July 3 - Friday

Yes, I know it's Friday night, and I'm sitting here working on my website while everyone else is dancing the night away or out drinking or driving outside the city limits to buy fireworks. But hey, did I ever tell you I had a social life? No, I don't think I did.

I'm getting braver. The other day I was at my excuse for a nightclub - otherwise known as "the grocery store," and I was alone so I thought I'd kill a few hours at the magazine rack and then later tell my husband that I took so long coz the person in front of me in line had WIC and foodstamps and a Pulse Pay card... but I couldn't coz there were three teenage people hanging all over the racks.

Okay, I'm not saying that I dislike teenagers. But I will say that a lot of times, when I see them in public, I find myself thinking, "Oh God I hope I never acted like that, and if I did I hope karma has already paid me back for it." So I see them, and I just kinda stop in the aisle with my diaper-laden cart, and they see me and give me the snooty teenage look. And then all the sudden the bigger guy (leader of the herd?) starts saying something all loud (loud-talking bragging) about his truck, and how the other night he was driving said truck, and then for some reason ended up driving on two wheels.

And I'm looking at the blonde chick he says this to, and the Junior Macho Boy at his side, and I'm thinking, "What? They can't find anything better to do?" Coz I would rather just watch a Dukes of Hazzard rerun to listen to some guy living one in his mind. But the chick and the boy are just respectfully quiet, so as I'm hauling my cart around, I mumble, "Yeah, right."

And I'm pretty brave now, so there's a possibility the guy even heard me say it.

So then the other day I was reading these magazines. They were called Men's Health. (I got them for free at the library. Don't laugh. I was broke and jonesing for a magazine fix real bad.) And I will admit that parts of them were amusing. But mostly they sucked. I would say that about 1/3 of each issue was devoted to bitching about the covers of magazines aimed at women. Like, they'd be like:

You've seen it on the covers of their magazines - "How To Get Him To Talk to You," "How To Get Him To Spend More Time With You," "How To Make Him More Romantic," "How To Make Him Quit Hitting You When He's Wasted"...
Women are out to manipulate us!
While it's true that women are gorgeous, most of them need to learn that there are fundamental differences between the sexes. It goes back to the caveman days. A man doesn't want to "communicate." He wants to come home from an evening of velcro-wall climbing, grab a cold microbrew, sit on the couch watching Friends until he works up the energy to have sex with you while pretending you're Jennifer Anniston, and then conk out on the futon. Why? Because men are HUNTERS.

And it's like, first of all...

Wait a sec. Before I get into it, let me just say: it's not that I dislike men. Coz I don't. Really, I don't. Some of my closest friends and relatives are men. And not all men are jerks. And not all women are NOT jerks. Believe me, I realize that. Now, back to the complaining.

It's like, first of all, QUIT GETTING YOUR INFORMATION ABOUT WOMEN FROM THE COVER OF COSMO!

Second: GIVE ME A FRICKING BREAK WITH THE CAVEMAN STUFF, ALREADY!

And no, I'm not judging men on the basis of the cover of Men's Health. I'm just saying that certain writers who write for Men's Health and Esquire and George and Penthouse need to quit getting on my nerves. And everyone needs to stop talking about men being hunters and women being gatherers. That just burns my butt. That is so stupid. Give me a break. UGH!!!

Let me break it down in unordered list HTML command form:

• How do you even know men were the ones who always hunted? Were you there?
• What does sitting at a desk all day making several thousands of dollars a year have to do with hunting?
• If men have "hunter instincts," does that mean they can be airlifted from their desks and dropped into the African savannahs with nothing but a loincloth and a sharp stick... and those instincts will kick in?
• I keep hearing people say that "Nature" intended men to be "the hunters," and that therefore women should be understanding when their man wants to "go into his cave" or "go out drinking with his buddies," or "go sleep with any woman who will let him," because men are Hunters and woman are Gatherers and that's the way it was meant to be.
  My question is: if Mother Nature or God or whoever wanted the human race to survive, why would he/she program men with instincts that would piss women off? Why? Huh? Why? Or is that the point? Is the Earth so overpopulated that new generations of men are evolving into a species of selfish jerks who excuse themselves with lame-ass caveman theories, eventually annoying women to the point that no one ever gets pregnant again and cockroaches take over the world?

I don't know. Whatever. All I know is, the fans of Men's Health need to date the fans of Cosmo, because they are just alike. The funniest part of both those mags is that they're always recruiting writers of the other sex to write about What Men/Women Really Want In Bed. And I'm like, "Uh, if you are too embarrassed to just ask your sex partner what he/she wants in bed, maybe you shouldn't be sleeping with his/her ass."

So I'm in a pretty good mood lately. I've been growing plants in pots on my porch. I want to get into the whole gardening thing. Last week we were riding around in our van and we took a shortcut behind this big craft supply store called KraftWerld* and we saw that someone had dumped off a really big pile of cedar mulch. And a pile of nice smooth rocks, too. So we went back later and got a whole bunch of both.
[*NOTE: THE NAME OF THE CRAFT SUPPLY STORE HAS BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT MY MULCH STASH.]

So I think that was a good omen. And none of my plants have died since then.

When I was a teenage person I used to sing in the church choir. There was this one song that we choir members didn't really like, but the congregation really loved it. It was like the only one they'd actually sing along with, and they'd clap their hands and everything instead of shoving out the door like a bunch of cattle right after the priest said the last amen. It went like this:

"In the-uh morning the sun will arise
And SHE-E-E-ED its warmth upon the E-A-A-A-A-ARTH
It is the beginning of a bri-i-i-i-ighter day,
A ti-i-i-i-i-ime for our rebi-i-i-i-irth

A-RISE, come SING to the MORning
PRAISE the LORD every DA-A-AY!
LIVE his LOVE every MOMENT OF OUR LIVES
Say YE-E-E-ES
In every wa-a-a-a- AY
Every da-a-a-a-ay.
[kick-ass bassline by Albert, who also played the tambourine with his foot because I was too dumb to play it on rhythm and sing at the same time.]

I don't know why I felt like telling y'all that. That's the song we used to have to sing, though. It was in the Glory and Praise hymnal. There were only a few of us in the choir, and we had guitars and the electric bass and mikes and flutes and even drums for a while, but then we got this new priest. He was nice and all, but he was kind of a control freak and even though the choir KICKED BUTT every week, he wanted us to disband and form a children's choir instead, coz he thought we were getting to be too "performance oriented" and not very churchy or whatever. I guess he didn't like it when Alice kept sneaking out the back door of the sachristy during the sermon so she could finish eating her breakfast taco or whatever. And also there was some mess about how our piano player was Baptist instead of Catholic, but everyone said it was really coz he was gay that he got fired. So that wasn't very nice. So I went up to the priest one day and I said,

"Hey, man, you don't know what kinda stuff you're bringing down on yourself, man. Someday you're gonna be sitting around in the rectory wishin' you had been the one to stick around. Coz this band's goin' straight to the TOP, padre!"

And I was right. We made the best-selling choir album in the world and we became stars.

Just kidding.

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