One Down. One to Go.

I wrote the following on a Friday several weeks ago, but chose not to post it. Looking at it again, though, I find it amusing enough to go ahead and post it. For the record: I got the present for my wife and she liked it! Hilariously enough, we've been together for five years and I have managed to be so sick we couldn't go out on three of her birthdays. I was just well enough to take her out this year. Last year, we were in the middle of a move and were exhausted when we went out. Needless to say, my health on her birthday has become something of a running joke.

* * *

Well, but for minor tweaking, I just finished writing up a grant I needed to have ready to turn in by Monday. So that deadline shouldn't be a problem. But then there's the other deadline, and I'm blogging it here lest I forget:

Buy your wife a birthday gift!

There will be no further indulgence in my writing hobby until this mission is accomplished. There will be no trip to the computer store to pick up a router. There will be no research on or comparisons of broadband ISPs. There will be no home brewing! I will not only avoid the doghouse, I will make sure my that my sweetie has a happy birthday.

But why must I remind myself here? I love my wife deeply, but I am (except for my taste in beer), something of a "High Life Man." (But not lazy like the example ad at that link implies. I take out the trash, and without having to be asked. My favorite of these commercials shows the HLM shaking his head at the sight of a poorly-driven SUV. The voice-over: "A High Life Man knows a station wagon when he sees one.")

But back to my predicament as a HLM. What is the first word of the bold-faced sentence above? Very good! I knew you could read! Yes. It's (nose wrinkling) that four-letter word (Shhh! He's on a roll!) B-U-Y! By implication, this means I have to (cringe) enter a store!

For any woman who wants to know why men don't like to shop: This is the post for you! I will start out by noting that many women will accuse men, tongue in cheek or not, of being "unable to multitask." This isn't strictly true, but like many other stereotypes, there's a grain of truth therein. That grain is, I think, that women are often much more perceptually-oriented than men, and that men generally find problem-solving more engaging. (The latter demands focus to the exclusion of distracting things, like sensory data.) I learned this the hard way. Before I hooked up with my wife, I was under the wildly mistaken impression that I was one of those rare men who likes to shop.

I'd been divorced for awhile and was in grad school (read: living on next to nothing). Shopping had become something of a game, whose object was efficiency in the financial and time domains. (Any woman reading this already thinks I'm from Mars. But isn't that part of the title of a book anyway? It's probably available at Half-Price books by now. Or even Quarter-Price Books! Houston has such a store, and I once got a hard-bound copy of The Joy of Cooking there for seven bucks.) In the financial domain, the name of the game was finding the most outrageous bargain. This could mean buying used, but it often meant buying in bulk. If I did the latter right, I could cut down on the number of trips I had to make. This was part of winning in the time domain. The other part was to shop quickly.

(And, from the link above, I have just learned that if I could just plan ahead, I could avoid stores altogether and do pretty well. Maybe next time.)

In other words, "shopping" wasn't about looking at every single red blouse in a display, or trying on every hat. It wasn't about "just browsing," either. These are all sensory pleasures that women can obtain from shopping and to which men can barely relate. (Shopping for computer equipment is about as close as it gets, and even this is mostly about what problems some gadget can solve. ) And shopping wasn't a social event, either. Anything other than going solo introduced an unacceptable drag coefficient that would grind the process down to an unacceptable snail's pace. In other words, my enjoyment of what I was errantly calling "shopping" was of a sport unknown to "females of the opposite sex," as HLM Popeye might put it.

I'm no longer in post-divorce survival mode, so the "shopping" game is mostly over. My wife also likes to run errands with me, so I've become somewhat accustomed to longer periods of the heavy sensory bombardment that trips to the store entail. But I have to admit that I'm glad she usually goes to the mall with female friends. For my mission, once inside a store, remains the same as it has always been: to get out. And as quickly and as cheaply as possible! Shopping is like a job you don't want -- except that time "on the job" represents money lost rather than earned.

So it's off to shop I go tomorrow. Not so quickly that I don't find something nice, and not so cheaply, either. I'd much rather do something with my grey matter or my hands or both. I'm doing this for her.

And if she doesn't like it, she can spend the day at the mall with her friends to return it!

-- CAV