Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down (25 page)

One woman said: “This guy comes up to me and says, ‘Are you a teacher?’ I mean, is that supposed to be
romantic?”

All three women rolled all six of their eyes.

Another one of them said: “This guy says to me, ‘I’ve been looking at you all night!’ So I go, ‘Hel-LO, we just GOT here.’ ”

At this point all three women—and I want to stress that these are intelligent, nice women—were laughing. Not me. I was feeling bad for the guys.

I realize that there are certain hardships that only females must endure, such as childbirth, waiting in lines for public-restroom stalls, and a crippling, psychotic obsession with shoe color. Also, females tend to reach emotional maturity very quickly, so that by age seven they are no longer capable of seeing the humor in loud inadvertent public blasts of flatulence, whereas males can continue to derive vast enjoyment from this well into their 80s.

So I grant that it is not easy being a female. But I contend that nature has given males the heaviest burden of all: the burden of always having to Make the First Move, and thereby risk getting Shot
Down. I don’t know WHY males get stuck with this burden, but it’s true throughout the animal kingdom. If you watch the nature shows on the Discovery Channel, you’ll note that whatever species they are talking about—birds, crabs, spiders, clams—it is ALWAYS the male who has to take the initiative. It’s always the male bird who does the courting dance, making a total moron of himself, while the female bird just stands there, looking aloof, thinking about what she’s going to tell her girlfriends. (“And then he hopped around on one foot! Like I’m supposed to be impressed by THAT!”)

Male insects have it the worst. The Discovery Channel announcer is always saying things like: “After the mating, the female mantis bites off the male mantis’s head, and then she and her girlfriend mantises use it to play a game that looks a lot like Skee Ball.”

Because I live in Florida, my patio is basically a giant singles bar for lizards. On any given day during mating season, I’ll see dozens of male lizards out there making their most suave lizard move, which consists of inflating and deflating a red pouch under their chins. They seem to think that female lizards really go for a guy with a big chin pouch, but I have never once, in 14 years of close observation, seen a female respond. They just squat there looking bored, while all around them males are blinking on and off like defective warning lights.

Every now and then you’ll see an offbeat TV news story about some animal, usually a moose, that has for some reason fallen in love with, and decided to relentlessly court, something totally inappropriate, such as a lawn tractor. This animal is ALWAYS a male. On the TV, they show it hanging around the lawn tractor with a big, sad, moony look, totally smitten, while the lawn tractor cruelly ignores it.

My point here is that, in matters of the heart, males have the brains of a walnut. No, wait! That is not my point. My point is that perhaps you women could cut us males a little bit of slack in the move-making process, because we are under a lot of stress. I vividly remember when I was in 10th grade, and I wanted to call a girl named Patty and ask her to a dance, and before I picked up the phone, I spent maybe 28
hours rehearsing exactly what I was going to say. So when I actually made the call, I was pretty smooth.

“Hello, Dance?” I said. “This is Patty. Do you want to go to the Dave with me?”

Fortunately Patty grasped the basic thrust of my gist and agreed to go to the dance. This was a good thing, because if she had shot me down, I would have been so humiliated that I would have never been able to go back to school. I would have dropped out of 10th grade and lied about my age and joined the U.S. armed forces, and as a direct result the Russians would have won the Cold War.

That is the awesome power that you women have over us men. I hope you understand this, and the next time a guy walks up and uses some incredibly lame, boneheaded line on you, I hope that, instead of laughing at him, you will remember that he is under the intense pressure of wanting to impress you enough so that you might want to get to know him better and maybe eventually, perhaps within the next 15 minutes, mate with him, thereby enabling the survival of the human race, which believe me is the only thing that we males are truly concerned about.

In conclusion, let me just say to all females everywhere, on behalf of all males everywhere, that you are very beautiful and your eyes are like two shining stars, unless you’re a female fly, in which case your eyes are more like 2,038 shining stars. So please give us a chance. And if
you’re
not interested, could you introduce us to your lawn tractor?

T
he most powerful force in the universe is not any kind of nuclear energy. It is not magnetism, gravity, or the IRS. The most powerful force in the universe is hormones. If you don’t believe me, conduct the following simple scientific experiment:

1. Take a normal woman.
   
2. Get her pregnant.
   
3. See if she can walk past a display of baby shoes without stopping.
   

I’ve been conducting this experiment for several months now with my wife, Michelle. She’s pregnant, and I have reason to believe that I’m the father. I’m excited about this, because I’m at an age—52—when many of my friends are thinking about retiring to dull, meaningless lives of travel, leisure, recreation, and culture. Not me! I’m about to start all over again with a brand-new little Miracle of Life to love, nurture, and—above all—become intimately familiar with the poops of.

But so far the big change in my life has been Michelle’s behavior. She has never been a particularly maternal person; she’s a professional sportswriter who has always been one of the guys. She understands the triangle offense and can watch football longer than I can.
I’ve seen her fight her way through frenzied locker-room media mobs to get quotes from giant, sweaty football players. I’ve seen her stand on the field of 3Com Park in San Francisco right before a baseball play-off game, arguing in Spanish and not backing down one millimeter from a professional baseball player who was (1) VERY angry about something she had written and (2) holding a baseball bat.

Like many career women, Michelle insisted that becoming a mother would not change her. She was going to be the same professional person, darn it! She was NOT going to turn into one of those women who babble obsessively about the baby and baby clothes and all the other baby fixin’s. Above all, she was NEVER going to drive a minivan.

Right.

I would estimate that, at the present time, my wife’s blood supply is 92 percent baby-related hormones. Doctors often call hormones “the Saddam Husseins of the human body” because they are moody, and when they give commands, they expect instant obedience. So for now my wife is not my wife: She is the official spokesperson for crazed dictator hormones. When the hormones wake up, they do NOT want an affectionate “good morning” kiss. They want AN UNCOOKED POP-TART, and they want it RIGHT NOW. You do not question them, because they will throw up on you.

The hormones also want baby shoes. I don’t know why. I have seen the baby, at the doctor’s office, via a procedure called a “sonogram,” and although, of course, I think it is a very beautiful and gifted child, it looks, more than anything, like a wad of gum. I frankly cannot imagine, given its current lifestyle in the womb, that footwear is a high priority.

But you try telling this to the hormones. They are CRAZY for baby shoes. My wife could be fleeing from an armed robber, but if she ran past a display of baby shoes, her hormones would demand that she stop, pick up a shoe, and exclaim to whomever is nearby, even the robber, “Look how CUTE!” The smaller the shoe, the cuter the hormones
think it is. If somebody came out with a baby shoe the size of a molecule, which could be viewed only through a very powerful microscope, my wife’s hormones would make her buy 27 pairs.

The hormones also want baby outfits. Even though the baby is still deep inside my wife and would be very hard to dress without surgical instruments, it already has at least as many outfits as Elizabeth Taylor. If you come to our house for any reason, including to fix an appliance, the hormones will make my wife show you these outfits one at a time, and as each one is held up, you will be expected to agree that it is cute.

Lately, the hormones have become obsessed with the decor of the baby’s room. They definitely wanted a Winnie the Pooh theme, but they spent weeks agonizing over whether to go with the Regular Pooh or the Classic Pooh theme. They finally decided on Classic Pooh, but, of course, now they must decide which of the estimated 14 million Classic Pooh baby-room accessories they will need. This is an important issue, and the hormones think about it all the time, even during football games. Any day now, Michelle is going to walk up to a defensive tackle in the Miami Dolphins locker room and ask him what he thinks about the Pooh ceiling border. This is not her fault. She is merely the vehicle: The hormones are driving.

Speaking of which, they want a minivan.

W
hew! I am exhausted, physically and emotionally, and I will tell you why: I have been helping my wife register for her baby shower.

This is a new wrinkle in the field of having babies. When I was born, during the presidency of James K. Polk, we babies did not require a lot of equipment. We had our blanket, and that was pretty much it. We’d lie on our blanket and amuse ourselves for weeks on end by trying to get our feet into our mouths. If we were lucky, we’d have a rattle, which we would obtain by catching an actual rattlesnake with our tiny bare hands. Also in those days we changed our own diapers.

So back then, baby showers were pretty basic. There was no registering. A group of women would simply get together and watch as the mother-to-be opened the gifts and commented on them (“A blanket! Thank you! Look! Another blanket! That’ll come in handy! Look! ANOTHER …,” etc.). In 20 minutes, the shower was over and everybody went back to pounding clothes with rocks.

Equipping your modern baby is a whole different kettle of fish. You’ve seen newsreels of the Normandy Invasion, with thousands of supply ships stretching across the English Channel as far as the eye can see? That will give you an idea of the minimum amount of things that you need to adequately support a single modern baby, in the view of today’s baby industry.

So now, when you have a baby shower, you register what your baby-equipment
needs are. We registered at a baby-fixin’s megastore the size of Yellowstone National Park. The lady behind the counter handed us a sheet of paper that said “BABY REGISTRY MUST HAVES!” It listed MUST HAVE! baby items in seven categories: First Priorities, Room Decor, At Home, Splash Down, On The Go, Just For Fun, and Layette. (The baby industry says “Layette” because it sounds classier than “Clothes For Baby To Poop In.”)

I added up all the items in the seven categories, and it came out to more than 150 things—furniture, bedding, undergarments, outer-garments, warmers, coolers, bath gizmos, sterilizers, stabilizers, transporters, transponders, diaper anti-stink devices, a type of pump I don’t even want to think about, and on and on—that the baby MUST HAVE! The piece of paper didn’t say what would happen if you didn’t get all of these things, but the clear implication is that your baby would fall behind all the other babies. Like, say you didn’t get a jumper, which is a MUST HAVE! device that you put the baby in so it can bounce up and down while it is pooping. Without this device, your baby would be slower to develop the vital bouncing skills that studies have shown ultimately determine who gets into what business school.

And you can’t just get any jumper. There are MANY jumpers, and you have to pick out the RIGHT one, the one that conforms to all 387 parts of the U.S. Department of Consumer Nervousness Jumper Safety Guidelines, because if you pick out the WRONG one, you could very well be signing your baby’s death warrant. Multiply this responsibility by your 150 MUST HAVE! items, and you begin to see the intense psychological pressures involved in registering for a baby shower.

The most stressful part is picking out the stroller. Today’s baby stroller is an extremely high-tech piece of equipment, comparable in complexity to the B-1 bomber, but more expensive. I have purchased houses in less time than it took us to decide on a stroller. And I still agonize that we picked the wrong one. I mean, the stroller is not just
a seat with wheels: It is a place where your baby will spend much of its critical developmental years pooping. You cannot afford to make a mistake.

The only good part of the shower-registration process was that I had a gun. I don’t mean a bullet-shooting gun: I mean an electronic scanning gun, the kind that beeps when you point it at an item’s Universal Product Code. This is how the baby megastore keeps track of what items you’ve registered for. All around the store, there were massively pregnant women, crazed by hormones, holding up tiny garments and going, “Awww! How CUTE!” And next to each woman was a man, finger on the trigger button of his scanning gun, ready to beep. It was like prehistoric times, when the woman’s job was to bear the child, and the man’s job was to hunt game and kill it by striking it with his club in the vulnerable product-code region.

So anyway, we registered for all kinds of stuff, which I guess means that once the shower is over, all that we’ll be missing is the actual baby. Although, come to think of it, maybe we don’t need the baby. It definitely was not on the MUST HAVES! list.

S
o my wife and I are preparing for childbirth. When I say “my wife and I,” I, of course, mean “my wife.” She will be the most directly involved.

On behalf of all men, I just want to take a moment here to get down on my knees and thank whoever invented our current biological system, under which the woman’s job is to have the baby somehow go from the inside of her body to the outside of her body, in clear violation of every known law of physics, and the man’s job is to stand around looking supportive and periodically, no matter what is actually happening to the woman, say, in an upbeat and perky voice, “You’re doing great!”