The Bio-illigical Man Clock

Okay, I feel that I must write a response to Mewes' blog about Men and Time. I, like Mewes, am in a relationship. In fact, it has just reached the one year mark. (You can e-mail congratulations separately.) We co-habitate a messy apartment. That's been going on for about four months. Okay, I'm straying from the point.

Time. There is this saying, more of a retort really, that you are supposed to use when somebody tells you they don't have enough time to do something. You are supposed to say, "You have 24 hours in every day. Just like Mahatma Ghandi, Leonardo di Vinci, Stephen Hawking, Louis Pasteur, etc., etc., etc. "

Well, Greg, my wonderful hunk of man-flesh, has the same problem as Mewes' guy. He also manages to waste time incredibly. Here's an example:

Saturday I needed to run a few errands, but we also needed to clean the apartment before we left for one of two meetup.com groups at 11:15am. I originally said that Greg should go with me and help me run the errands, so we would have more time to clean. He said that it would be better if I ran the errands and he stayed home to clean. Okay, that seemed logical.

Here is everything I did: took bridesmaids dress to alterations shop, tried it on, got it pinned in all the right places, went to the book store and went to the grocery store. I left at 10:00. I got home at 11:05. I looked at the apartment upon my return. It seemed different, but I couldn't put my finger on what. It certainly didn't look any cleaner. There was Greg, in the kitchen, washing dishes.

Okay, clean dishes is a good start, but I could not really see anything else that had been done in that 65 minutes I was gone. He said he cleaned the whole time.

"Cleaned the whole time?" I said.

"Yeah, and I'm a little hurt that you seem to think I was goofing around," he said with his big brown eyes about three seconds away from a pout.

"Hmm... I just don't see what you cleaned. It looks a little better, but I don't really see things were picked up." I admit, we are total slobs, and stuff doesn't get picked up unless we think someone is coming over.

Someone was coming over. Between our meetup.com groups, we would only have about 90 minutes to heat up food and have our guests, including Greg's father come over. I sigh-zed up my options. I had to do it. Yes, nag.

"Well, I'm not trying to nag, darling, but what the hell did you do for 65 minutes?"

"You can't even tell, can you?!" he snapped.

"Well, if I could tell, I wouldn't need to ask... Baby."

I turns out, he put the DVDs that were out away. No, we do not live in a Blockbuster, so you're probably wondering how that could take more than 5 minutes. Well, you see, as he explained to me, "They needed to be alphabatized so people wouldn't think we're complete animals."

As much as I wanted to slap him, I also wanted to hug him because that is the man that I fell in love with. He will sleep through his alarm and miss work or class, but he will stay up until 4:30 in the morning, alphabatizing our movie collection. That was the first thing that got merged when he moved in. And yes, duplicates were pulled out -- keeping the special editions over regular editions, of course. Of course, during that time he was supposed to be looking for his birth certificate so he could apply for a passport.... True story, and I had to take the business trip to Amsterdam by myself, thanks for asking.

One of my best guy friends says that alphabatizing movies by title is really stupid. Because everybody knows that you have to put them in order of Director. I mean, how can you have Kill Bill 1&2 apart from Resevoir Dogs? Well, if they are alphabatized, you sure as heck will. You can't have Chasing Amy apart from Clerks! Sure, they have a shot of being next to each other if you are alphabatizing by title, but what about Dogma? Jersey Girl? Mallrats? I rest my case, well, er his case. Of course his fiancee is rolling her eyes the whole time he's explaining this to me.

ME, I had a crazy system for keeping my movies: Buffy and Sex in the City go in the front because those are the ones I like to watch most often. I had a whole Ben Affleck shelf . Don't tell me, I don't know how to organize movies. And, truly, it only took me about 10 minutes to come up with and organize my system.

So, man time. It should have its own code, like Eastern Standard Time. We'll call it BMT. As in, we'll get to the store at 6pm, 6:50 BMT. That leaves time for the movie organizing, the weed-wacker fixing, the watch alarm setting, the e-mail checking, and all of the other crapple that they think only takes 5 minutes, but really takes at least 30.

Oh, and BMT is quadrupled if he thinks he is doing something nice for me. Greg and I have different days off, except for Saturdays. Well, one Thursday, he swore that he would start listing some stuff on eBay that needed to be sold (in a joint effort to declutter our apartment), go to the store (to reclutter our apartment) and do some laundry. I came home to find him in front of the computer in his underwear. Nothing went up on eBay, nothing new from the store and laundry still not done. When I asked him, he said, "Well, I know you were upset that you missed Pete Yorn on Conan from Friday night, so I searched for hours until I found it! I just found it about ten minutes ago, and I'm burning it right now.

What is the rule about getting mad at your man for wasting time when he's wasting it to do something nice for you?

My rule is to smile, say thank you, and just think in my head that I could be with some inconsiderate jerk who would probably waste just as much time, but never do anything nice for me.