Of Men (but not Mice)...

Ah, the aggravating distraction that is a Man.  One can get on very well without him.  Life is so much simpler and more orderly when he is not around.  He is quarrelsome or temperamental or romantic by turns; he is never interested in what one wants to interest him in, but always interested in proving to himself that he can deflect one's attention to something else.  If one is washing the dishes, he can't leave well enough alone.  No, he must needs insist upon a discussion of politics or else his work or else become amorous, just to satisfy his vanity and reassure himself she still falls for him.  If one feels romantic in one's own turn, however, he is sure to be busy paying bills or reading articles.

Yet all the time one knows that one's life would be terribly narrow without him: cool and pristine and glassy, obscured and small and safe in one's grasp, a single endless project of femininity.  The most aggravating point for me, however, in the matters politic between men and women, is the tenacity with which a man will insist that women are complicated and that men are simplicity itself.  Men are much the most fascinating objects of complexity I know: funny, absurd, tender, rough, romantic, prosaic, obnoxious, courteous, mischievous, wheedlesome, so many contradictions in one interesting and exasperating and irresistible package.  If they were cat toys then they would be the ball of yarn that never fully unravels.  If they were dog toys they would be big, meaty bones with pith and marrow.

My Man pestered me determinedly as I gazed equally determinedly at the screen, trying to compose the first thoughts of a new post.  I felt poetry in my blood, but it couldn't come for distraction.  I asked, "Do you not want me to write?" He replied, thinking himself very clever, and what is not precisely the same thing, "I like that you're a writer." Hmph.  So I began this post...

He was looking over my shoulder at the end, and couldn't help chuckling as he read- but at last he complained: "It isn't fair.  Men are simple and uncomplicated..." Me, in a drippingly sweet voice: "I know, I know.  Of course they are."  At which he was finally equally exasperated.  "But you have made it so that my saying so seems to prove your point!!!"  Haha.  Indeed, check mate, my mate!