You've had too much to think...

One of my best friends, Nathan, is getting married in a few weeks. That's pretty remarkable because he was perhaps the most commitment phobic guy I've ever known. On the other hand, watching him be single made me wonder if being single forever would really be that bad. Despite the level of our raucousness, Nathan's kept himself surprisingly marryable. Ashley hasn't had to do much work to get him into husband shape -- if he were a house, he's basically just needed window treatments and a little paint. The whole process has made me wonder about my own marryability. (Yes, I know it's supposed to be written marriageability, but it's my blog, ok?)

If you haven't gathered, marryability is basically the credit score of a single male. It's a function of age, status, income, maturity, spirituality, hair follicle density, fashion sense, culinary talent, waist size, horsepower, fuel economy, taste and everything else you can think of. The younger you are, what you lack in maturity and income, you can make up for in potential and sheer fun. The girl sees you and says, "Ah, I can work with this."

As you age, what you loose in some areas you gain in others. Your hair thins, but now you've been on cross-country road trips, you have a degree, and your clothes still mostly match. At this point, the girl says, "Well, I'm going to have to train him to not do a, b, and c, but his car is paid off and he only quotes The Simpson's about half the time." Of course, this process continues until you reach the riper ages of male singleness. At this point, you've been single so long unless you make a conscious effort to stay marryable, you may acquire so many odd quirks that no one can put up with you.

For example, around age 30, every male loses whatever instincts they had once had to change my sheets regularly, do the dishes, wipe the counter, not be flatulent, avoid wearing sandals with socks, shower daily, eat vegetables, vacuum periodically and every other thing your mother insisted you do for the first 18 years of life. Basically, if left to your druthers, you'll turn into your father, except as becomes when your mom goes out of town for several weeks: unkempt, jaundiced from a canned chili/Mountain Dew diet, and wearing 90's era Doc Martin sandals with a t-shirt tucked into jean shorts.

To prevent this from happening, you have to at least make an effort to keep up appearances, even if just seems like a bunch of hassle. I say at least because if that's all you do, your marryability will still go down. The reality is that we age, we get weird. We get weird because the world is constantly changing around us, and we simple can't adapt to everything. Some stuff we readily accept, like switching to MP3 players instead of CDs. But you know there's some dude somewhere caressing his collection of Aerosmith cassettes/Bee Gees 8-tracks/Pink Floyd LPs and wondering how the world got so off track. That dude's marryability index is plunging fast.

The reality is that the older you get, to stay as marryable as you were at a younger age, you have to bring more to the table. This is not just to make up for what you've lost, but also to offset all your extra baggage that someone is going to have to put up with. I'm not saying you need to grow biceps the size of your thighs or read the Divine Comedy in the original Italian to woo a mate (such pursuits are actually non-stop detours to Douche-ville.) But you've got to keep yourself up to date, as inane as it appears sometimes. Returning to the house metaphor, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a house built in the 70s, but selling one with the orange shag carpet and faux wood paneling is going to be tough. They're fun and quirky, but remodeling is a huge hassle and can take forever.

Yes, yes, I can hear the chorus of, "But I want someone who accepts me for who you I am." Well, that's baloney. You don't want anyone whose standards are that low. And as for the fairer readers of this blog, I have no comment on your marryability. I am, after all, trying to keep my own marryability index high as possible.

Ward Ski Night

Being a single Mormon in Utah has its share of peculiarities above and beyond the general oddities of LDS life. Take, as example, the church sponsored and oddly named activities in which we are expected to participate. Activities such as "linger longer", "ward prayer", and "etiquette dinners" are cleverly engineered to get us together so that we can merrily and married-ly copulate and torture a new generation of young Mormons with unrealistic expectations.

Tonight, my ward is engaging in just such activity; the ward ski night. And I, suffering from a minor cold and severe writers' itch, am here to mock it. Like so many church activities, ward ski night seems full of promise but is in fact fraught with peril. We live in Utah, home to the greatest snow on earth, and so it seems serendipitous that we are able to gather at a local ski resort one or two nights each winter with our ward-mates. Surely this is the perfect recipe for the Mormon marriage martini: one measure ward boys, one measure ward girls, shaken well with food, physical activity, and a "For the Beauty of the Earth" moment in all of nature's frozen splendor.

With that combination, surely the engagements will start sprouting up. But after years of Ward Ski Nights, this is the reality:

• Many people don't know how to ski, even in a place like Utah. While this travesty warrants another separate post, it also has the odd side effect of making it so that very few people actual ski at Ward Ski Night. It all comes down to this: if you give a skier a choice between skiing on a bitterly cold night or watching non-skiers learning to ski, they will probably opt for watching the non-skiers learn to ski -- not surprisingly, watching beginners fumble about on 6 foot planks is far more entertaining that skiing in the cold dark.
  

• Night skiing is cold. Seriously people, IT'S COLD. Right now it's 6 degrees on the mountain. (I am not making that up.) And guess what? Girls don't like cold generally. They especially don't like the snotty noses and the freeze dried mascara tears that result from such tundra like temperatures. And, on the male side, night skiing requires cold weather foods like chili, stew and sloppy joe's, which may be among the pantheon of Mormon and Scout Camp foods, but they certainly raise intestinal issues in mixed company, particularly if the resort area is location up some winding canyon road.

• Finally, Skiing isn't really much of a couple's activity. It's at least as mutually torturous as it is mutually edifying. Sure, there may be moments of cuddling on the lift (depending on sloppy joe consumption), but what about the ride down? Odds are that one person will be much better than the other person, so the slow person worries about slowing down the fast person, while the fast person doesn't want to seem insensitive by going too fast. Or, alternatively the beginner silently curses the intermediate for depositing them on the top of K2 with the admonition, "It's not that bad...", while the intermediate mentally screams, "What is SO HARD about the the making a pizza/french fry?" Don't believe me? Two weeks ago, I was riding a lift at the Canyons with an older gentleman and his recently engaged son. They were talking about the mechanics of skiing as a married couple, when the father wisely counseled, "When you're married, you can't just tell her to meet you at the lodge at 4:30. That'll get you in trouble. That's also why the happiest day of my life was when your mother decided she didn't want to ski anymore."
  

So, I tip my glass for another Ward Ski Night and bid it farewell till next year. I can't wait for the Ward Etiquette Ski Linger Longer Auction.

Girls are Weird...

Is there a formal body of research on why girls are so weird? Of course, that premise implies that men are the non-weird ones, which I don't think I could ever argue.

The thing that is weird about women, if there is anything, is the effect that they have on men, whether they are conscious of it or not. With a flick of the hair, a slight touch on the shoulder, a lingering glance, and all of man's rationality and sense will simply evaporate. Perhaps men have the same effect of women, but it seems to me that that they are at least moderately aware of what is happening to them -- and have at least the option to resist. Men, however, seem the hapless pawns of biology and chemistry.

Men wouldn't mind their kryptonite so much if the members of the fairer sex didn't seem so fickle, irrational, and, at times, downright crazy. But when it comes down to it, I surmise that when a woman acts crazy, it's because a man is driving her nuts. Gentlemen, you know how truly asinine we can be. Can you imagine what it's like for someone without a Y chromosome to help interpret our moronic behavior?

Since I barely understand my own mind, it makes perfect sense that women would remain an enigma. Who can fathom the feminine mind? Not I. And it's not particularly relevant anyway, since I hold the same opinion as Hobbes: "I like 'em anyway."

Here Fishy, Fishy, Fishy

I spent the weekend up at a friend's ranch. 6000 acres of sagebrush, ragweed, and whatever else decided to assault my sinuses. I hate fall sometimes, but it was a good time. Besides the ATV riding, the trap shooting, the sleeping under the stars, and the canoing, the highlight was probably the fishing.

I found myself on a pontoon boat in the middle of a pond stocked with feisty rainbow trout. My companions on the boat were three novice fisherwomen. The results, frankly, were hilarious. Not much thought had been given to what to do with the fish once they were reeled onto the boat. The first catch of the day brought this oversight to light. I removed the hook from the fish's mouth and asked, "Well, do you want to eat him?" (All fish are considered male, in case you were wondering.) She seem convinced that yes, she did want to eat the fish, so I said, "Well, you're going to have to kill him then." (This is why all fish are male, because it's easier to dispatch a male fish.) I will happily tie lines, bait hooks, and help with a cast, but I only kill my own fish.

She seemed less than thrilled about the prospect, but proceeded to grasp the trout in both hands firmly by the tail and went to swing it against the aluminum railing. It went like this:

"Awwww..."

Thunk!

"Sorry!"

Thunk!

"Ewwww...."

Thunk!

"I think he's dead..."

There's nothing quite like the sound of squishy clang of a fish's ahead against a metal bar.

I also wonder, does helping a girl clean her fish count as an act of chivalry?

What's done is done?

Tonight while serving the dutch oven chicken to a big line of guys and girls from the ward, it reminded me that men and women generally have very different ideas of what "done" means. Many women carefully inspected their chicken, poking it carefully, while the men didn't seem to care. I've noticed the same thing with steaks and my sisters. Pink is absolutely verbotten.

These seem to be the rules for doneness:

For women:

• Moisture, juices and oils (i.e., the flavor) should not be present in any state on the exterior of the meat, or when the meat is cut into.
  
• The meat should be firm enough that it could be used as a tongue depressor.
  
• The color should be entirely uniform. Spackle colored for chicken, grout colored for steaks.

For Men:

• The meat must have criss crossed char marks.
  
• The animal must be dead.
  

Now I understand why so many women don't seem to like a good steak! I'd dislike it too if it were a blackened, dry disc. Trust me ladies, it's already dead, there's no reason to kill it again.

The Hierarchy of Towels

My roommate gave me the evil eye the other day for drying my hands with the dishtowel. I didn't know we had dishtowels and was also unaware they were different from the hand towels. Apparently neither are appropriate for wiping off the counter. I wish someone had explained this to me earlier -- In my simple mind, I had basically lumped all towels into two categories -- bath towels and kitchen towels. I figured their differing sizes and softness were merely functions of how large a thing you needed to dry and how much chaffing you were willing to endure. My mom probably tried to explain the difference to me ages ago, but somewhere between calculus and the lines from Top Gun, I forgot.

So, in lieu of the proper towels, I basically had an informal hierarchy of towels that related to their perceived cleanliness. The cleanest towels were hand towels, and in a pinch, they could be used as dish towels. Eventually the hand towel became a bona fide dish towel, which eventually morphed into a counter wiping towel, and finally, a sink and floor wiping towel -- after which they would be washed and the cycle began again.

In case you're wondering, men have a similar hierarchy for clothes. The cleanest clothes are for church, funerals, and other formal events, next is work meetings, followed closely by dates and then down to Saturday attire. Yes, it's said but true. Don't believe me? I cite Ghostbusters as corroborating evidence:

Peter Venkman: "Did you happen to see some shirts on the floor in here?"

Dana: "I put them in your hamper. I thought they were dirty."

Peter <shakes head>: "I have a hamper? I have more than two grades of laundry. There are lots of subtle levels between clean and dirty. <Lifts shirt out of hamper and smells it.> See, this isn't so bad, just hang it out the window and it'll be fine."

Here, smell this.

Smells are intriguing to me. Mostly because they are generally involuntary. We experience smells all the time simply by existing and moving from place to place, and those smells can bring back waves of history and emotion -- just ask any man what it's like when something reminds him of her hair or her lotion. Smells even seem capable of encapsulating an idea. One of my favorite scents is that of lawn mowing. There's just something about the smell of moist grass mingled with gasoline on a warm summer morning that reminds me of hard work.

But, for as universal as smell is, there is one part thing that the genders differ greatly on. Women love to share smells like candles and perfumes, and men love to share stenches. A group of girls can spend hours in bath and body works, sharing the latest lotion scents, whereas the highlight of man's work day may well be reached when he manages to trap a foul gaseous emission in the bathroom stall long enough for the next occupant to be brought to tears.

To further illustrate, picture a 3 month old moldy Tupperware container in the fridge. A woman would examine the container and oh so carefully lift the corner and faintly sniff for an odor. At the slightest hint of stench, she'd immediately discard the whole container.

A man, on the other hand, will eye the container at first, attempting to judge the lethality of whatever might lie within. If he thinks he can handle it, he'll open the container, stick his nose in, and inhale deeply, knowing full well that the smell may be absolutely horrifying. Like he was sucker punched, he may double over, eyes bulging and gasping for breathe. And when it's all over, something in his pea brain will convince him that someone else might want to experience this same terrifying smell, so he'll wander around until he finds a buddy and orders, "Here, smell this..."