The Crunchy Peanut Butter Incident

There are certain rifts between married couples that never really go away. The use of some products versus others can be an ongoing problem. For instance, in the times when my wife mops the floors, she uses some half-baked (girlie) product called Fabuloso. As near as I can tell it's just tap water that has been colored with some purple food coloring and hit with some heavy perfumes that essentially does nothing. Call me a man, but for my money nothing does a better job than hot water, some Dawn dish soap, and a jigger of bleach. It seems to me that sometime back in the 50's women were sold a bill of goods that told them that just because something smells good it must be working. This idea takes me back to the topic of Febreze. That product might just be the biggest scam perpetrated on the American public since the invention of dry cleaning; let's be honest, if it's not getting wet it's NOT getting cleaned. How effective do you think your washing machine would be without a little H2O? Spraying Febreze around a room that stinks is like putting a band aide on a severed limb. This is just a lazy person's way of solving a problem. How about getting to the bottom of the problem, figuring out what really stinks, and actually cleaning it. WHAT A RADICAL CONCEPT! If you had a pair of dirty underwear that started to stink, would you spritz them with perfume and put them back in your top drawer or would you do a freaking wash? Therin may just lie the difference between the sexes and possibly a generation.

My wife continually takes me task over cooking fish in the house. In fact, her exact words are "why does the house smell like a dead body?" I usually tell her this is my insurance policy to make sure my old body sticks around for a few more years. Sometimes I MUST eat healthy, if I have to stink up the house in the process so be it! The woman refuses to eat anything that swims so she cannot begin to understand my plight. I swear the woman is part blood hound, she can walk in the front door and tell me right away that something has spoiled in the fridge. This is (at least in part) to the size of her nostrils. I usually write her off as crazy until whatever has started to turn bad in the kitchen also catches my attention at which point I usually find the culprit. The last time a new potato had rolled under the fridge when I wasn't looking. In short, I find out she is right and that is per our usual agreement, but much to my chagrin.

How many couples (straight couples that is) argue whether or not the toilet seat lid should be left up or down? I know a guy who has had on ongoing riff with his wife for so long on the topic he actually created a toilet seat that shines a red light in the bowl for when he accidently leaves it up in the middle of the night. I have three questions about this. #1) wouldn't it just be easier to check the status of the lid before you sit? #2) Isn't lowering the seat easier than fighting with your loved one about it? AND #3) once the lid has surpassed the 30% mark doesn't gravity do the rest of the work for you? I mean, how lazy as a nation are we really?! We fixed the problem permanently in my house, girls get their own bathroom, and boys have theirs. And while we are on the subject of things that cause more separations every year in America than the subject of which way the toilet paper roll should be facing than the whereabouts of the family back scratcher in the month of January. It should also be pointed out that men are all such a bunch of simpletons we are just elated that we aren't still using the Sears & Robuck catalog. Things like toilet paper color, how many plies they have, flowery patterns, and scents are things we don't give wit about. Men are far too practical to care about such nonsense. We are just glad we are not using our hands like they do in the middle east.

Like we are on so many other choices in life, my wife and I nearly have to put on boxing gloves when it comes to food differences. She will eat margarine with no questions asked, while I am a real butter guy. Trust me when I tell you are better off to ingest a bit of REAL fat than to consume a FAT FREE chemical. She likes grape jelly and I dig strawberry preserves. She likes dark chocolate and I will only eat milk chocolate. She wants waffle cones and I like sugar cones. I will only eat "from scratch" pancakes and she like the frozen kind. I usually buy Greek yogurt and she digs the whips. The list of our food differences is endless. For her peanut butter MUST be smooth. For me it must not only be crunchy, but extra crunchy. This fact is partly because I dig it, and the other part is just to piss her off. Like most of our differences we both accepted it at face value until one day she figured out my secret, she found out that the main reason I buy crunchy is so she won't eat it and in this instance my poker face would not suffice. I also have a tell in that when I lie, I flare my nostrils. And at the time I tried to lie about it my nostrils were going wild.