Perpetual Estrogen
Tom "moist towelette" Waters
May 1 , 2008
Estrogen n: a substance (as a hormone) that promotes development of various female characteristics.After living with my future wife for almost four years now, I’ve notice a number of core differences between men and women. I had my suspicions in previous relationships and in my dealings with the opposite sex through the ages, but Lindsay’s confirmed many of my hypotheses without her knowledge that I was bringing crucial intel back to the warfront. I took great care to remove the electrodes before she woke up and stopped spiking her drink water with truth serums when she began to catch on. They are a strange, confusing and fascinating species with a number of universal traits in common. Here, for the first time, I will present my findings.
1. Women Hate Almost All Other Women With a Blinding Rage That Defies Reason:
This perplexes and amuses me in turns. I don’t understand it, but it’s true. Sure, they have friends and same-sex relatives, but they secretly hate all of them. Common interests are scorned, personal hygiene habits are examined under a microscope and intellectual fortitude is brought into question the second they leave each other’s sight. Women will scrutinize and pick their female acquaintances to shreds with a vicious, methodical and brutal intensity. Any other woman is viewed as competition of some form or another and they have an innate talent to smile, hug and air kiss each other and launch a kitchenette’s worth of daggers at each other the second they walk away. You may disagree, but you’d be wrong to, and then I would call you a jackanape. Truly, all women hate almost all other women with a blinding rage that defies reason.2. Women Use Enough Tissues, Kleenex, Toilet Paper And Moisturizing Products To Construct A Pinata The Size Of Wisconsin:
I’m not sure when they’re being used, why or how, but I’ve stocked the bathroom with four rolls of toilet paper only to come up short and hopping through the kitchen with my pants down not three days later looking for reinforcements.Somehow, I have a drawer under my sink that is filled with creams, salves and lotions that I’m incapable of pronouncing or explaining the purposes of. On a few occasions, I’ve caught her applying lotion to her hands when her guard was down before bed, but this doesn’t explain the 462 different tubes of moisturizer. If my hands were dry and I was the sort of person who used moisturizer (which I’m not), logic would dictate that one tube would be enough to do the job until it ran out. 462 tubes of moisturizer is significantly more than one.
Being crass, common and male, I often blow my nose with a paper towel rather than making the long eight foot trek into the bathroom to grab a tissue. This works out well, because there are no tissues to be rationed out to men. We buy two boxes every other month and it’s a minor miracle if I get to use one sheet or tab or whatever the hell you call them. She also keeps a portable package of tissues in her glove compartment for nose emergencies along with moist towelettes. If I sneeze in my car, I will either hunt under the seats for a discarded fast food napkin or wipe my hand off on the avalanche of ATM receipts in my armrest. Maybe it’s a difference of having class and having no class. I have no class, so I can’t differentiate.
3. Women Love To Wear Sweat Pants and Pajamas:
I think sweat pants are the first and final sign that you no longer care about the shape your body is reverting to. There is a strict ’no sweat pants’ policy enforced in my household. She still tries to slip one past the goalie by wearing sweat pants facsimiles only to be vetoed. Sweat pants are unattractive, stuffy and uncomfortable. I’ve also seen a certain cross section of mothers and daughters who go shopping, hop on an airplane flight or run errands in their sweat pants. Perhaps I’m being sexist, but women should only leave the house in leather mini-skirts and six inch pumps. That includes Mother Theresa, even though she’s deceased. Women who wear sweat pants in public look like unattractive slobs. It’s far more socially acceptable to wear the same pair of jeans to any and every social or casual situation until they vaporize off of your body. I’m not talking about anyone in particular, mind you, I’m just generalizing. And women at any age love pajamas, bloomers, jumpers or any evening wear that ends with ’ers’. Lindsay spends her entire weekend in pajamas. I take my shirt off and throw it on the floor before we go to bed. I’m not a ’50s sitcom father and I’m not 12 years old, so my days of wearing pajamas are over.4. Women Will Only Eat Normally In Private:
If you believe that females eat the way they do in restaurants, at work or during family gatherings all the time, you’d be wrong, and I’d call you a jackanape. Call it a symptom of society, but they won’t eat a regular meal in the presence of other people. If it’s a dinner out with friends, they will order one of the healthiest items on the menu and eat a third of it, claiming that they’re stuffed. Two hours later, when no one is looking, they will eat a novelty sized chocolate bar the size of a plasma television and top it off with an entire box of rosemary Triscuits. Rosemary does not enter into my snacking equation. I don’t even know what rosemary is, and I intend to keep it that way. It’s the secret meals that sustain them through the three or four days of exposed, miniature meals. I have no qualms against shoveling a double order of chicken wings in the direction of my mouth and swallowing the bones whole while pouring half of the sauce on my pants. I would do it for a room of spectators if someone else was buying. A lady won’t do that. Damned if I know why, but it’s true.5. Women Clean When They Are Angry and/or When Company Is Coming Over:
Unlike Gene Simmon’s A-Z telephone-book-sized list of women he’s slept with, I can count the women I’ve been with on four hands and count the number I’ve lived with on one. And yet they all went on psychotic housekeeping frenzies before, during and after a fight. If we have an argument, I can eat my dinner off the toilet, the kitchen floor and even the nooks and crannies behind the couch without so much as one dust bunny intruding on my meal. In the span of ten minutes, the dishes are lined up on the rack and making that sparkling ’ting!’ noise you hear in the commercials. If friends are coming over, I just get the hell out of the way because she turns into a Tasmanian Devil with disinfectants. Now if my friends came over and ran a white glove test, they wouldn’t be my friends, but she does it anyway. I think it’s pointless to uphold the illusion that your living quarters are hospital clean all the time. Nobody lives that way except for obsessive compulsives, Martha Stewart and people who can afford a professional cleaning service. Nevertheless, an hour before company, I’m told that we don’t want our guests to think we live like pigs. I am a pig! All of my acquaintances are well aware of this! So who are we fooling? If they don’t like the dust, then they can damn well clean it. Maybe that’s the wrong attitude to have. I’d rather clean pretty well most of the time than have to go on lockdown at T-Minus sixty minutes to company and play catch up, but that’s me.6. Unless They Just Left The Salon, Women Hate Their Hair:
This is a stereotype because it’s true. If it’s curly, they wish it was straight, if it’s blonde, they wish it was purple, and if it’s short, they wish their hair was down to their ankles like Lady Godiva. This probably has a lot to do with the general maintenance and upkeep of long hair. I used to wear mine long and it was a constant pain in the tuccus to groom it every day so that it didn’t look like a crow’s nest. Unfortunately, women with short hair all look like Tom Brokaw, so that’s not a viable option. Unless you want to look like Tom Brokaw. And if they ask you how it looks, back away, jump out of a window, or relocate to another state. Don’t fall into that trap because you’ll lose every time.7. When Women Don’t Shave Their Legs, They Have More Hair Than An Orangutan On Rogain:
8. Women Remember Birthdays, Anniversaries, Christenings And Bar Mitzvahs:
Many people don’t know this, but unless a woman is actively pursuing a man in the beginning stages of a relationship or vacation in Maui, they will go the entire winter season shaving their legs rarely or not at all. The bottom half of their body begins to resemble Clyde from ’Any Which Way But Loose’ and their legs become cactus-like and horrific. Scientists have been unable to determine if this is a defense mechanism to ward off sexual advances from the captive male, a method of gathering heat in colder climates, or total laziness. We’ll just say that five o’clock shadow isn’t just a phenomenon that occurs on your face and leave it at that.
You’ll thank them for this rule later because it will save your ass time and again. I wouldn’t remember my own birthday most years if I didn’t start getting cards in the mail. I don’t know how they do it, but I think it has something to do with writing these events down on what’s referred to as a ‘calendar‘. Somehow they find out when someone’s special event takes place and then transcribe this information into the appropriate slot in their date books and wall calendars. It’s an advanced technique with far-reaching properties I can’t even begin to fathom. They’ve tried to teach me how to do it, but it’s way over my head.9. Women Have An Unhealthy Fixation With Scented Candles, Designer Teas And All For A Dollar Outlets And Boutiques:
To us, they’re columns of wax with inferior lighting in this age of halogen lamps and the 100 Watt light bulb. To them, they’re decorative masterpieces that accent a household with captivating smells like linen, vanilla, spice and other tantalizing scents. I say if they want the smell of fresh linen, they should do the laundry more often! Ha ha! I will never understand the appeal of candles. As Freud said, ’Candles are Candles all the time.’ That’s a direct quote. The only pleasant odors in my household that I really care about are the smell of green peppers and onions sautéing on an open range. Men have less refined olfactory senses, though. We don’t utilize candles for a romantic interlude, a long bath, a quite rainy evening, or a good book on an afternoon alone. If we did, we would be gay. Men have two occasions for lighting candles: Christmas Mass and when the power goes out. There is little to no deviation from this course. But as Marie Antoinette said, ’Let them have their goddamned candles.’ She was a smart woman.And since I’m not British, I don’t get tea either. Perhaps this ties in to the female olfactory glands. Why spend a half hour brewing one fancy cup of tea when you can percolate an entire pot of coffee in five minutes? There’s a nuance that we’re missing here. Teas pretend to have healing properties and a wide range of flavors. It all tastes the same to me. Men only drink tea when there’s three shots of vodka in it or when there is no coffee left in the house and we’re rummaging through the cupboards in a caffeine frenzy. Tea has no place in my lifestyle, but it’s crucial to theirs.
And if you walk in to your local Dollar General, Monsignor 99 Cents, Everything Haphazardly Hung From Hooks For The Vicinity Of A Buck or Random Crap For $1.08 Including Tax, you’ll find a veritable army of women. I wouldn’t recommend walking into any of them, though. That’s enemy territory. They’ve claimed these outlets as their own. I don’t know why you’d want to walk into them because there’s nothing even remotely interesting about them. If you shoveled all of the leftover crafts, wrapping paper, corny knick-knacks and party favors from your third birthday party when your mom made you a coconut birthday cake even though you hate coconuts and you cried in front of all your friends…well, maybe that was just me, but if you dumped all of that garbage with no regard for how it looked into bins and onto shelves in a 10,000 square foot area, you’d have a dollar store. This plays into the different motivators between men and women where shopping is concerned. Men have an objective and a goal to their shopping trips. They go somewhere with an item in mind, capture the flag and return to base. Women go shopping sometimes just to wander around aimlessly for hours on end smelling candles, trying out fragrances and coming up with centerpiece ideas. They often won’t come home with anything! What is the point of that, I ask you? Dollar stores fulfill this basic, female need.
10. Women Don’t Lapse Into A Coma After Sex:
This is once again an issue of genetics. This is one of god’s little jokes. While we’re on the verge of snoring, they start chattering away and sharing delightful stories about work, current events and the misfortunes of their friends. The sexual act energizes them while it reduces us to sawing logs. I’m sure there’s a biological explanation to all of this but it’s not going to change anything. Perhaps the endorphin rush puts us out in order to cope with all the yackety yackety.If you think that there are any exceptions to these rules, then you’re either stupid, wrong or misinformed. Oh, and I’ll call you a jackanapes. If you find these findings sexist or chauvinistic in any way, shape or form, then get in the kitchen and start making my dinner! I still don’t understand the fairer sex, but studying their behavior helps to demystify some of the mysteries. From an anthropological standpoint, if we can dissect their habits, then we’re halfway there to finding a cure for all these maladies. It’s a good thing that men are perfect in every way or I’d have a hell of a time making room for my day job.