Confessions of a Male Shopper

Posted on December 11, 2012 by enthusiasmiscontagious

It’s Christmas time again, the season of brotherly shoving. If you think shopping at your local department store is a nightmare, try the mall. I call it, “holiday spawning”. You literally fight your way through a mass of humanity, only to get verbally abused at the customer service desk, walk 10 miles looking for your car in the cavernous parking lot, then survive the commute home. It’s there where you dump off your load of gifts, and promptly drop dead from exhaustion. Yes, I do know what a salmon feels like.

Of course, nothing is as difficult as trying to find the “perfect” gift for your significant other. I know I’m not the only man who has walked into a store and looks as if he’s about to take the bar exam without studying.

My feeble attempt in the art of shopping for my wife occurred in a women’s store recently. The store was holding a gift shop night strictly for men. It was like a therapy group for dysfunctional gift-buying men. I knew this trip would be less stressful than most after I read the theme banner, “No questions too dumb”.

Everything on display was user friendly for men. The perfume counter used only scratch-in-sniff stickers since most men only know how to open things with a pop-top lid. Even the dress aisle was ideal. To determine your wife’s size, mannequins from size small to registry of motor vehicles were placed in line. 99% of the men had to embrace the mannequin models to figure out their wife’s size.

Despite my ignorance, I was most pleased that I came to a decision-any decision- without the aide of my wife. So, what did I buy? An expensive dress size, 4. I determined that while she might not like the dress, she will be impressed that I felt she was worth the expense. Also, I know she’s not a size 4, but if she believes I see her as such, she’ll really love me.

Now, what do I do next year? I’m already sweating on that question.

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New Form of Sex Education

Posted on December 9, 2012 by enthusiasmiscontagious

It’s comical how parents and school districts tackle the tough subject of teaching youth about responsible relationships. As you can surmise, I’m speaking about the increasing number of young school aged children having babies. Each week I hear lectures, read books, and listen to disagreements over how to address and solve this problem. In my estimation, the experts are going about it all the wrong way.

Rather than a student lugging around a Betsy Wetsy doll that simulates a real baby, or make a male student walk around with a bag of bird seed strapped around his waist to simulate pregnancy, I suggest an alternative. I think school districts should teach classes that simulate real-life experiences. If I taught school, my mandatory classes would include subjects like this:

Infant Bonding 101
Every night for a 30-day period, play a tape of a screaming and fussy infant just as the student starts to doze off at night. Play it each night additionally at odd hours to simulate colic.

Diaper Simulation and Intervention
Assign a student (who is designated a child) to visit a local cow pasture and roll in a meadow muffin from head to toe and report back to class. Cleaning of the student must be done while the designated student father is in a suit, and the designated student mother is in high heels and pearls. Extra credit is given if the “parents” remain clean.

Repetitive Pickup- Cleaning after a Child
This class requires participants to work in pairs. To authenticate a child’s bedroom, step-one requires a small explosion to be set off in a toy filled room scattered with finger paints, crayons, and matchbox cars. Step-two, one student will immediately clean up the aftermath, including the walls, and return the room to it’s original state in a timely manner. Repeat the process as necessary to reinforce repetitiveness over an 8 hour period. Supplies needed: duct tape, Mr. Clean, Tylenol, and a rag.

Learning to Walk after Childbirth
All students must drink six glasses of water before they go to bed. (This exercise places their bladder in the same age bracket as a pregnant mother’s at 3 am). When the student gets up in the middle of the night to go to the restroom in their usual sleepy stupor, strew Legos and Jacks all over the floor. Stepping on one of these is closely akin to placing your corn in a vice grip.

Spoon Feeding Techniques
Each student must stand at the end of a leaf blower and carefully spoon a bowl of oatmeal and blended bananas into the blower’s end when it is running. The exercise simulates a child’s reaction to foods they don’t like. Extra credit is given to those student parents whose hair retains it’s original shape and color.

The final exam consists of one exercise. You have no money. Without the aid of parents, friends, cell phone, internet or television, entertain yourself and your baby for four weeks straight. This exercise will be accomplished while living in a tent. Now this is education!

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I’m not a Star, I like it that Way

Posted on December 7, 2012 by enthusiasmiscontagious

Are you one of the millions of people while standing in the grocery store line that’s tempted to peruse the weekly gossip magazines? I mean, how can you not pick up the silly thing when you see an outer space martian in the Oval Office shaking hands with the president with the caption, “Alien endorses the President”. I am now convinced more than ever that the Mayan calender wasn’t prophesying the end of the world, but the end of snack cakes as we know it. The demise of Hostess.

These yellow journalism papers have all the sincerity of a Hollywood agent’s heart and all the veracity of a congressman’s press conference. The way they hound and follow people to get pictures and stories is insidious. I think at least one of them should have the guts to have as it’s slogan, “Our news comes from good stalk”!

I am so glad my life is mundane. I wouldn’t want to be the center of gossip with my every move. Besides, you’re never safe even from a distance. All their pictures are captured by photographers who have lenses bigger than water cooler bottles. This week I saw the indignities one magazine inflicted on it’s intended victims. It was nothing but famous stars in bathing suits at the beach. It wasn’t the ones we would think were attractive and tasteful. No, in some of these pictures, the stars looked like the Good Year blimp in a Speedo. I know if you’re the size of Orson Welles and you want to wear a minuscule bathing suit, can’t just the people at the beach suffer? Why do I want to see that dimpled body on the front page of the magazine while I’m purchasing food no less? While I was tempted to place all my groceries back from being nauseated, it did remind me I forgot something. I went back to get a large container of cottage cheese.

From now on, I will force myself to look away even if the headline reads, “Hillary Clinton pregnant” or “Elvis is alive and running a donut shop in Las Cruces” No, I’ll take the high road. I’ll only accept the most trusted sources in America; Like Better Homes and Gardens. I’ve always wanted to know how to entertain a large family during the holidays where everyone loves the food and conflicts never happen.

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Building A Christmas Float

Posted on December 4, 2012 by enthusiasmiscontagious

If you use a Christmas tree bulb on anything other than your own Christmas tree, it has a half life of only three days. I reached this conclusion as I was working on my employers Christmas Light Parade float. How is it that on Thursday every bulb works, then one hour before showtime when plugged in, it looks like it was used for target practice at a wild west show?

When our company float committee set out to make our halogen masterpiece, the only thing we could agree on was that it needed lights. That’s the problem with committees, they know what has to be done, but not how to do it! So much paper was used in drafting our float creation, that we had to switch to etch-a-sketches. It was the politically correct thing to do as it would conserve tree pulp so future generations could draft their own floats one day too.

The best way to describe a team assembling a float is like this: Take a marriage of 25 years, take out all the good times, leave in all the irritations and compact it into one week. Our group which exuded all the camaraderie of Sesame Street on Monday, regressed to the Dirty Dozen with a bad attitude by Friday. It wasn’t a total loss. We again reached a consensus that the float needed more lights. So much for the Sesame Street cooperation.

Two days before the “big day”, we picked our design democratically, the boss chose it. Two pieces of plywood, four feet of calico fabric, two twig reindeer and 20,000 light bulbs later, we assembled our creation. We meant for our float to look like a house in the north pole. Instead, it looked like a railroad diner for Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. But we did what any parent does when they receive crayon art from their children, we stuck out our chest and faked feelings of pride. The worse part of the float was the interior of the little house, There were so many extension cords and green electric wires that it looked like the Jolly Green Giant with varicose veins.

To make a float appear more natural at parade time, we placed the happiest employees we had (at that time) atop the float. We were happy to have both of them. With temperatures dipping into the 20’s and a generator that died 100 yards from the finish line, we had to be creative at reviving our volunteers. We gave them coffee intravenously so they could be brought back from their cryogenic state.

Would I do another Christmas float again? Absolutely! I figure, whatever curve life throws me, I can bear it smiling because I was part of a float committee. Now the most immediate hurdle I face at work is making new friends. If I don’t do that, I’ll be doing next year’s float all alone with a miner’s helmet and duct tape. The upside is if that happens, at least I can brag the committee finally voted on something unanimously.

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