I’m filching a filcher. It appears Esquire magazine, Suburban Kamikaze and Simply Nutmeg all have some things they want to teach the male of our species, describing 10 things we don’t know about women. While that may be true, I think there may be a few things women don’t know about men. Lemme explain.

1. We don’t understand why we need to ask several hundred times if something is wrong. Is it really that hard to answer the first time? Is it that you want us to prove that we love you and are truly interested before you answer? Can we instead prove it by sticking a flaming needle into one of our butt cheeks instead of having to ask the same question a bajillion times? It’ll get the issue resolved quicker and for us, it’ll be less painful, too.
2. Every man, no matter how strong, stoic, successful, self-sufficient or self-confident, has the desire to be taken care of on some level. Would it kill you to tell us we’re brilliant every once in awhile? Would it kill you to wear just one of the many pairs of novelty panties we’ve bought you once in awhile? We promise you won’t have to wear them for long.
3. If we’d known the thing that happened 7 months ago was going to come up in a fight today, we’d have been taking notes back then. ‘Cause that thing you never forget? We forgot it a few minutes after it happened, and bringing it up now is like a verbal sucker punch. We have no chance against it. (Maybe you could have told us when we asked seven months ago if something was wrong?)
4. (for moms) We don’t give you enough credit for what you do with the kids. We know that. We won’t tell you this, but even though we love our kids with all our hearts, 90 minutes alone with them and we’re looking for the door. Leaving us with the kids more often will only help remind us of the great things you do.
5. We know the “cleaning the house is an aphrodesiac” claim is a scam. But we’ll still fall for it if it’s been long enough.
6. We always picture you naked. With the lemon-yellow rays of an early morning sun striking your beautiful, mussed morning hair, we’re picturing you naked. Reaching up to grab a fruit cup from the top shelf for snack time, your sweater stretching, baring just an inch of your midriff, we’re picturing you naked. Seeing your hair swept in waves and eddies down the nape of your neck, we’re picturing you naked. In the shower? We’re totally peeking over the curtain at you naked. We’re. Always. Thinking. About. You. Naked. But you already knew that one.
7. The amount of effort we’ll put into wooing you into a night of intimacy declines in proportion to our increase in age. With kids and jobs and dolls and poop and dogs and noise and endless dishes, as time goes by we know that the odds of our success go from that of a $2 scratch-off when we were kids, to winning Powerball now. We’re just playin’ the odds.
8. We don’t like needing a variable decision tree when faced with telling you whether an outfit makes you look fat, so we’re always going to say that it doesn’t.
9. Our desire for you is not tied to your weight. It’s what you do with what you have and how you make us feel that gets our eyes popping, tongue unfurling and foot stomping the ground like it’s trying to scratch an itch.
10. You hate it when we picture you naked. You’ll hate it worse if we stop.

11. Men are smarter in many ways.  Proof?  We’re smart enough not to claim to be smarter at everything, and smart enough to keep quiet about it.

I’m curious for some opinions. Today the Scripps National Spelling Bee is being aired live on ESPN. I’d be happy to argue with someone about whether competitive spelling is a sport, deserving of coverage on ESPN, but I’m looking for a different opinion.

A few years ago I recall hearing about how either the champion or several of the runners-up were home schooled. And in one of the last few years, 5 of the top 10 finalists were home schooled. (I’d have more data, but Scripps seems to want to guard previous Bee data like it’s the Dharma Project.)

In the United States, 1.7 percent of children are home schooled.

Obviously their representation at the highest level of spelling is way out of proportion.

To what would you attribute this?

I think this blog is affecting my business. I’m not sure if it’s in a good way or not.

When you blog, do you ever get caught up in a vibe? Say you go read i am bossy and get a chuckle from her third person self-deprecation. Then you stop over to The Wink and read something saucy, and then you get a final guffaw from the Well Read Hostess. You get swept up in the tide of humor. Feeling comedic and snarky, you go over to your own blog and start playing fast and loose with a few f-bombs and some questionable topics. Before you know it, this lemme-show-you-how-funny-I-am attitude is permeating everything you do that day; from your interaction with your spouse and kids, to the clerk at the store.

And then you return that call to a prospective client. She isn’t home, so you leave a message - “Sorry I missed your call, Ms. Client. I didn’t stop out at your home today, so whoever your neighbor saw at the door wasn’t me. Maybe it was a Jehovah’s Witness and you lucked out by not being home.” *chuckle*

(pause)

“Um, hopefully you’re not a Jehovah’s Witness.”

“Uh…”

“Callmebackwhenyougetachance. Okthxbye.”

Pshheeeeewwwwwwwwwww!

Did you hear that? It’s the wind leaving that great big snark balloon after you realize you’ve carried your blog life a bit too far into your real life.

I’m working on designs tonight.

When I’m sitting at the drafting table I’ll often have the TV in my office running in the background; white noise to help me focus, or an occasional distraction from the task in front of me. Tonight Spike TV is playing Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. With my back to the TV I heard a couple bars of the Star Wars theme, a staccato blast of trumpets and trombones warning of a climactic scene, transporting back in time about twenty five years, back to when I owned the Star Wars theme on 45. (Yes, I’m that old.)

I was in my early teens and never had any money, so the only records I had were ones my parents gave me. They’d given me the Star Wars 45 as a gift, the aural bookend to a gift a year or two earlier, the theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I’d play those records, my few cassettes and the radio on a small, mostly plastic, all-in-one gray box of a stereo. With electrical tape over the red “Power” and green “Stereo” indicator lights so as not to alert my parents to my blatant bedtime rule-breaking, I’d plug in my Pioneer headphones and late into the night I’d listen to those records or the cassettes of music I’d lifted from my favorite radio station. Or once in a while every time I could, I’d follow the edict of the raging hormones in my teenage body and navigate the FM dial to find the queen of FCC-approved sex talk at the time, Dr. Ruth Westheimer. I’d listen in titillated gravity as young men would call in and describe the obvious coital problems associated with being so large as to need a third leg for their jeans, or young women calling in to find out if it was normal for their boyfriends to request them to perform sundry depraved acts with/on/to them.

There I was, all alone, late at night, still years away from losing my virginity, thinking about but not having any sex.

Fast forward 25 years later and here I am, almost 40, two young children and one small business.  It’s again late at night, and now thanks to that little flashback, I’m thinking about sex.  Again.  But with being up past midnight many nights working on designs and Diane usually exhausted from chasing the kids around the house and the town all day, I realize that it’ll again be a long while before the planets align and our schedules, energy levels and desires will coalesce for an evening of carnal pleasure.

I feel 13 again.

hurray.

And you thought I was kidding.