The Rules

The last forty eight hours of my life have been peppered with reasons as to why I haven’t seriously sought relationships for the last five seasons of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Apparently the insistence that people act with tact, logic, grace, and tolerance is a wholly unrealistic expectation. I have also found that a patient and thoughtful approach to problems is viewed by many of the woman-folk around me as timidity or weakness. You swirl all this together and the picture that settles is one in which I spend my life up to my sixties playing (according to my projections) Metal Gear Solid: Confusing Story on a PlayStation 25 with a menagerie of pets that both keep me company and the neighbor kids at bay. I imagine that as a part of this suburban zoo -in the back yard - I have a water buffalo named Elvis.

At the risk of sounding misogynistic, I simply refuse to accept illogical behavior from woman as a given or an unavoidable inclusion into the female experience. I do this because it is a ridiculous standard that, as tripods, we are expected to tolerate. This is a line that I draw for the same reasons I pick verbal arguments to challenge my friends so they don’t fall into intellectual complacency, even if it means I stake out a position in a camp I don’t agree with. It’s the same reason I got into an heated exchange with someone during an episode of Sex in the City (not my choice) that pan au chocolat and a pilsbury chocolate toaster strudel is essentially the same thing.

I would rather walk away from budding relationships than deal with what I consider to be absurdity. I wont bore you with the details of my must recent kurfluffle, save to say that every person in which I posit the situation, removing real names and instead using muppets, follows my line of thinking. The only aberration is when I drop the ruse to my female friends and mention that person B is a woman I know, their attitudes change radically. “Of course she does”, they’ll tell me “she is a woman.” When I protest that the answer is still prepasteurized bullshit, I get a lot of exasperated sighs and rolled eyes accompanying the accusation that I just don’t understand women.

I humbly submit an alternative theory; I understand them perfectly yet I am unwilling to accept preposterousness as an inevitability. I think that a human being should behave in manner congruent with lucidity, no matter their sex. That is not asking too much. If we as dudes accept that irrational behavior is fixed condition in woman then they should consider it equally unavoidable that guys will walk around with fibula bones and club rival males for access to the Galaga machine. There is reason why decorum exists. It gives people a fighting chance to anticipate what other people will and will not find offensive or hurtful. If you invent new rules to this game on the fly and then attempt to punish me for breaking them I, for one, refuse to play.

I once saw a Wanda Sykes stand up routine in which she joked that women fail men on tests they aren’t even aware that they are taking. If you agree with that statement, you have failed mine.