Justice O’Connor: “Truthfully, I’m not sure that this was ever an intelligent exercise of appellate power—”
Justice Thomas: “Florida? Ahhh, Indian River fruit. Best stuff in the world. I don’t even mind the seeds it’s so good. Hey, one time I was in Florida and I got one of those little gift shop gizmos where you pour the whisky in the top of the little boy’s head and you push a button on his backside and he pee-pees the whisky right into your glass. Man oh man, that was funny!”
Justice Scalia: “If my head wasn’t attached, good one, uh, uh, Mandy.”
Men don’t have the capacity to talk like women do. Another study, this one by Working Mother magazine, reported that women discuss an average of forty topics when they get together for a typical night out, while men discuss just four.
Even with my regulation-issue girl math brain, I can cipher that to be ten times as many subjects discussed. Not that I’m shocked. Men have the whole conversation thing condensed to the final four: beer, sports, women, and work.
I decided to test the truth of this study during a recent night with some gal pals. Lisa, Michelle, Susan, and I have gotten together one night a month since we all attended pregnant aerobics class together back in ’97. Lisa calls us PALs (pregnant aerobic ladies), which is cute and the exact kind of thing that a man would never, ever think of.
I started the conversation ball rolling by telling the absolutely true story reported to me by a friend who found herself in gastrointestinal hell after eating a bad fish taco. Turns out, not long after she ate the taco, she decided to drive over to her friend’s house across town to return a very nice casserole dish she had borrowed for a dinner party.
As she was driving, her belly began to make horrible noises and she was in such distress, she pulled her minivan over to the curb. As sweat beads popped on her forehead, she channeled the wisdom of her foremothers, looked around the van for a solution, and spied the casserole dish. She pounced on it, hiked up her cute little Talbot’s jumper, and did a BM right there in the casserole dish.
After she was finished, she politely placed the glass lid on top of the dish, pulled over to the nearest Dumpster, and gently dropped her doody dish inside. Because this was in an inner-city area that was known for Dumpster diving at night, she said she nearly wept at the thought that somebody who was hungry and homeless might happen upon her doody casserole and get the shock of his life.
Because she was a good Southern girl, raised right, don’tchaknow, she wanted to write a little note on top saying Do Not Open but she didn’t have a pen or paper and it wasn’t the kind of neighborhood you wanted to hang around in.
That got things off to a great start, as you might imagine! The rest of the evening we discussed, in order: liposuction; what kind of a woman actually gives another woman a Brazilian wax, because you know you have to have your calves touching your ears for that thing; the new mayor’s performance; a foolproof Caesar dressing recipe; at what age boys should stop wearing anything smocked (consensus: age three); how we knew Angelina and Billy Bob wouldn’t last when they started wearing each other’s blood round their necks, which just meant they were trying too hard and they’d end up shipping that poor Cambodian boy they adopted back like he was a busted barstool from Ikea.
This was followed by… facial hair; Afghanistan; facial hair in Afghanistan; how sistah-girls can get away with eating anything when they wear that sweaty-ass burkah so it’s not all bad; how it’s really awkward to see someone you know in the grocery store and then you have to think of something new to say to them when you keep meeting them on every aisle or else just pretend to really need something on the bottom shelf until they can go away.
Shoot, that’s thirteen and the bread basket hasn’t even arrived yet. We followed with: Enron; Ronnie Reagan; da-doo-ron-ron; how to pronounce Ilyanla’s name and wonder if she signs her checks with a little exclamation point like on TV; speeding tickets; the comeback of fishnet pantyhose…
There was more of course: how pineapple salsa always gives me bad dreams; is brown or gray the new black; why nobody RSVPs for a kid’s birthday party and how that makes you crazy; the trend of sending invitations to big-budget parties for engaged couples and then, on the same invitation, hitting you up to help pay for it (consensus: tacky beyond words); liposuction (well, it had been an hour); Russell Crowe; crow’s feet; the Black Crowes (this is typical estrogen stream-of-consciousness stuff; try to hang); Chelsea’s sleek new bob; Sarah Jessica Parker’s sleek new bob; how we’d have kept the curls; the Winter Olympics; how somebody’s brother-in-law used to live in Salt Lake City and said they do, too, drink coffee out there; how our waiter looks exactly like Joey on Friends.
That’s close to forty and we haven’t even seen the dessert menu yet. Face it, my hons: Girls rule. And we also never shut up.
4
BIG SCREEN,
Big Tallywacker
Shoot, Everybody Knows That
The day my husband arrived home with a shiny big-screen TV, I finally understood male TV envy. But first things first.
“Can you give me a hand with this?” he asked.
Slipping into TV mode, I announced, “Survey says! I’d have an easier time trying to pry Louis Anderson’s big butt out of the truck than unloading that thing.”
“It’s…not…as… heavy…as…it… looks,”he huffed, tiny drops of blood spilling from his eye sockets as he pulled and tugged one corner of the box. It didn’t budge. In fact, the TV seemed to shrink deeper into the depths of the truck as though it wondered what kind of nut house it was going to spend between ten and twelve years of fully warranteed service in.
I told my husband that I would “surely bust an ovary” if I lifted anything that heavy. The mention of female parts sent him scurrying for man-type neighbors to help, just as I knew it would. Women have long realized that the mere mention of their “females” can get them out of just about anything, the notable exception being a very insensitive North Carolina highway patrolman who once refused to believe I was speeding because “my uterus told me to.”
Moments later, my husband arrived with two burly neighbors who had interrupted their Saturday afternoon football watching to help out. There are certain things that men simply can’t resist, with watching a game on a big screen or seeing Anna Kournikova eat a banana being at the tip-top of the list.
It did not escape me that it was going to take two WWF types to do what my husband had expected me to do.
There was a brief moment of panic after we all had some trouble locating the English instructions for hooking all the gizmos into each other. I don’t know why there can’t be an English-only manual available when you buy anything requiring assembly.
Is some weird political correctness run amok responsible for the fact that even your waffle iron comes with page after page of operating instructions ensuring that even Sanskrit devotees can enjoy a fluffy Belgian now and again? I bought a curling iron last week with operating instructions including every imaginable language, living and dead, including little hieroglyphics of what looked like a curly-haired deer leaping through a forest.
While the boys tore packaging apart looking for the English instructions, it occurred to me that it’s less about being PC and more about economics. It would cost much more to print owners’ manuals in different languages. So voila! Bravo! Wunderbar! Hop Sing!
Maybe I hate plowing through all these languages because it’s an in-your-face reminder that after three years of high school Spanish, the only thing I know how to say is “Oh no! I forgot my notebook!” or the equally useful “Hello. Can John and Mary come to the party at the public toilet?”
While the guys hunched over the (hallelujah!) English instructions, I recalled the Bookshelves That Nearly Ended My Marriage. The instructions were folded accordian style. Step 1 was right up front but steps 2–256 were scattered all over the place. I spent hours flapping and folding with my husband, finally giving up after the English instructions morphed into what
appeared to be a rare Hopi Indian translation. Perhaps the Hopi, a proud people, share my fondness for cheaply made particle-board shelving. Perhaps not.
Once the TV was finally hooked up (the “little woman” got to clean up all the packing materials, natch), the guys sat down in reverent awe.
“That sure is a good picture,” one said.
“And big, too,” said the second.
“Yep. It’s good and big,” said my husband. “You know they threw in a DVD player with purchase.”
“Naw!!!!” they howled in unison.
Then, and I knew this was coming: “How late you think they’re open?”
While the football game raged in our small living room (“You can practically smell their sweat,” my husband noted, choking back tears of happiness), the mood grew solemn.
“I only got a nineteen-incher, can you believe that?” one grumbled.
“Sure can,” crowed my husband. “Until today, we just had a twenty-one.”
Clearly we had moved up in the world, just as surely as the Jeffersons had achieved that “deeeeluxe apartment in the sky.”
Since we got the big TV, our neighbors like to joke that they’ve canceled their premium cable because they can just watch our TV from across the street and read the actors’ lips.
Har-dee-har-har.
During the day, I get to watch Days of Our Lives on our new humungous TV. As loyal as I am to Days, I can’t say I was surprised to read recently that there has been a big decline in soap-opera viewing.
Let’s face it. Soaps used to be downright educational. Where else would you learn about the sorrows so many of us face in our daily lives: extramarital affairs, alcoholism, child abuse, and, oh yes, the constant threat that an evil twin will resurface after twenty years on a remote Pacific island to take over our family and thriving medical practice?
The evil twin was about as wild and silly as it got back in the good ol’ days of soapdumb. Not anymore.
Today there is real shame in admitting you still watch the soaps. Not too long ago, I asked some play-group moms if anyone had managed to catch Days and their looks told me that I was as uncool as Dynasty shoulder pads.
Okay. So soaps don’t move very quickly. Yesterday, for instance, on Days, there was sweet and pretty Hope Brady telling dim and buff John Black (who hasn’t been the same since the evil Stefano DeMira took his brain out and washed it) that she must know about her past.
“I must know, John! I must know about my past. Why don’t you understand?”
“Be careful what you wish for,” said John Black, raising a soap-opera brow and looking mysterious. “You just might get it.”
I realized that this was the exact same conversation the two of them had one year earlier. In soap land, wedding ceremonies last four to six weeks and a prom night can go for six months so this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Paradoxically, a kid who is in kindergarten one month can mutate into a surly teenager with a pregnant girlfriend in the next.
(Hope Brady to surly teen dad: “Soooo, how long have you known this girl and are you sure you really know anything about… her past?”)
In desperation, soaps have started adding a lot of ooga-booga ghost storylines with voodoo, witchcraft, and, in the case of one, a Chucky-style creepy doll that comes to life. They’ve given Erica Kane a lesbian daughter to lure the gay audience, and you can be sure that, sooner or later, Erica will have her daughter’s brain taken out and washed so she can live a decent, normal life with seven husbands just like her mama.
There is talk that Days will soon be courting Hispanic viewers by including more Latino storylines. This time next year, I just know I’ll kick back in front of the big TV and hear Hope Brady whining about her “el past-o” and John Black will be advising her that it was “muy mal es verdad.”
Which, as I recall from high school Spanish, means you have to have correct change for the dryers. Or something like that.
5
SICK OF SEEING MEN
at Those “Couples” Baby Showers?
Tell ’Em About the Time You Lost Your Mucus Plug in the Winn-Dixie
A pregnant friend told me her husband has written a “birth plan” to present to the obstetrician at her next checkup.
Men love devising these birth plans because it gives them something to do in the waiting room besides pretending to read the magazine articles their wives keep shoving at them. (“Rupert, read this about inverted nipple syndrome; it’s fascinating!”) Birth plans also distract men from dwelling on the age-old question of why some women seem to recruit armies of small, whiny children to bring with them to every appointment.
My pregnant friend, Amy, asked me about my birth plan, and I said it had been real simple.
“Really?” she said. “Harold has several pages of plans with supporting documentation and footnotes. He’s amazing. Did you manage to keep yours under two pages?”
“Well, uh, we didn’t really write that much down,” I said.
Did I have the heart to tell Amy the truth? That my “birth plan” consisted of one line hastily scrawled on the back of a maternity pantyhose carton? That it read “Drugs. Lots of ’em and keep ’em coming”?
She thought I was kidding and began to chuckle. And then she said that hormones-are-eating-my-brain thing that newly pregnant women say: “Oh, I don’t want any drugs. I just want to have as natural an experience as possible. I don’t want to miss a single second!”
Sure you do. Listen to me. If I could have, I would have been sitting on the third-base line at Dodger Stadium, roughly three thousand miles from that hospital, eating a sausage dog and swilling Bud Light during my kid’s birth.
You don’t want to miss a second? True. You want to miss hours. I’ll let you in on a little secret, hons. The whole delivery thing is vastly overrated. Sure, you think you’re going to lie up there with Mozart softly playing from the portable CD player hubby so thoughtfully packed. He’s going to be rubbing your back with tennis balls rolled up in a sock while you speak in loving tones about the wonderment that is taking place in your body, your lives.
He’s going to gently spoon ice chips into your alarmingly dry and crusty mouth while murmuring that you are, without a doubt, the bravest, most wonderful woman in the world.
As the time draws near, you experience some discomfort, surely, perhaps even some pain, but this is more than countered by the presence of your dear partner telling you to “Breathe, darling, just like in class.”
A doctor will enter the room, and softly say, “It’s time.” Then, after a few soap-opera birth-scene squeals, for which you apologize profusely, presto-whammo, you’ve got a baby.
Birth plans are silly because they give the illusion that you have any control at all over a situation that is completely beyond your control.
I didn’t say this to Amy, who has watched way too many episodes of A Baby Story on The Learning Channel and is convinced she wants a water birth. At home. With a midwife.
Amy insisted on wearing regular clothes throughout her pregnancy just because “all the pregnant celebrities do it.”
Amy wasn’t alone. Although I was happy to see the demise of the “Baby” shirts with the arrow pointing crotch-ward (yecch!) and the dancing bear casual/Bo Peep– collared business wear that used to define maternity fashion (as though just because we were pregnant our IQs had inexplicably plunged 75 points), tight clothes on pregnant women look, well, tacky.
I saw Jane Leeves (Frasier’s Daphne Moon) at the Emmys stuffed in a painted-on sleeveless sheath that made her look like the cover girl for White Trash Weekly. All she needed was some Vi-enna sausages and Saltines and a True Story magazine.
Amy said she was proud for the world to watch her blooming body. I told her that while she thought she looked chic and fabulous, she really looked just like the tired-ass boa constrictor at the Tote-Em-In Zoo right after he had his once-a-month bunny rabbit lunch.
I finally gave up. Amy was way granola. I knew she would plant
the afterbirth under a tree in her backyard and nurse her kid until it was using words like “pontificate.”
She was one of the first of my friends to insist on a couples baby shower. I’ve been to a half dozen of these now, and the men always wear that frozen look of horror that is usually reserved for when they discover that ESPN’s showing the world figure skating championships.
Men have no place at baby showers. They can never figure out how to retrieve a mini-pizza from beneath the puffy fold-out stork centerpiece and it’ll break your heart to watch ’em try.
Recently, I took the dad-to-be aside and gave him some tips: “Here’s the drill. You open the gift, hold it up, and squeal something like, ‘It’s beautiful. Oh, thank you so much. It’s exactly what we wanted!’”
I even told him how you have to pass it to the person beside you so it can make the long, strange trip around the room and everyone can repeat the exact same comments. (“Why, yes! This is the most precious and darling breast pump I’ve ever seen!”)
This dad-to-be finished his beer, burped, and said, “Huh? Yeah, okay. Got it.”
My duty done, I returned to my rented chair and watched him help his wife open an adorable bib. He held it aloft—so far, so good—and said, “Wow. Where the hell did you get this thing?”
This is why no man should be at any party that ends in the “shower” word.
It’s not their fault. We’ve had practice. At bridal showers, we women can gush worthy of an Oscar over a crocheted toilet paper cozy.
The men who go to these showers always abandon their buddy at the first announcement that it’s present time. Utter the phrase “mucus plug” or debate the merits of Baby Bjorn over Snugli and they leave him like a wounded animal, fleeing to the room with the big TV or the deck, where they can bond over a few “foamers.”
Amy’s Harold had done better than most at their shower, probably because, as she frequently pointed out, “He is very much in touch with his feminine side,” causing his buddies to snicker and make tent tits by pulling on their Polo knits.
We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier Page 9