Dave Barry's Money Secrets (6 page)
Read Dave Barry's Money Secrets Online
Authors: Dave Barry
So the bottom line is, if you want to eat a Healthy Balanced Diet, you are going to have to develop the self-discipline to quit the junk-food habit and make the time to eat only sensible, healthy meals prepared in advance at home. Like you would
ever
do that. This leaves you with no choice but to SUE THEIR ASS!
4. Don’t have sex.
Sex, along with virtually every other natural human activity, is a leading cause of death. These days you can’t trust
anybody.
More and more, we’re seeing cases where people caught deadly diseases from having sex
with their own selves.
So my advice is, just don’t do it, and if you absolutely
must
do it, do it only with somebody you are absolutely certain is reliable, such as a spouse or trusted pet.*
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5. Avoid accidents.
Accidents cause more deaths than any other single thing I intend to mention in this particular sentence. Statistics show that more than 91 percent of all accidents occur either on or off the job, or in the home. So these are three places you should definitely avoid. Driving is also out of the question. Wear a helmet at all times,
especially
when going to the bathroom. Every year more than 650,000 Americans die from head injuries sustained from falling off toilets, yet our so-called “political leaders” do nothing, because they are taking handouts from the powerful commode lobby. Which, for the record, does
not
wash its hands.
6. Get plenty of exercise.
Every year, lack of exercise kills more Americans than the Hundred Years War and all the Punic Wars
combined.
So stop sitting around on your giant mesquite-enhanced American butt! No more excuses! I want you to get up RIGHT NOW, walk to the telephone, dial the toll-free number, and order one of those exercise contraptions advertised by hyperenthusiastic spandex-wearing physical freaks on daytime TV in between lawyer commercials. Then you can sit back down—you don’t want to overexert yourself on your first day—and allow four to six weeks for delivery. When the device comes, take it out of the box, examine it closely for defects, and—after some basic stretching exercises to loosen up—store it under a bed. Be careful not to strain yourself, lest you sustain a painful back injury and be forced to sue somebody’s ass.
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HOW TO ARGUE WITH YOUR SPOUSE ABOUT MONEY
The Nuclear Option: Tampons
A
RGUING IS A NORMAL PART of being married, like finding alien hairs embedded in the bath soap. In any close relationship between two people, there’s always going to be a certain amount of friction, sometimes resulting in gunplay.
But when you’re arguing, you must keep things in perspective. No matter what particular issue you’re arguing about, no matter how serious it seems at the moment, remember that in the long run, the truly important thing—all psychologists agree on this—is that
you must win the argument.
If you win, you receive points that can be redeemed for valuable merchandise at the Marriage Argument Prize Redemption Center.
Not really. The truth is that many marital arguments are complete wastes of time involving idiotically trivial issues. For example, my wife and I routinely argue about what time we need to leave the house. Let’s say we’re supposed to be at some event that starts at 7 p.m., and that the place where the event is being held is about a 15-minute drive from our house. My wife and I both agree on these basic facts. The problem is that we don’t interpret them the same way at all.
•
How I interpret the facts:
I start with the premise that if the event starts at 7 p.m., we need to be physically present at the event at 7 p.m., or, preferably, ten minutes early. Allowing fifteen minutes for the drive, plus ten minutes for finding a parking space, plus another five minutes to walk from the parking space to the event, we need to be in the car, with the engine running, at 6:20 p.m. at the latest. But then I allow a ten-minute cushion in case there is traffic, which pushes it back to 6:10, to which I add another fifteen-minute cushion for the unexpected, such as engine trouble, carjacking, a meteor strike, etc. This now puts our Mandatory Time of Departure (MTD) at 5:55 p.m., or, rounding off, 5:45 p.m. So shortly before then—say, around 5:30—I am ready to go. I am pacing around the house jingling my car keys in a suggestive manner.
•
How my wife interprets the facts:
First off, my wife believes that just because an event is
scheduled
for 7 p.m., that does not mean it will
start
at 7 p.m. Most likely it will start late—7:15, say, or 7:30—and even then nobody is expected to actually
be
there when it starts, so an arrival time of, say, 8 p.m. is fine. My wife is of Cuban descent, and she believes this about
all
events, including weddings, funerals, and commercial airplane departures. She also believes in the Special Theory of Automotive Relativity, which holds that when you are traveling inside a car,
there is no passage
of time.
You can get into a car at 8 p.m. and drive for 15 minutes, and when you get out of the car,
it will still be 8
p.m.
So if you need to be somewhere at 8, you can leave at 8. Except that my wife will not be ready at 8. She will be ready closer to 8:30, because she will be “running a little late,” because it takes her longer than she expected to apply her makeup. It
always
takes her longer than she expected to apply her makeup, but she continues to assume that the next time the process will somehow go quicker, as if one day she’ll look into the mirror and discover that she has, I don’t know, fewer eyebrows.
So, starting with precisely the same facts, my wife and I arrive at departure times that are three hours apart. This results in tension between us. We resolve it by calmly discussing our differences, then formulating a reasonable and workable compromise.
Seriously, we get into a big honking argument wherein I accuse her of being inconsiderate and out of touch with the known physical laws of the universe, and she accuses me of being a key-jingling time Nazi. If we’re in good form, we can make this argument completely ruin any chance of our enjoying the event that we were trying to get to.
Eventually—sometimes several days later, when we can no longer clearly remember what the event
was—
we realize that we’re being foolish. We apologize to each other and sincerely promise to do better. And because we are both mature, intelligent adults, the next time we have an event to attend, we have
exactly the same argument.
Tradition is important in a marriage.
Two other topics that married couples traditionally disagree about are child care and housework. Every year, these two areas are the subject of literally millions of marital arguments. And while I certainly would never engage in crude generalizations based on gender, all of these arguments are started by women.
The problem is that women have developed a set of extremely rigid standards concerning child care and housework, and they expect men to meet these standards. Women are not willing to acknowledge that men
also
have standards for child care and housework, but we do. Ours just happen to be
different
standards, as we see in the following chart:
| Area of Concern | Women’s Standards | Men’s Standards |
| Child Care | You see to it that the children bathe regularly, brush their teeth twice daily, eat three nutritious meals a day, with a minimum of junk food, and wear clean, appropriate clothing. You make sure they receive regular medical and dental care, and that they keep up in school—including homework and special projects. You coordinate their participation in extracurricular activities and sports. At every moment of the day and night, you know exactly where all your children are. When the children are home, you play with them or supervise them in constructive activities. If they are not physically in your presence, you know the name and phone number of the person they are with, and what they are doing. You have memorized the names and phone numbers of the children’s doctors, dentists, and teachers. | You feel you have done a good job if, to the best of your knowledge, none of the children are actively bleeding. |
| Housekeeping | A house is satisfactorily kept when all floors and carpets are vacuumed, all shelves are dusted, and all beds made. In the kitchen, all counters should be wiped, the dishes should be washed and put away, and the refrigerator should be cleaned, with outdated food discarded. All bathroom surfaces should be cleaned, including the shower tile and grout; the toilets should be thoroughly scrubbed with a disinfectant cleanser. | You should be able to find the remote control in under ten minutes. |
| Laundry | Dirty clothes should be placed in a hamper. At regular intervals, they should be sorted by color and fabric type, presoaked and/or sprayed with stain remover if necessary, then washed in separate loads at appropriate temperature and time settings, with detergent, softener and bleach as required. They should then be either placed in the drier at the appropriate setting, or, for delicates, allowed to air-dry. Garments should be ironed as necessary. | For years, you dropped your dirty clothes on the floor, and they wound up coming back clean. But finally one day you got tired of the snide comments from your spouse, plus you needed clean socks, so you took it upon yourself, unasked, to do a load of laundry. With no help from anyone, you put all the dirty clothes into the washer, then into the drier, even though it took you several minutes to figure out how to turn these appliances on. You viewed the result as a success, in that your socks did OK. But many of the other garments shrank from normal human sizes to Barbie clothes, plus all the whites came out roughly the color of Hawaiian Punch. Your spouse was highly critical, so you decided never to attempt a laundry again, and you resumed dropping your clothes on the floor. So now your spouse has resumed making snide comments. What the hell does she want?. |
| Observing a Child’s Birthday | Months before the child’s birthday, you select a party date and place. You also select a theme and scour the Internet for theme-appropriate decorations, party favors, etc. You arrange for food and entertainment—a clown, a magician, Barry Manilow, etc. You send out invitations, after carefully reviewing the guest list with the child. On the day of the party itself, you turn into a raving theme-crazed lunatic,* 22 barking orders to your spouse such as: “I don’t care if it’s raining, you need to PUT OUT THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD RIGHT NOW. ” At the end of the party, when your house is a child-devastation zone with partially eaten chicken nuggets strewn everywhere, you say, “Wasn’t that GREAT??” Then, after a break of about fifteen minutes, you start planning next year’s party. | Roughly a month after the child’s birth date, you remark: “Hey, doesn’t (name of child) have a birthday coming up?” |
As this chart shows, we men
do
have standards for child care and housework. We would appreciate it if you women would make an honest effort to see things from
our
perspective for a change, and not get all snitty every time we make some teensy little mistake such as forgetting to feed the children for several days, or accidentally leaving a child behind at a turnpike service plaza. On behalf of all men everywhere, I ask you women to please cut us a little slack, OK? Also, would you mind fixing us a sandwich? We’re hungry! Thanks!
Now that we’ve dealt with child care and housework, let’s tackle the issue that
really
causes trouble in marriages: money. Married couples argue about money more than any other topic. In fact, they usually start arguing about it before they’re actually married, when they are planning their wedding.
When I say “they” in the previous sentence, I am of course referring to the bride-to-be and her mother, since they are the ones who plan the wedding. As a rule, the groom-to-be has nothing to do with it. Sometimes the groom-to-be doesn’t even know he’s getting married until the bride-to-be orders him to rent formal wear. At that point the bride-to-be and her mom have spent
months
poring over bridal magazines the size of meat lockers and talking to wedding planners, printers, florists, caterers, banquet managers, bandleaders, dressmakers, photographers, videographers, jewelers, cake makers, confectioners, and so on, making the thousands of critical decisions necessary to stage a modern American wedding, which involves the same amount of planning as the Normandy Invasion, although of course the wedding is far more expensive.
Eventually two facts penetrate the brain of the groom-to-be: (1) he really and truly is going to get married, and (2) the wedding is going to cost more money than either he or the bride-to-be has ever spent on anything. This strikes the groom-to-be as insane. If he truly believes that he is an equal partner in the relationship, and he is also a complete idiot, he voices this opinion to the bride-to-be.
This is when they have their first big money-related argument. The bride-to-be’s position is that their wedding is the culmination of all her girlhood dreams and the sacred public declaration of their love for, and eternal commitment to, each other. The groom-to-be’s position is that it is basically a big party requiring uncomfortable rented clothing. He will point out that if they took the wedding money and instead invested it in the stock market, it could pay for their children’s college educations. Of course, if the groom-to-be actually
had
the wedding money, he would not invest it in the stock market; he would invest it in a motorcycle. But that’s irrelevant, because the groom-to-be never wins this argument. The bride-to-be always wins, because she employs a powerful, persuasive, and logical argument: crying.*
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So they have a lavish wedding, and it is a wonderful affair documented for posterity by a riveting, professionally produced three-hour video that nobody except the bride and her mother is able to watch for more than ninety seconds without lapsing into a coma. But the pattern has been set: Just as men and women have different standards for child care and housework, they have different priorities about how to spend money.
