten their period, which snuck up on them in the form of a mood change. So if you get involved with a woman, don’t be surprised when you find it sneaking up on you as well.
There are very simple ways to give a woman an orgasm These involve specific manipulations of “the plumbing.” If you suspect that you don’t know what you’re doing but think you are bluffing effectively and/or you notice that it is taking more than a half hour, please be advised that you’re fooling no one. It’s just that most women are too polite and too concerned about the frailties of the male ego to say anything. So ask the owner of “the plumbing” to provide you with some helpful tips!!! And save everyone involved a couple of long, painful hours!!! And by the way … if you do suspect that you don’t know what you’re doing, for God’s sake, don’t do it harder.
6. Women and Love. I have heard men say that they don’t mind the idea of breast implants in a woman because, after all, big breasts are big breasts. (Actually what I have heard men say is slightly coarser.) On the other hand, I have never met a woman who would rather be with a man in a toupee than a bald man.
This ability to accept and embrace the less-than-ideal, this generosity of spirit, has a downside—the tendency to be attracted to psychos. We know better, we’re not proud of this, and we have spent decades learning that we would really rather be with nice men. But any man who has a problem attracting women because they think he is too nice would do well to augment his usual behavior with anguished exhalations of barely controlled rage.
In case you haven’t noticed, women take sex just a tad more personally than do guys. For a woman, the only working definition of a one-night stand is a night spent with a guy who turned out to be a total weenie. The degree of any date’s success can be easily determined by the degree of obsession it causes in the woman. If you would like to test this, introduce yourself to some of her good friends. If they aren’t already sick of hearing your name, the date didn’t go that well.
Once women are in love, they can be easily manipulated because they’re so overwhelmed with feelings of insecurity. Many will happily take responsibility for everything that goes wrong, as in: “If he isn’t happy it’s my fault” and “If I’m not happy it’s my fault.”
Now that you know this, be a good guy and don’t take unfair advantage. Own up to stuff you know is your fault. You might as well, anyway, because there is still another female phenomenon that ensures you’ll be living on borrowed time if you don’t.
7. Women and Therapy. Women are naturally attracted to therapy. Yes, it’s true! If they don’t get expensive one-on-one counseling, they will read self-help books and magazine articles or listen to radio and TV shows that discuss these issues or talk to and get advice from their friends who have done some or all of the above. Women do this because therapy actually involves so many of the things they enjoy: personal idiosyncrasy, a chance to talk dramatically about themselves, and a good starting point for future conversations with friends or anyone they might meet in the checkout line.
8. Their Purses, Their Bras. A woman learns at a young age that she will be expected to carry the equivalent of a suitcase everywhere she goes for the rest of her life. And so she plans accordingly, secure in the knowledge that she will permanently have at her disposal anything, under a certain size, she might need in an emergency. This means that no matter what unexpected event or disaster she encounters, a woman will always have enough makeup to look really cute.
As far as the bra goes … give me a break, okay? Give me a fucking break.
A Dog Is a Dog Is a Dog
For months now I have been living in dog adoption hell. I sure hope I’m not going to be a permanent resident.
As anyone who has ever read more than two pieces of my work has probably noticed, I have kind of a dog fixation. Which I guess made it all the worse this past Thanksgiving when I lost my remaining dog. Well, I didn’t really lose him. I know where he is. He’s dead of a toxic overdose of ham.
Yes, you read correctly. My boy was killed by a house sitter who stupidly left about half a HoneyBaked Ham in dog-stealing proximity. Once you know that toxic levels of fat in a prepared ham can destroy the pancreas, liver, and kidneys of a seventy-five-pound dog, that ad featuring a smiling, tuxedoed O. J. Simpson holding up a giant silver serving tray of the stuff suddenly looks like a still from A Nightmare on Elm Street.
I guess holiday gluttony was one weakness that both my dogs had in common. A few years back, my older dog, Bob, stole and consumed a ten-pound frozen turkey. Luckily for him, turkey has a very low fat content, and the worst side effect he suffered was the short-term embarrassment of looking briefly like a medium-size sofa bed.
Still, I was not at all prepared for Stan’s death. He was in good health when I went away for Thanksgiving. And dead when I returned. It was the first time I had ever spent a minute in my house without him.
My life with Stan began when I realized that Bob didn’t bark when people came into my yard. Only squirrels. I took some comfort in the fact that I was covered if a psycho dressed in a squirrel suit broke into my house, but I decided to bring in a backup line of defense. So I went to the pound and, in about fifteen seconds, plucked Stan off death row. He was the shyest, saddest-looking dog in a giant cage full of future dead guys. He also had a pair of ears on him that could have carried him airborne.
I think I selected him so quickly because his passive-aggressive approach broadcast the phrase “Rescue Me” louder than the energetic, friendlier efforts of all his cell mates. I had not yet realized that I was using the same method to select dogs that I was using to select men—with some of the same problematic results. Eventually Stan turned out to have uncontrollable homicidal urges toward others of his species. How often has a date of mine been ruined by much the same thing?
Stan followed me everywhere, seeming to be operating with the mentality of someone who had either been abandoned or gotten badly lost and who was not going to make that mistake again. When I got into my pool to swim laps,
he jumped in after me. From that point on he never let me out of his sight if he could help it. Day or night, even when I went into the bathroom, I could always count on the fact that Stan would be standing somewhere nearby, staring at me as though he felt something good was going to happen. This was his trademark. It always made me feel guilty because in most cases I knew damn well that nothing particularly good had been planned.
And so I had to live with the constant knowledge that I was continually letting him down. If I reached for a Kleenex, Stan would jump to his feet, certain that this was the first move in a potentially thrilling chain of events. He had an abiding belief that every action in this world might eventually lead to food or ball. In fact, he made this so clear to me that a fair percentage of the time I did try to follow up whatever I was doing with a little food or ball. Happily, he died without ever having learned the cruel truth that taking out the garbage or opening up the sock drawer does not necessarily signal any dog activity.
To his credit, Stan was an excellent ballplayer. Whereas Bob used to play “Catch the Ball and Eat It,” Stan preferred “Double Dog Ball,” in which two balls are put into play at all times, the one in the mouth being released at the same time that the one in the hand hits the air. This game could go on indefinitely—in fact, the more indefinitely the better. And because he was so enthusiastic in his playing, I generally chose to overlook the fact that he almost always took a dump on the dog ball field, during the third inning, with the ball still in his mouth. Anyone who has ever played this game will tell you that ordinarily this is an automatic out.
Also, thanks to Stan, I developed a certain confidence about my sloppy eating habits, secure in the knowledge that any food accidentally dropped onto the lower half of the room would instantaneously become his property. And because I was expected to give him a substantial portion of everything I was eating, I never really had to worry about consuming too many calories. Of course this was often just one more way in which I was a source of disappointment to him, since all he’d wind up with was a portion of some dumb salad. He’d eat it, but he wasn’t happy about it. I bet the day that HoneyBaked Ham turned up at my house must have seemed to him like some kind of answered prayer.
When he died, I sobbed for a couple of days, then everyone advised me to get “out there” and find myself a new dog. On day one of my search I called a series of ads from the Los Angeles Times that turned out to have been placed by a variety of kind ladies who feel compelled to rescue strays and then to attempt to find people to adopt them. This sounded like some kind of scam to me until I visited the suburban residence of a fiftyish Japanese lady who had two dogs in her front yard, two dogs in her backyard, one in her garage, five in her house, and one in her station wagon. Since I had no automatic instinct about which of them to take, I decided not to rush things and left to think it over.
The next day on my way home from work I stopped by the animal shelter nearest to my home and met dozens of other dogs, all cute. All potentially mine.
Overwhelmed again, I headed home alone. In the days that followed I repeated this behavior on a daily basis. Plus I added a way to confuse myself even further—I began taking some of the candidates out to a special yard to see if we had any “chemistry.” That was when I learned that, though a dog may nuzzle you through the cage, when he is released from a kennel situation, he can offer you, at best, the kind of behavior I used to get from my own dogs when they were finally released from the vet. They would rush right on past in a sort of dog tornado, ignoring me totally in a mad dash to get the hell out. As depressing as it always was to receive that treatment from a beloved family pet, to have a strange dog treat you that way is even more peculiar. Not only does no chemistry occur, it is hard not to worry that maybe this new dog hates your guts. Anyway, after these experiences I decided to go home and think about it.
Then I paid a visit to something called the Pet Adoption Fund, in the San Fernando Valley, a large kennel facility where a lot of kind ladies board about 300 different dogs and cats that they have rescued. Walking past cage after cage of candidates I felt like a member of the parole board meeting thousands of eligible prisoners. Dog after dog would scream to me:
“I’m a big, dumb guy. Take me home and I’ll kiss you, then eat all your furniture.”
“I’m more sedate, but I’m kind of an older guy. I don’t know you and I’m not sure I like you.”
“I love you. Here, watch me make this dog face. See? No one can resist it.”
They were all going a million miles an hour.
That was the day it occurred to me that what I was actually looking for, in their faces, was the face of my dog. I was looking for that familiar stare that already knew me, already knew how to live with me and could come home and fit in and put things back the way they were. Which is why that was also the day I decided to knock off looking for a while. Because the reality is that there are millions of dogs who could be completely right for me. One thing you would have had to say about my two dogs was that they could easily be classified as “generic.” But in the decades we spent together they each became so completely lovable and unique that each was irreplaceable. And in a way their very randomness makes the new selection process tougher. How in the world do I figure out which dog to save? I guess one day I’ll just show up at one of these facilities and point and say, “That one.” And then I’ll have my new dog.
Ninety-eight percent of the dogs I meet are probably perfect. The whole key is that somehow I have to be ready.
I, Lewis
My name is Lewis, and it was initially my plan to live with Barbara Bush in the White House. But she was a no-show. So I came to live with Merrill Markoe instead. It was January 1991, and her previous dog, Stan, had died a couple months earlier from a toxic overdose of ham. None dare call it suicide.
I feel I should say at this point that I have found people pretty strange from the first, but this woman is nuts, and I mean that sincerely.
So anyway, I was about seven weeks old (which is like 150 of your years), and I go to sleep one night and the next day when I wake up I’m in solitary. I mean, I realized I was big for my age, but I’ll be damned if I know what I did. One minute I’m being born. The next I’m a lifer. And I’m the youngest one in the joint. I don’t know what stunt I pulled during my nap, but I think it was a doozy.
So I’m in the slammer and not much is happening. People stop by and stick their hands through the bars in my cell, and I gnaw on their fingers with my razor-sharp teeth until I draw blood or they cry out in pain. And that’s about it for activity until day two, when this big gangly woman stops by. She’s wearing jeans and she’s got brown hair on her head and blond hair on her arms, so I figure she’s a mixed breed. I’m leaning against the bars, biting her for as long as she can stand it—I’m getting very close to making a puncture wound—when I hear a lot of discussion, and the next thing I know, she springs me. She puts me on her lap and starts driving, which I know can’t be very safe. At first I think maybe she’s taking me to meet Air Force One. However, it begins to hit me that her car smells like dog vomit. Which makes me think she’s not a Republican.
When we arrive at her house, right away I can’t believe my eyes because everywhere I look is a great place to go to the bathroom!!! But already I’m thinking this woman has some serious mental problems, because every time I start to take a leak, she’s in my face interrupting me. She’s going, “No! No! No!” and trying to make me relocate out in the yard!!! I’m serious! In the dark! Or in the rain!!! Like it’s the eleven hundreds. Suddenly I think I’m Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit.
The craziness doesn’t end here. Now I find out that she doesn’t want me to eat. I mean, I’m starving, I’m teething, and her place is like a big all-you-can-eat buffet. Everywhere I look is edible stuff. But when I try to take a mouthful she’s in my face again. She doesn’t want me to eat anything. Not clothes. Not nails. Not candles. Not door frames. Not nothing. It’s like everything I know to
be true about the world has suddenly shifted, and now every single idea that I have is a problem. As it happens, I’ve always prided myself on my original thinking. I’m an idea man. But suddenly this woman is telling me that everything I do is wrong.
I get the idea “Let’s pull up the rug and eat the foam-rubber pad” and of course, no, we can’t do that. So then I figure, “Let’s eat all the wires wherever we find them attached to the wall,” and that’s no good. So then I think, “Let’s find a pack of needles behind the bed and chew on them,” and of course, there’s something wrong with that too. And it doesn’t even occur to her that the law of averages would dictate that all these ideas couldn’t possibly be bad. That just maybe she’s wrong occasionally.
Obviously, something else is going on here. I mean, it’s more than a coincidence that she doesn’t want me to pull up her plants or rip her upholstery or eat her books and magazines. It begins to dawn on me that I’m more than just a long, long way from the White House. I mean, not only do I not attend cabinet meetings, but I seem to be stuck in some kind of banana republic here, with her as the pack leader!! (And as far as I can tell, all she has in the way of qualifications is height.) It’s not just the arbitrary restrictions; now when she leaves the house, she locks me up in the kitchen.
The first gate she puts up I can climb, no problem. Even though it’s covered with wire mesh, I can just dead-drop to the floor. And so for at least that one brief shining moment I am actually able to accomplish things that I can point to with pride. For instance, by the time she gets home that day I’ve not only dismantled and consumed most of a telephone, but I’ve also eaten over half of the paperback Toxic Parents: Overcoming Their Hurtful Legacy and Reclaiming Your Life.
Let’s just say she’s not impressed by this. I don’t think she gets the message I’m trying to send her, either. Instead of looking within, she just hires a guy to make the gate more difficult to climb! So now when she goes out, I have no choice but to sit in the kitchen alone, surrounded by mysterious squeaking vinyl food replicas. I don’t understand the full implications of that pork chop, but I do know it’s the toughest, noisiest piece of meat with which I have ever had the misfortune to be imprisoned.
What the Dogs Have Taught Me: And Other Amazing Things I've Learned Page 5