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.

Do men know how to read a clock?

So, there's this really cool thing that was invented sometime in the 1500's. The minute hand came about in 1957 and was made more efficient by the Pendulum. Anyone know what it is?

Umm, what is a clock? Ding ding ding! We have a winner.

Yes, a clock, something that I'm not sure men are aware of. If they were they would know how to be on time. Or how to use thier time. Kitty and I have had endless conversations about how our boyfriends spend thier time....and we're not exactly sure what they are doing with it and why it takes them so long to do....whatever it is that they do.

Let me first start by saying that I have a wonderful boyfriend. He's loving, considerate, kind and funny. But....he has a problem with time. I don't really know what his major malfunction is when it comes to this....all that I know is that it drives me completely insane. I know that many hours are logged (or lost) in front of the computer to start. I know that there is always something to fix or pull apart and put back together. It seems that many times when we are walking out of the house (through the garage of course) he will see something that all of a sudden urgently must be fixed before we can leave. Like the weed-eater, or some kind of laser tool that is broken. Wierd, I didn't know we needed the weed-eater to run to the grocery store....why can't it wait?! I don't understand.

I am sitting here, waiting for my boyfriend to arrive. He was supposed to be here 15 mins ago, but will not be arriving for at least another hour. Men. He explained to me the long list of things that came up that he had to do before leaving (which I admit, were mainly nice things for me) and all I could think of was....I could have done that in 15 minutes but it took you an hour and a half? Mystifying.

What are they doing with thier time? Why do they dick around so much? What exactly is it? I just can't figure it out. But, it's starting to spill over into my life. When we are together, we tend to run a little late (I totally blame him :) because of all this last minute shit. I think it's just poor planning.

The thing that really gets me though, is that men don't understand why us ladies get so pissed off and annoyed by thier time wasting, procrastination and tardiness. LIke, why we are irritated when we do an entire days worth of chores IN THE MORNING before they have even gotten out of bed....or why we hate waiting for them at dinner time when we've cooked a hot meal and they haven't arrived or just have to "finish" what they are doing.

Why is it that time seems to be more important to women than to men?

Maybe we should change the subtitle of this blog to "All the shit women don't understand about men" cause right now I'm feeling really confused.

Mewes