Crazy Glue: Nothing Brings Women Together Like Our Shared Frustration with Men

There are thousands of organizations that aim to transcend racial and ethnic boundaries and get people to bond as human beings, as citizens of planet Earth.  Yet, none of these organizations seem to accomplish their goal because quite frankly, we all don’t like each other much.  The fact that we share the same biology doesn’t change the fact that we don’t share the same language, habits, beliefs, values, fashion sense or food preferences.

Nevertheless, there is one topic that does bring women from all cultures together, one bond that can make a room full of diverse women with absolutely nothing in common nod at one another in a rare moment of solidarity.  That topic is men – and our shared frustration with their bad habits and crazy ways.

Case in point: Last week, I was sitting in the dentist office waiting room and there was a girl sitting across from me.  She had freckles, a pony tail in her hair, and she was wearing jeans and t-shirt.  She could have been the poster child for “All American twenty-something.”

As we sat there, a woman walked in wearing a traditional headscarf and spoke to the receptionist in broken English.  Just as she sat down near us, the freckle faced girl’s phone rang.  She answered it and I could hear a guy yelling at her.  She argued with him and it became clear that she was dating the guy.  When she hung up the phone, the woman wearing the headscarf turned to her and in perfect English said “What a jerk. Dear, don’t waste your time on that man.”

All three of us laughed in a special moment of inter-cultural female bonding that the United Nations can only dream about.

So, today, I would like to thank men for their bad behavior for a change.  It is the crazy glue that bonds all women together regardless of where we live, what color our skin is or what clothes we wear.

 

           

  

Is Life On Other Planets as Annoying as Life on Earth?

I was reading an article about the size of the universe and apparently, it is a quadrillion times the size of anything we can imagine.  The author Bill Bryson says that if a galaxy like the Milky Way was the size of a pea, the universe is the size of an auditorium filled with those peas.
 
So in light of how ridiculously vast the universe is, I cannot figure out why we waste our time debating whether or not there is life on other planets.  Of course there is.  We can’t possibly be that special.  We can’t be the only planet in the sea of peas that happens to have creatures on it.  
 
Therefore, I’d like to change the focus of the scientific debate.  I would like to shift it away from asking “is there life on other planets?” and raise a new, more interesting question:  “If there are aliens zipping around out there in the universe, is their world as painfully annoying as ours is?”

For example, is there an alien somewhere out there who has to get up for work on a rainy Monday morning? 
 
Will she sit in spaceship traffic for an hour, or ride a miserable alien shuttle bus to a city full of annoying aliens?

Will she get stuck sitting next to another alien who won’t stop talking?

Does that alien sit in a windowless cubicle and spend her days wishing she was somewhere else?

Does she count down the minutes to the weekend?
 
Do alien men snore?
 
Do alien men get yellow armpit stains on their undershirts?
 
Do alien women get really frustrated with alien men because they can’t seem to communicate?  (Maybe all aliens are men and that’s why they haven’t communicated with us yet…)
   
One day in the distant future, we might land our own spacecraft on another planet and discover a new world teeming with life.  But when we step outside, there might not be any fanfare, no band playing or fireworks welcoming us.
 
Instead, we might be accosted by an alien meter maid who raises her antenna and says “Excuuuuse me.  You can’t park that piece of junk here!”

And then we’ll finally know the answer to our question: our world might be really annoying but everyone else’s is too.
  

Does Your Mother Get All of Her News and Information from Email Forwards?

Does your mother get all of her information from email forwards?  Does she stay up at night worrying about missing children who aren’t actually missing, or cologne that can be used by criminals to knock people out in parking lots just because she read about these things in emails from her friends? 

Has she replaced whatever notion of U.S. history she learned in school with information she pieced together from emails forwarded to her by people you only know as snookie3522@aol and grammylove2000@hotmail?

If so, you are probably distraught by your mom’s bizarre information sources, but don’t worry.  You can stop her from being indoctrinated further by spam in one easy step:  Just tell her that every time she opens an email forward, a random stranger at an offshore bank can access her credit card information and take a picture of her.  Make sure she knows that this invasion of her privacy can happen even if the email comes from her very best friend. 

Before you know it, she won’t be spamming anyone anymore, including you.