Coming to Terms with the Y Chromosome

So here’s the thing about men: the thing is, all men are airheads.

And I’m not trying to pick a fight or necessarily make a sweeping generalization, it’s just a conclusion I’ve come to after years and years of empirical study. My husband is an airhead, all of his male friends are airheads, all of my friends’ husbands and boyfriends are airheads. I’ve never met an exception.

Granted, everyone has their moments of airheadedness, of misplacing wallets and getting lost and mistaking the salt for the sugar. But the airhead gene that is carried on the Y chromosome is far more pronounced and ferocious than the airhead gene carried on the X chromosome. Women may misplace keys, but a man will walk around the house for twenty fucking minutes looking for his keys only to realize that he’s had them in his hand the whole time.

And I’m not saying that being an airhead is such a bad thing, it’s just something I’ve had to learn to deal with. I’ve had to learn that men will most likely lose track of time while they are sitting on the toilet, and when I say lose track of time I mean that they will not realize that they have been reading Macworld for over 90 minutes while sitting bare-bottomed on a cold porcelain pot. My husband often wonders why he has a permanent red indentation around his upper thighs.

Men will forget that the dog is a living, breathing being, and when you point out that the dog has had an empty water bowl for over 12 hours a man will say, “But he had a drink this morning, I don’t see the problem.” When you ask if he’s fed the dog he’ll say, “He ate yesterday. You mean he has to eat everyday?”

Men will put in their contact lenses, forget they have put in their contact lenses, put on their glasses and wonder why everything is so blurry.

A man will fill the teapot to the brim with water, turn on the stove and walk away. 5 minutes later in the middle of a riveting article on G4 upgrade cards and their relative installation times, he’ll wonder from the safety of the commode what the hell that screaming, hissing noise is and why the dog is howling. 10 minutes later, after the hissing has turned into sizzling and the fire alarm has sounded, he’ll muse to himself, “I really like the PowerForce G4 Series 100 1GHz, I wonder how fast they could ship it?”

And just when I think I’ve learned everything, when I think the airheadedness had reached it’s most ridiculous form, my husband will walk up to me, look at me with those lovely hazel eyes through his trendy Isaac Mizrahi glasses and ask with pained seriousness, “Have you see my glasses?”