The Mysteries of Living With a Woman Redux or A Feuer Christmas Carol

Scene:  Christmas Eve morning in the Feuer household.  Tammy leaves for work before Richard.  She has a "hospital full of angry patients who can't be home for Christmas" to run while Richard only has one unlucky patient "who bit the wrong way into a candy cane the day before Christmas" to ameliorate.  Tammy is gone by 7 AM.  Richard finally works his way down to the kitchen at 8:30.  And there, in the semi-early morning dawn light he sees the note on his place-mat.  He already suspects it is not an "I love you, have a blessed day" missive.  Richard and Tammy have been together too long for the kinds of platitudinous crap trappings more commonly seen in 6 month old unions.  No, it is most assuredly a honey-do list on this, the most horrific, nauseatingly frantic, and insufferably annoying shopping day of the year.  So before Richard even sees the print on the sticky note he is "oh crapping", "you gotta be kidding me", and I don't freaking believe this" himself to death.  But, blessedly (Christmas miracle number one) the note is short.

Action: There are only two items on the list and they are conveniently labeled 1 and 2.  But helpful numbering system aside, the instructions are in "Tammy shorthand".  If you are unfamiliar with this time and space saving method of enumeration let me explain.  You see, even the most lengthy of instructions, lists, and commandments, can be squeezed onto a sticky note no bigger than 1" by 1" square.  If Tammy had been the set designer for Charlton Heston in the Ten Commandments he could have come down from the mountain with not only the big ten, but the entire Torah on a stone tablet no bigger than your basic Etch a Sketch screen.  The key is to start randomly somewhere in the middle of the page, with really big print, and then when you start to run out of room, merely start twirling the paper around and around, writing smaller and smaller, utilizing every corner of the paper without regard to top, bottom, left or right.  And then, as with indecipherable ancient Aramaic, expect the generations that follow you to use this as a guide for their resultant behavior.  Or in my case, as merely a guide to how many, and what kind, of rolls to buy for Christmas dinner the next day.

Here then, for your interpretation, is the note:

It is obvious, if you are a student of semiotics, that the Pillsbury Crescent instruction was actually written down first.  The green beans were added as an after thought.  Thus the helpfully circled 1, 2 informational symbols inserted in the margin.  But the more significant sign of Tammy's thought process is the smaller typeface and banishment to that portion of the memo pad already taken up by the sponsor of the instructional note, the NJDOT, of the green bean commandment.  We can further assume, once we have this information, that the style of cut, size of bag, and brand of green beans will not be too crucially important to the success of the covered dish for which they are intended.  So we are good for the frozen food isle.

What is not so apparent is the number and possibly style of rolls to purchase.  In solving any Rosetta Stone style hieroglyphics one must first rewrite the words in the proper order of the translationalist's language.  So for us, commandment number two reads as follows, or so I thought:

28's =16 Pillsbury Crescent + 4 rolls.

My first thought, of course, took me back to eleventh grade chemistry class and those confounding oxidation-reduction equations where the number of electrons "in"must equal the number of electrons "out".   Could it be that we were having 28 guests and Tammy was trying to figure out if 20 rolls could feed 28 people without a loss of satiety?  I really had no idea so I knew what I had to do; recruit someone who spoke the language of honey-do lists.  So I showed the note to my dental assistant after we finished fixing the tooth of the hapless candy cane eater.  "Do you know what this means?  What are 28's?" I hopefully asked.  She, too, had no idea what the note meant.  Then, once at the supermarket I ran into a patient of mine who happens to be an engineer and a female.  I hopefully showed her the note.  She had no idea either.  But once I got to the refrigerated  section, it began to make more sense.  The crescent rolls were in packs of eight.  Oooooooohhhhhhhhh, I thought to myself.  She means two packs of eight.  But what about the + 4?  Still worried about buying an incorrect number of rolls for our carbohydrate deprived guests I asked a lady standing next to me what she thought.  After her initial shock at a strange man saying to her in the refrigerator section "can I ask you something?" (from her circumspect glare I really believe she thought I was going to proposition her) she had no insight for me.  So, assuming the note was making a distinction between crescents and regular rolls I bought a smaller pack of Pillsbury Grandes.  This was a five pack, but since there were no four packs of anything, I was satisfied with my ultimate decision.

The only thing now, standing between me and Christmas break relaxation, was the inevitable ten people deep lines at every register.  But here was Christmas miracle number two; I found a register with only one person in front of me and she was already ringing up the last item, a 12 pound, serves two,  fruitcake.  I was home 10 minutes later.  And it was only after taking the picture of Tammy's note for this post that I decrypted its full contextual meaning.  She actually wrote it utilizing a vertical columnar pattern a la Chinese characters.  Here then is the note reinterpreted:

2-eight packs equaling sixteen (as if I needed help with the addition) plus 1-four pack of Pillsbury Crescent rolls.  If you look again at the note more carefully you will see the columnar structure.  Numbers in one column and letters in the next column.  Mystery solved.  Except for the fact that I found no four packs of crescent rolls.  Here is how a man would have written the note:

1. 1 lb green beans
2. 2x8 pack and 1x4 pack Pillsbury crescent rolls.

That's how we order lumber by the way.
(ask a man what this means; 5x2"x4"x8' stud grade, and he will know).

And by the way, for Tammy's Christmas gift, I adopted mile 83.2 to 84.2 of the NJ Turnpike in her name because I believe her choice of sticky notes was a hint at what she wanted (being the cryptologist that I am) .  So don't throw anything out your car window while driving there.

The Spice Rack and Other Mysteries of Living With a Woman

Women are great executive chefs when it comes to planning holiday meals.  Able to conceive, plan, and execute a menu for a party from four to forty and enjoy doing it.   I consider myself a good prep and dependable line chef.  There is no shame in this.  Point me toward a huge pile of russet potatoes, the peeler and a sharp knife and I will make sure they are julienned just right for the chef de cuisine to turn them into gourmet papas fritas.  But task me with coming up with the menu in the first place and I will just call ahead for take out fries from the nearest burger joint.  So when my brother asked me to cut up some veggies for a crudites tray for my nephew's apres Bar Mitzvah party I was all over it.  But when he asked me if I thought we had prepared a sufficient quantity I was stymied.  "I have no idea", I lamely replied.  "Tammy usually tells me how much to make".  It is an absolute mystery to me how my wife seems to know with unflinching confidence what, and how much, to prepare for a party.  "Go to Acme and get a pound and a half of cooked shrimp for the hors d'oeurves" she steadfastly commands me as if I might mistakenly only buy one pound.  Therefore leaving each of our guests three shrimps short of what they actually desired.

Another source of great inscrutability for me is the spice rack . There are spices on display in our kitchen that were once used in 1997.  A particularly enigmatic one that comes to mind is cream of tarter.  I am not even sure that is a spice but my wife insists on it being perched on the spice rack alongside the more obvious Mediterranean oregano.  Some spices get relegated to the lazy susan in the spice cabinet but others are kept out on the hanging wall rack.  Allspice is in the cabinet but rosemary is on the rack.  Since neither have been used in anything served to me in the past twenty years I am unsure as to the logic of the organizational scheme.  But one time I did trade out the thyme leaves for the Season All (the most versatile of spices) and there was hell to pay.  Perhaps since the spice rack is visible to our guests it sends a certain message about our kitchen.  Fancy McCormick jars of rosemary, tarragon, Turkish bay leaves, and Saigon cinnamon all say Dean and DeLuca while a tub of Season All says Costco. If it were up to me we wouldn't even need a spice rack.  I would have garlic, onion, chile, and red pepper powders along side the salt and pepper shakers. And perhaps some coriander for my famous guacamole.

The puzzlement of the female character does not end in the kitchen.  My wife's sartorial vocabulary also eludes my cognitive frame of reference.  For example, please briefly describe the item of clothing seen in the photo below:

My wife, on a recent weekend away, informed me that I had left my "gold top" in the car.   "What's my gold top?" I irritatingly inquired.
"You know, for the outfit you are wearing tomorrow" she replied.
"You mean my yellow flannel shirt?  I am just going to wear it with my black jeans.   Men have shirts, not tops. "And furthermore", I firmly added, "I don't wear outfits."
Men have shirts and pants.  Women have outfits.

Then there is the matter of window treatments.  The idea that windows get treated is as foreign a concept to me as dressing a turkey.  If I were a bachelor I am quite certain the windows in my condo would have shades, blinds, or possibly, if I had a study, shudders.  If I did have the need to dress up the window frame I would take two measurements, width and height, and go buy some pre-made curtains at JC Penny which hang on a straight forward rod. In my house, however, we have swags, jabots, cornices, and lambrequins.  All custom sewn by my wife.  And in order to even fabricate a swag one needs the mathematical chops of Sir Isaac Newton. The formulas used to calculate the amount of material needed to sew a swag which will hang just so are complicated enough for an advanced algebra course. Yet Tammy can figure it out in her head while she is standing in the cutting table queue at JoAnn's while holding the bolt of calico muslin.  But for some odd reason she refuses to understand that a 15 watt CFL replaces a 60 watt incandescent.  Or even what CFL stands for. 

My final observation has been touched on before in this column (I promoted my blog).  When company comes over, even our own family, why must we hide all the evidence that we actually live in our home?  Every magazine, newspaper, glass, sock, and pen must be hidden from view as if we have newly arrived in our abode along with the guests.   I guess it's like your mother telling you to always put on a clean pair of underwear in case you are in an accident and the paramedics have to cut off your pants.  But much like the paramedics realizing many accident victims shit their pants anyway, your company surely is aware of the fact that there is usually a foot high stack of old newspapers on the coffee table so what's the difference.

Henry Higgins asked "why can't a woman be more like a man" many years ago so this topic is hardly new.  But I encourage you to send in your own anecdotes.  I even encourage "why can't a man be more like a woman" quips.

This is Rich, What's Your Bitch?

Dear Rich,

Why can't I get my sister/brother/mother/father-in-law to behave in a manner I find appropriate?  Why must they engage in behavior that exasperates me?

Signed,
The Well Behaved One.



Dear Put Out Daughter/Son/Mother/Father-in-law,

They are not going to change so you must......change. You can continue to bang your head against the wall hoping the wall gives before your head does, or you can accept things as they are.  Your choice to make, not theirs to comply.

Signed,
Rich

I have thus distilled 50 years of advice column writing.  I welcome your questions.

My Impressions of the Impressionists

So we went to the infamous Barnes Museum the other Sunday.  Oh, sorry, it's not a museum, it's a Foundation.   Founded by the extraordinarily curmudgeonly Dr. Albert Barnes.  Actually, that is a disservice to curmudgeons everywhere.  He was basically just pissed off at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  As is well known by now to even the most dilettante Philadelphian, the art establishment  rejected Dr Barnes's vision over 80 years ago.  He espoused a unique organizational scheme to display the art he had amassed, a codification system that would reveal commonalities in design of various artworks to even the most casual art enthusiast.  The biggest problem with abstruse art, you see, is that the casual observer rarely appreciates it.  Art, it seems, must be put in historical context to fully understand its profound nature.  If we look at a so called masterpiece painted in 1783, for example, we may think to ourselves "big deal, I saw Bob Ross paint a prettier picture on PBS television the other night and it only took him thirty minutes".  That may be true but he did not invent how to make clouds look like they are actually reflecting sunlight.  Some fifteenth century Dutch dude figured that out.  Or it might have been a sixteenth century Venetian.  I have no idea.  But that is exactly the point.  Barnes would hang a few pictures with, say, brightly highlighted clouds all in a single cluster.  Regardless of in what century they were actually painted. So a dilettante like me could put the art in historical context and easily visualize the common design elements in otherwise disparate pieces.  Or perhaps not. I really have no idea what the hell Barnes was thinking.  The various galleries, while awesome in the sheer amount of great art packed into a small space, reminded me of a cluttered refrigerator door in the home of a too proud mother of an artistically prolific six year old.  My niece, the art historian, tried to explain the hodgepodge to me, but really, I was way more interested in the other people enjoying the art that day than the art itself.  I am more anthropologist than aesthete.

When I say that the other patrons were enjoying the art, I really mean that they were merely studying it.  At least as far as I could tell.  You see, the really odd thing to me was that not a single person in the entire place was smiling.....except me.  Not a smirk, grimace, grin, frown , nor harrumph, and as far as I could tell, no movement at all of the labial commissures on anybody's face.  I don't believe I even heard a sigh nor murmur of disgust in front of one particularly galling Renoir.  I, of course, exhaled a loud "how the hell did that get in here", hoping to at least get a nod of assent from the cute bereted beatnik standing next to me but she merely pivoted and focused her attention on the Delacroix adjacent to the Manet.  Which only forced me to harrumph even louder hoping to get some reaction.  Nothing.  In fact the only time I could get a rise out of any one in the entire museum is when I dared to stick my nose too close to a Seurat to see if the painting really was made up of tiny dots.  Then a blue blazered, overly austere guard came running over and told me to please step back from the art.  That got a harrumph out of my bereted friend.  A show of enthusiasm, I guess, is taboo in a museum of world class art.  Doesn't the very nature of art demand that it evoke some emotion in the viewer?  As far as I could tell the only emotion being felt in this place was one of funereal resignation.

But, I hear you protest, one must be subdued, like in a library, so as not to disturb the ruminations of the other enthusiasts.  To which I reply, the guards never shushed me, they only told me to stand back.  And believe me, I was doing a lot of disruptive emoting.  I would turn the corner into a new gallery and be blasted by a wall crammed with the most sublime art in the world and I could hardly contain my enthusiasm.  But the other art lovers were literally standing there frozen in a posture one would only expect to see at a cemetery while their mother was being lowered into the ground.  Yet they weren't crying.  One would be at a loss to figure out what, if anything, they were feeling at all.  And in front of world class art!  I really don't get it.  No wonder most people just go to Disney World.  At least there you can loudly cheer when your six year old daughter completes her spin art painting at Mickey's Wonderful World of Spin Art booth.