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It's not pictures of primitives, it's self preservation
by anna at 06:40 PM on December 09, 2003
Now I could be dead wrong, but I sense that most of you are footloose and fancy-free. By which I mean you remain single. You might be in a committed relationship but you aren’t, at least as yet, married. You’re thus free to go. Sooner or later that is liable to change. Someone will totally rock your world. You’ll start leaving goofy notes like, “Used your toothbrush. Hope you don’t mind. Love, Me.” (Trust me, they do mind.) You’ll learn to tolerate their butt pimples, snoring and occasional straying. There’ll be fierce fights but equally intense makeup sex. Wedding bells will ring.
And that’s when you’ll hear The Sigh. This isn’t the contented sigh you’d hear after those zestful romps in bed. Nor is it the wistful sigh of a withered old person reminiscing about what might have been. No, this is the sigh of a woman struggling under the heft of something heavy, such as a grand piano. It screams, “Don’t get up, honey. I realize how vitally important it is for you to catch every last second of that one-sided football game. No need to worry, I’ll be fine once I forcibly push the ruptured discs back into my spinal column.” Dude, if you know what’s good for you’ll listen to The Sigh. You will heed The Sigh.
There’s hooking up, dating, sometimes staying over, shacking up and there’s being married. Only with the latter do you endure The Sigh. Same goes for The Icy Morning Stare (TIMS.) This is often due to some transgression or perceived slight the night before. Maybe you made a fool of yourself in front of her parents. Perhaps you forgot your right to remain silent and answered the loaded question of whether a given garment made her butt look fat. Or you stared a little too long at some tattooed chippie in a slit skirt. Or else you boorishly dissed the oh-so-ernest Indigo Girls, Queer Eye or Trading Spaces. Hell, you may or may not even know what you did wrong, depending on alcohol or heroin intake.
TIMS is accompanied by this profound, bone-chilling silence like no other this side of a graveyard. It is not just an absence of sound, it is a freaking sound vacuum, sucking the very life out of any fool that dares to come anywhere near it. It is a silence that makes the sound of newspaper pages turning seem deafeningly loud, as if the Space Shuttle were being launched in your living room.
So you’d best pay attention to TIMS. You had better determine its root cause pronto, by subterfuge if necessary. You had better go buy a dozen roses and not the roadside/grocery store bouquet variety either. I am talking elegant florist box, $60 long stem roses with the thorns removed. And don’t scrimp and buy a half dozen as I once did. You don’t half-love her, do you?
Of course, a heartfelt apology is in order too. A rule of thumb is that an effective apology should contain exactly one pronoun: I. Good: I am sorry. I made a mistake. It won’t happen again. Bad: I’m sorry you perceived my actions as wrong. (Even worse is the generic politician standby “Mistakes were made.” By whom? You.)
But don’t expect any more makeup sex. You’ve got to earn that now. It’s kickoff time. Beer is chilled. Buffalo wings are ready. Don’t you think that piano would look so much better on the other side of the room? Correct answer: yes. Wrong answer: anything else.
Two questions: Are there other sounds like The Sigh that you’ve chanced to hear? On those rare occasions when you’re really in the clear, are you often made to feel guilty nonetheless? I know I sure am.
comments (17)
Priceless.
The problem with The Sigh and TIMS is that most married women (well, at least the ones I know, my mother and grandmother included) seem to do this out of nothing but instinct. How is this instinct "developed" or "activated", to be precise, is still unknown. No matter how much they have said "I will not employ those methods to manipulate my husband" or variations of that same statement, they invariably do.
Me, I won't delude myself into thinking I will be able to avoid these phenomena. The way I see it, if I can make it through life without ever uttering the phrase "If you really loved me you would/wouldn't..." during an argument, then I can consider myself ahead of the rest.
by Lucy at December 10, 2003 12:49 AM
Yeah, "if you really loved me..." is a definite deal-breaker. But guys deserve some blame as well. As we get older we develop obsessions with football, workshops, tools, that show on the Spanish station where kids dance with abandon by the pool etc. This blinds us to our wives' concerns sometimes. Good luck with your cartoon, Lucy.
by anna at December 10, 2003 7:48 AM
Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About
In case you're bored and need some more reading material on the subject. It's funny and sad at the same time.
by MrBlank at December 10, 2003 9:33 AM
well i haven't seen much of what you write of anna. i could say i was glad about that, but really all it means is that i've been single a lot, which has its ups and downs. it does serve as a good primer though.... filed under "stuff I'd better watch out for".
lucy..what cartoon?
by lajo at December 10, 2003 12:29 PM
Lucy: Are you, as I've always expected, a little black haired girl who likes to pull footballs out from in front of bald headed boys with stripped shirts on?
by mg at December 10, 2003 12:33 PM
Thanks for linking my comment, magical comment fixer. Those 'B', 'I', and 'link' buttons don't work in Safari. And neither do my 'remember info' cookies. Stupid Macs.
I've never seen that kind of thing that you speak of, anna, with my parents. I've also never seen them drunk until I was 24, so they must be good at hiding stuff. For all I know they could be aliens who, while I'm gone, shed their human skin and breathe dryer lint.
by MrBlank at December 10, 2003 2:50 PM
well blank, as we get older i'm sure we'll all find out that very little beats a good dryer lint.
that and the fact that cows aren't really cows at all, but wooden signs, placed in the fields by farmers trying to sell something.
by lajo at December 10, 2003 3:12 PM
I think the training starts somewhere in elementary school, and reaches maximum intensity in high school. There the little girls learn to sink or swim against the queen bitches that rule the roost in each grade. These bitch-girls are natural harpies-- they instinctively know how to wither you with a look, snub you with the slightest pause, and wipe you off the face of the planet by looking right through you at a small point about 3 feet behind your head. Through their nefarious ways they gain power over their defenseless little peers. The unfortunate majority have basically two choices: fall in and adopt their methods to defend themselves, or reject the system (and the friendship of most other females) entirely. This is all well and good, until we apply our battle training to the men.
Maybe the equivalent among males is the jock system-- jocks gain power by being able to push other boys around. Once the system's in place, it's either fight your enemy or join them.
by jean at December 10, 2003 4:06 PM
for more on jean's hypothesis, check out the allure of the mean friend.
it's free, but worth every penny.
by lajo at December 10, 2003 4:37 PM
Thanks Anna, I'll let you guys know when the "cartoon" (we prefer the term "online comic", by the way :P) is up and running. It's a little project a friend of mine and I have been thinking about for a while now, and it is on its earliest stages of developement (we don't even have a definite story-line yet, so it may some time before you hear from this again).
And MG, while I am a black haired girl currently falling for a pianist (whom, by the way, is NOT hung-up on Beethoven, thank the gods above) I no longer pull footballs away from unsuspecting and gullible bald headed boys. I'm the girl that points and laughs when they fall on their backs ;p
by Lucy at December 10, 2003 5:14 PM
Lajo we've all seen you on TV and we don't believe you.
Mr B, loved that site. You sure do turn up a lot of German stuff. I'm still looking for that German orgasm sound site.
Jean you're probably right but I hope not because then it will never change. Peer pressure is the mightiest force on the planet.
And I envision Lucy as this exotic Latina gal with maybe de la or a hyphen in her name.
by anna at December 10, 2003 6:50 PM
German orgasm sound site?? I don't think that was me. I remember a German 'Visual Orgasm' site I found through a design portal. There wasn't any sound to it.
by MrBlank at December 10, 2003 7:35 PM
You're welcome.
PS: I did a search and was unable to turn up any reference to the German Orgasm you keep mention. I think it must have been a fever dream.
by deus ex machina at December 10, 2003 11:07 PM
Maybe so. But if it doesn't exist, it should. We just set up audio tapes in all our bedrooms and then digitalize the results and post 'em. Readers could rate the results. Sub-categories: Raucous snoring and beer farts.
by anna at December 11, 2003 3:48 AM
I've developed a method that seems to work well at keeping me out of trouble. Whenever I make a comment that has perhaps stepped over a line (see the Daniel Pearl reference in the post above), I immediately wear a look of confusion, and, if it is particularly bad statement, I actually ask "Did I just say that?" For some reason that almost always works. If not, I remind her about the "botched abortion" comment she made earlier in the day and then we both drop the subject completly.
by mg at December 11, 2003 5:05 PM
Damn MG, all that education done you some good. I will definately make use of that one. Seriously.
by anna at December 11, 2003 5:10 PM
Having been a witness to TIMS I have to say it is one of the most powerful and disturbing things I have ever seen. It does make your ballsack draw up like a walnut.
What I like even better is when you wake up with a raging hangover and know you did something boneheaded but can't exactly remember what. All you can do is wait, riddled with anxiety, until your other brings it up to talk about. What you should do is begin grovelling immediately upon waking but what if they were just as drunk and don't remember either? You run the risk of busting yourself. Tricky territory.
by Ezy at December 12, 2003 10:03 AM