Sometimes, I wish I were a man. Today was one of those times.
It’s days like this, where the politics of being female lands me right back in grade school where every drama is magnified tenfold and friendships shift so fast you can’t be sure which team you’ll land on, but you’ll likely be the last one picked.
I used to think drama was due to a lack of maturity. Now I understand it is really about human nature. Women love drama – well, some of them. And since human nature blessed men with the ability to avoid it all through instant conflict resolution, without residual hard feelings (especially on a construction site where there is no Human Resources department or political correctness), I would like to play on their team.
I know I should embrace my inner feminine power, like my inherent ability to give life, to nurture and heal, (to use PMS as an excuse to snap and threaten harm to inanimate objects), and embrace the ability to feel and express my deepest emotions with chocolate in hand, watching sappy re-run movies. Ya-freakin-hoo.
Today was tough day for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which was a simple miscommunication between myself and a friend that escalated from comical to nasty, to the ultimate chill of texting silence. That’s right, it all went down by text. Thank goodness for technology: meant to improve communication but more likely to destroy it.
When these dramas happen, as they do from time to time, I wish I were the Carpenter. He doesn’t do drama, ever. His world view is black and white, right or wrong. That’s it. And to be clear, it doesn’t matter because either way, he just doesn’t care. Things don’t escalate; they come to a fast stop. He has the uncanny ability to park forgiveness right behind the hard line of acceptance that if someone isn’t worth his time, they won’t get it. And while I know you think I am just saying that he doesn’t care, I can assure you he does not. Know why? He values himself and his family above all else. It’s that simple. Negative people need not apply.
So when I came home today, spouting off the play-by-play tirade of unjust abuses fired at me through the words of a peer who clearly could not take a joke, much less read a text, the Carpenter had the compassion to listen. He exuded such patience, managing to blink when I paused, before I launched into another outburst. While I made sweeping rationalizations with animated gestures to express the “she said,” and then, “I said” statements, followed by the, “and she had the nerve to say,” accusations, ending with the “so I told her…” conclusions, the Carpenter somehow managed not to let his eyeballs roll like the images in a slot machine.
When I stopped my rant too suddenly for him to fake comprehension of the facts laid out before him, he simply looked at me and said, “Thank God I’m a guy. No games.”
Then he offered advice that sounded like it came straight from a cowboy in a Western movie. He laid out the no-nonsense law of the land in one syllable words. Common sense, Carpenter style. That, ladies and gentlemen, makes him the sexiest man I know, and me happy to be on the girl team.