Thursday, December 28, 2006

Gender Meme

Gender Meme

Mandarine tagged me for the gender meme over here, which I forgot I wanted to do back when I first read it (too distracted by all this holiday stuff). Actually, Mandarine’s been giving me quite a lot of fodder for my blog these days. During what must have been a period of desperate boredom, he went back to the early days of my blog and started commenting on some of the posts I’d practically forgotten I’d written, which has made me want to revisit some of those topics, now that a whole, long seven months has gone by. Those things will have to wait, though. For now, it’s the meme:

Three things you do that women usually do

1. Wear makeup (but only what takes less than five minutes to apply)
2. Shave my legs (an activity that helps keep me from envying those tall women whose shapely legs start right around their eyebrows)
3. Consider chocolate to be one of my dearest friends

Three things you do that men usually do

1. Drive all over creation, hopelessly lost, but refusing to ask for directions, despite the fact that I know damn well I’ve got a terrible sense of direction
2. Hang out with the boys
3. Consider the floor to be a perfectly reasonable place to store clothes until I’m ready to put them away

Three things you do that women usually don’t do

1. Love to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon at the ball park, filling in the score card and eating hotdogs and Cracker Jacks (HUGE disppointment at Camden Yards: no Cracker Jacks. How could such a cool baseball stadium not sell Cracker Jacks?)
2. Avoid talking on the phone as if the latest research has shown it causes severe brain damage (noting from the way people act with their cell phones, I’m pretty sure it does, even without the research to back up my theory)
3. Talk incessantly about math and how cool it is (but I don’t know many men who do this, either. Maybe this should go under a different category “something you do that non-geeks usually don’t do”)

Three things you do that men usually don’t do

1. Obsessively try to make sure Bob and I are eating healthily
2. Drink all those “girlie” cocktails like apple martinis, amaretto sours, and lemon drops. I’m always deeply impressed by men who will drink them with me (like Bob), but they seem to be impressed that I will also kick back a bourbon on the rocks.
3. Get drunk after only two of those aforementioned cocktails, so that any man who might have been impressed that I was kicking back a bourbon on the rocks immediately becomes unimpressed by the fact that I can’t hold my liquor

Three things you don’t do that women usually do

1. Prefer driving an automatic to driving a stick shift
2. Freak out when a spider/insect/lizard, etc. runs across my path
3. Go ga-ga over babies (puppies and kittens, on the other hand…)

Three things you don’t do that men usually do

1. Tell people they’re being irrational just because they don’t agree with me
2. Eat enough food for three people in one sitting
3. Spend so much time talking, reading, and thinking about sports that the important things for which they’re still mainly responsible (like doing something about global warming, putting a stop to war, irradicating AIDS) don’t get done

Three things you don’t do that women usually don’t do

1. Mow the lawn (I don’t think I’ve ever even turned on a lawn mower in my life)
2. Run my own company (although maybe, one day…)
3. Consider every other driver on the road to be my enemy, personally out to get me

Three things you don’t do that men usually don’t do

1. Jump on the newest fad diet craze
2. Spend hours on end shopping at the mall
3. Get manicures

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Emily, I think this post ended up truncated? It stops halfway through. I'm with you on baseball parks, shaving legs, and five-minute makeup. We might seriously need to look into our past and find out if one of us was adopted...

Emily Barton said...

You're right, Court. It's now complete. Thanks.

I'm hoping one of these days, business will take me out to Michigan, and I can take a side trip for you and me to trace our family trees.

Rebecca H. said...

I still need to do this ... I'm just not sure I can think of enough things!

mandarine said...

"a period of desperate boredom": you would not believe what a couple of your posts can do against boredom or research engineer's block. I do not have access to a lot of chocolate at my office, but I can read you.

Emily Barton said...

Dorr, oh, I hope you do. I'd love to see your responses.

Mandarine, hmmm...I don't think anyone has ever flattered me so much as to compare me to chocolate. That's something I won't soon forget!

Froshty said...

I think that the idea that women prefer driving automatic shifts is a myth. Granted, I'm not acquainted with all the women drivers in the world, but I can't think of one who doesn't prefer a manual except those who have only driven automatic in their lives. Give me a manual shift any day!