Nothing to See Here…

If there is one area where the differences between the genders seem the most obvious, it’s with regard to housecleaning.  I know what you’re thinking - you’re thinking “No, it’s with regard to what’s in their pants.”  Well, duh.  But stick with me here, okay?

A couple months ago, my husband and I were expecting guests.  I know you’re not picturing me entertaining with a four course meal and place cards and napkin rings, are you?  Because my form of entertaining is more an “Order some pizza.” type of model.  Imo’s pizza and beer, that is what we promised our guests.

As an aside, Imo’s pizza is a St. Louis thing.  If you’re not from here, you will never understand it.  If you come to town and someone says “Oh, you simply must try Imo’s pizza.” don’t fall for it.  Every single out of town guest who has ever tried Imo’s pizza has hated it.  They’re all “What is up with this crust, it’s like a cracker?” and even “What the buh - this isn’t mozzarella… what kind of cheese is this?”  Just trust me and accept the fact that you won’t like it unless you suckled on it from your St. Louis cradle.  So just leave the Imo’s pizza for us natives, and some extra to be packed up in dry ice and shipped off to expats in Tacoma or Poughkeepsie or wherever.  Order Papa John’s instead.

But I digress…

There is a governing principle in my life I refer to as The Pregnancy Principle.  Let me try to explain…  When a man and a women who are horny and inebriated want to have sex, they often throw caution to the winds.  Protection?  Who needs protection?  Nothing will happen to us and if it does, well, babies are sorta cute, right?

If you check in with this man 8 1/2 months later, he will sing a different tune.  The woman is miserable and pregnant and he has sworn off beer for life and has promised that he will only have sex with well-aged women who have come out the other side of menopause.  He is clearly not himself.  In a matter of days, she will vow never to have sex with males again and threaten horrible, disgusting, and illegal harm to the man as she pushes a ______ out her ______.  (By all means, fill in your favorite euphemism… a watermelon out her hoo-haa or whatever you have.)

This, my friends, is The Pregnancy Principle.  It means that an undertaking or commitment in the present has consequences that are only felt in the future.  This gives the present participants a sense of safety, a devil-may-care attitute, knowing that it’s their future selves who will have to deal with the fall out.

This is the governing principle of my life.

When I agree to a speaking engagement, it’s always weeks off and my present self never considers the future self scrambling at midnight the night before to write the damn thing hours before it is to be delivered.  My present self volunteers to manage a booth at the school picnic not thinking of the heat and the boredom that my future self will have to face.  My present self likes to write checks that my future self has a hard time cashing.

As well, my present self often invites people over to my home under The Pregnancy Principle.  My present self is awfully inconsiderate of my future self who will have to do all the damn housework in preparation for guests.  But if I was being entirely honest, the fact of the matter is that my primary reason for inviting guests over is to force me to clean my filthy house.  Oh, sure, the beer and pizza part is fun.  I like that part.  But it’s the clean house I am after.  Having my past self invite people over is the best way to assure there will be, at some point in the future, a clean house.

It’s true - I manipulate even myself.  It doesn’t get more pathetic than that, huh?

This, however, doesn’t stop my future self from really hating and despising her past self for committing her to the work, though.

So where was I?  Oh, yes, a long meandering path to a very weak point.  My husband and I were having people over which meant the house needed to be cleaned up.  Unfortunately, this was on the same day I had a hair appointment.  (People, this kind of hair doesn’t just happen!  It takes work… or at least an annual visit to someone licensed to sheer sheep.  Something like that.)  Off I went.

I came home (had Warren Zevon been alive and present, he might have sung “Her hair was perfect….”) and it was literally minutes until the guests were to arrive.  My husband was beaming, saying “I did all the last minute work!” and I could tell he wanted me to throw him a puppy treat but my eyes immediately went to the dirty pot on the stove, the crumbs on the counter, the clean dishes in the drainer, the mail on the table, and a half dozen other affronts to cleanliness.

I said “We need to clean up!  They’ll be here any minute!!”

“It is clean.” he said. 

And that was the moment it became crystal clear the reason why wives might thwap their husbands on the sides of their heads with cast iron skillets.  I’m not saying I did this, because, really, I wouldn’t confess it here in a public forum if I had.

I said “You’ve got to be kidding.  It’s a mess.  Let’s hurry.” 

But someone who was expecting a bone and was instead told that he sucked at housecleaning isn’t in that cooperative of a mood.  “WHAT???  What is the problem?  For God’s sakes, it’s clean.  Tell me what is wrong?”

My life at that moment turned into a cartoon episode, some cross between Family Guy and Itchy & Scratchy.  I looked at the dirty pot on the stove, the messy counter, the stuff laying around, and my eyes popped out of their sockets in shock that he was so blind to these glaring things.  Then, my eyes closed into little X’s and I slid to the floor, passed out cold.  When I regained cartoon consciousness, all these messes had flashing neon signs.  “Wash me!”  “Clean me!”  “Put me away!” but my husband was blind to it.  His cartoon equivalent was standing there looking right at the mess, but a cartoon bubble over his head indicated he was thinking about women’s breasts.

This is my cartoon surprised face.

The moral of the story is probably that there was a much more concise way to make this particular point.  The point being that it amazes me that men, or at least the ones that think about nothing but boobies, can look at a mess and not even see it; can judge a room to be completely clean when a well-coiffed female would see disaster.

Someone explain that to me.

The night was a success.  The Imo’s pizza was very crispy and thin and provelly.  And everyone enjoyed the cold beer.  Well, except for the sophisticated person who was drinking frou-frou sissy-la-la pretty colored fruity drinks (me) and pondering what kind of blog post she could get out of the whole thing.  Of course, as always happens in my Pregnancy Principle life, this past self committed to writing the article and here I am awake at all hours and stuck doing the actual work. 

She’s such a slacker.

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Wow, that felt good.  That’s the kind of blogging I started this website to do.  People, I got up out of bed in the middle of the night because my brain needed me to write this.  That’s called inspiration.  Thank you for it, too.  Writing this made me feel like my old self for a change.  Just what I needed…