There's a reason my mind is on a break right now...

I have been working with a new client these past few months; one of the things that has been keeping me so busy of late. The work is interesting, challenging and it surely qualifies as worthwhile on the humanistic scale. Nice people to work with and, did I happen to mention, all women?

If you have visited this blog before and read my lame justification for clogging up Internet bandwidth (read the masthead), you should know that I am already surrounded by females in my home life. And now that I have come to this revelation about the primary source of my social interactions, it all makes sense: the sudden need for a significant increase in my meds; the ear protection purchase at the sporting goods store; the solo weekend backwoods camping trip that nearly turned into a month (if only the bourbon had held).

Work or home, there always seems to be an in-basket full of drama and a blender full of emotion in a typical day. I think I know why men work so hard to appear repulsive to women at times. It's simple self-preservation. The burping, the sporadic bathing, the beer belly; it's all a shield to keep women at a distance. That way we don't have to deal with the drama.

I sometimes joke about building a cabin in the woods where I will live a hermits life for the duration of the overlapping years that include my younger daughters as teens and my wife in the throes of menopause. There will be no telephone. There will be no address. I will solve no problems except whether or not I should eat the squirrel meat that appears slightly spoiled.

Ladies, we just aren't built to referee the dramas that swirl around you, straining to be unleashed at the slightest provocation. Infectious beyond compare, once a conflict starts, it spreads like a mushroom cloud throughout an entire home or office.

Just the other day I found myself thinking, "Not even 9:30 and there's already a storm brewing over Susan's outfit. Granted, it's not proper office attire, but we all need to express ourselves."

A typical man cannot grasp the pressing need to get involved in the minutiae of why Angela is so mad about the bridesmaid's dress she has to wear this weekend. "How could she do this to me? She knows I look terrible in taffeta." Nor do we fathom the depth of loathing one woman demonstrates for another of her own kind when she stabs her in the back with an underhanded comment about the ex-boyfriend turning gay.

As I continue in the crusade to raise my daughters and persevere in my current work environment, I sometimes dream of the Nirvana I may never achieve, a world in which I understand women.

"May the spirit of enlightenment descend upon you and all the males of your species." - excerpt from A Prayer for the Damned