Tuesday, December 13, 2011

SPARKLY THINGS

I love shopping malls. Malls is America, don'cha know, especially now that they got not only the big stores, but those little booths outside. Very democratic. Big enterprise and small trying to catch the eye of women and their purses.

I feel so connected to the whole of humanity in a mall. It's every marketplace throughout the history of civilization, said history really being just the history of shopping made to look like the males was doing something more than making pretty things and places to attract women.

Anyway, I was outside Bloomingdales at the Century City mall, sitting in the sun and sipping a cup of coffee with a friend. The little booth across from us was twinkling with sparkly accessories: hair clips, pins, earrings, buttons, purses. You name it - it had rhinestones all over it. Many people say your flashy is trashy, but those people is just repressed, or worse, trying to prove we humans ain't animals when you scratch the surface of your cerebral cortex.

Descartes, he only got it half right when he said "I think therefore I am." He shoulda said, "I think therefore I am not doing anything important right now." The thinking part is pretty new, and while your higher human brain activities like compassion, using the subjunctive tense, and conceptualizing quantum entanglement are nifty, they are resting on the older mammal brain with its mysteries of your mommy love and your sense of humor, which anybody who has played with a dog knows is pretty well developed in your four-legged friends.

This Mammal Brain in turn is sitting on top of the Reptile Brain that really runs the show. Marketers know this, which explains the success of campaigns offering more food as in Super Sizing and implied sex as in girls as naked as TV will allow sucking beer right from the bottle. So long as Reptile Brain is active, Human Brain is dissolved into that great pool on being that your zen masters spend a lifetime trying to find with only the poor cortex, them not wanting to ride their mental crocodile to bliss 'cuz it has a habit of turning on you and then you'd never be able to come up for air and think like Descartes again.

Which brings us back to sparkles. Your human eye has both rods and cones. Cones is where we see color. They need a lot of light to work and are grouped more in the middle of the eye. Rod only tell black from white, but they are much more sensitive to light and motion, and are more concentrated around the edges. Not only that, your rods are hooked right into your Reptile Brain.

So a movement out the corner of your eye grabs your attention no matter what the Descartes part of the brain is thinking. And every girl in rhinestones knows (as well as some boys who want to appeal to boys and so wear, say, a set of keys hooked to flash and dangle outside their pocket...) that motion and flash are the way to make a man's reptile self turn his head and look with his reptile eyes.

And while he's looking with his reptile eyes, he might just notice how sexy she is and fall in love. He don't know what made him turn his head at the exact moment She was walking by. He figures Kismet, Fate, Destiny. But she knows the real cause. Rhinestones.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

HOLIDAYS AND THE MALE

As we gear up for the holiday season, I figured to give you all a little heads up about what's coming in the way of your male behavior and why you should start shopping now.

Psychiatrists have noticed that men mostly get irritable and depressed this time of year, and like most of you having your Thanksgiving traumas with your family, they blame it on The Holidays. They are, of course, wrong. I just tell you this so you know you are not the only smart person to make this mistake.

If you remember what I said back on September 30 , you know that October is the annual high for testosterone and other such prostaglandins in men. These hormones give them a wonderful zest just as the leaves start turning, and romance lurks on every corner, especially around 2 in the afternoon, which is the daily high level of that horny hormone. Think of it as the high tide with the new moon.

Anyway, October, like all good things, passes and suddenly his feel-good chemicals start to go away. We girls can empathize because, what with the ebb and flow of hormones that is the glory of every female, we experience a similar sudden drop every month. The result is called PMS. We have only a teeny bit of that hair-on-your-chest stuff, so our bodies can go cold-turkey. Forty-eight hours later, we're back to our sweet, agreeable selves..

Your poor guys, their withdrawal drags out for weeks. So think of November and December as the male PMS -equivalent, only instead of three days a month, they get their whole five weeks at once. Gals, treat them as you expect to be treated on your three days, twelve times a year.

Howsomever, five or six weeks is still a long time to put up with moodiness, so The Hoidays was invented to lighten things up. Fortunately, your male is not an abstract thinker and can be distracted by beautiful packaging.

For those who doubt this, just look at the basic male visual response. A bit of blonde hair catches the light, or a ponytail goes swaying down the street, and a man forgets his name and life history in the eternal now of Her. This is why he carries identification with his name and address on it.

Or take what I call the 'Baywatch phenomenon.' No man cares if the contours he sees on the screen are biologically 'real.' They are in front of his eyes and that is enough for him. But turn off the TV, and any man worth the name knows to the depths of his objective, manly self that the pair of breasts in the bed next to him are the most beautiful in the world.

So, not being an abstract thinker, we can distract him from his misery by stringing bright, preferably blinking lights, singing perky, hopeful songs, wearing clothes with sparkles, dabbing perfume, serving tasty treats, and encouraging shopping, which dulls feelings with the frenzy of finding. That, some extra sports on the TV, a few craft projects requiring assembly, and the crisis will have passed. Soon, the testosterone will be climbing again, and he[base ']ll rise to the challenge of paying all those holiday bills like a man.

Monday, November 07, 2011

EVERY WOMAN'S PURSE

My sister was visiting Lost Angeles, so naturally, we went shopping. She was looking for a purse. We went to a half dozen stores. We saw cute purses with rhinestones and puppy dogs, classy purses in leather and linen, hip purses in bright translucent floppy plastic, tote bags, shoulder bags, hand bags. A cornucopia of choices and my sister, while appreciating the style of many, had to find the perfect purse.

There are many fabulous things a girl can buy when she just wants to shop, but shoes and purses are the ne plus ultra shopping experience because they are the most personal. I already explained about women's inner-shoeness, so I don't need to go into it again. Suffice to say that inner-shoeness, like outer-toolness in a male, is about sexual play and so there's loads of fantasy involved and thusly there are many choices. A girl like I might wear three or four different pair in the course of the day. You can't have too many shoes.

Not so with purses, because a purse is a representation of how a woman feels about herself in her womb. And that don't change from one day to the next. Changes womb-wise take much longer and require much more care.

My mother's generation, the women all had those big sturdy bags that could carry a family of four and never show signs of wear. At night they'd go out with only a tiny little clutch, 'cuz dancing at the club a woman wanted to appear young and fresh, like her purse ain't never had to do no heavy lifting yet.

Today, gals is carrying those little purses all the time. And notice, a lot of 'em ain't having no kids neither. A big family now is three, maybe even four kids. And college girls, notice they don't carry no purse at all. But before you worry that we're going the way of the Shakers, notice what they are carrying - backpacks. These new backpacks are soft and rounded, kinda like a womb when it's full. Only they are carried on the back, trailing behind like an unconcsious thought, "I know I'm going to have kids some day, but I don't want to think about it right now."

This is why a man ain't never gonna carry a purse. Designers tried to sell the idea in the seventies. No such luck. Men do carry briefcases, but a briefcase is not a purse. It is a box. And most men suffer from what I like to call 'box envy."

This goes back to Freud. He thought about what a cigar represented and he didn't think about where he keeps his cigar - in a humidor, which is a box that is temperature and moisture controlled to keep it plump. And if you've ever known a man who smokes a cigar, think about the time he lavishes on his humidor, and you will see that I am right.

Cars is boxes you can get into, start the engine by sticking in a teeny-tiny little key and jiggling it, and then drive wherever you want to go, beating the other guys in their boxes. This is why most of your channel surfers are men. They take a tool, which represents their personal apertenance, that they can finger, point it at a box, and make it jump.

Monday, October 24, 2011

HALLOWEEN

Everybody keeps asking what I'm going to be for Halloween. I keep trying to come up with something. But the only person I can think of that I want to be is me. So you can come over dressed up as your fantasy self. Me, I already am.

Some people say you should dress up all ugly and scary so the ghouls and goblins will run away and go after someone else. I don't worry about that. If I can handle men who have gotten rich hoping money can buy them out of their 2nd class status in Mother Nature's plan and make them masters of the universe who don't have to pay for dinner, I can handle a measly gremlin

Monday, October 10, 2011

BIBLE-THUMPING LIARS

Anybody who says the Bible defines marriage as something only between a man and a woman is either ignorant or a liar.

I may not be the world's greatest expert on the Bible, but I can read as good as the next girl. And sometimes I do. So let me tell all of you that the Bible don't say nowhere that marriage is between a man and a woman. Check out your King James if you don't believe me. Now, there's lots of references about marriage in the index, but they're just about divorce and adultery, not defining which marriage partners are permissible and which aren't. And some of that stuff about divorce and adultery makes me doubt that the Bible is really the word of an Almighty God and not a translation by a mean-spirited husband. But whichever way you read it, the Bible says not one place that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. No place, no where, no how. Zilch.

Me, if I was gonna bother with a law to keep people I didn't approve of from getting married, I'd put in anybody who abused a child, anybody who poisoned the environment knowingly, and everybody who drives on the shoulder because they don't like waiting in traffic with the rest of us.

Friday, September 30, 2011

OCTOBER ZEST

October is the month when the testosterone levels in your males is at its yearly high. Two o'clock in the afternoon is the daily peak - kinda like a high tide at the full moon. Basically, girls, we're talking free lunches in the fall. Just smile at a guy, and he'll be panting to pick up the tab. After all, accepting food from a male is the first step in Mother Nature's mating cha-cha for most of your Animal Kingdom. Why should your human males be treated any different?

Not that after the mousse au chocolat you have to join him in some afternoon delight. No. A simple thank you will suffice. You see, by allowing him to buy you a meal, you actually are performing an act of altruism, allowing him an outlet for his natural, testosterone-driven provider urges and giving him hope, however faint, that someday he may be Waltzing Matilda with the best of the birds and the bees.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

MORE ABOUT SHOES

My philosophy of shoes is not just an abstract theory about female sexual self-expression. It has very practical applications in life.

Say, for example, there is some sexual activity a guy wants to try and he's not sure his gal will go for it. He figures he'll just mention it in the middle of sex and maybe she'll agree. Mistake. Unlike your male when aroused, before she can agree, she will have to think about it. And thinking will take her out of the sexual moment. End of session.

Asking a woman out ot the blue to experiment sexually is kind of like a woman who wants to be closer to her mate asking him out of the blue to share his feelings. Suddenly he's wary, not a condition that encourages sharing. A woman would do better to suddenly sniff the air and say, "Honey, I smell gas."

Even if you have an electric stove, he will get up and investigate. When he returns he will be able to assure you that all is well. He will feel closer to you and his feelings will find expression.

Likewise, an indirect approach with a woman's shoe-ness as your point of reference will help you get what you want more easily than a frontal attack. Go to her closet. You will see amazing pairs of shoes in there that she has never worn. They are all aspects of her sexual person, just some are less confident and don't get to go out in public. Pick a pair of shoes that looks like what you want to try. Take them to Nordstroms or Saks and ask for the shopper lady. (Your upper-scale stores will have people whose job it is to help the shopping impaired.) Tell her you need a dress that goes with the shoes, price is no object.

Go home and slip the shoes back. Hand the dress in a wrapped box to your lady and say innocently, "I saw this and I thought of you."

When she opens the box, her first thought will be, "I wonder if I have the shoes for this dress." When she goes to her closet and finds the perfect match, she will feel understood to the depths of her soul.

Take her someplace that goes with the dress and shoes. When you come home, the dress will come off, but the shoes won't.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

THINKING MALE

I was sitting in the doctor's office reading an old Psychology Today. It was that or the fishing magazine. The article talked about this guy, he's a Cambridge researcher named Simon Baron-Cohen. He studies autism and his theory says autism is just an extreme version of your basic male brain. Your male brain, he explains, is all about making systems, while your female brain is about using empathy.

Now a systemizing brain is making abstractions, and some of you might think this disproves my position that males are not abstract thinkers. And you might add that empathy is not even thinking, that it's naturally muddled because you can't really separate your feelings from the other person's. 'Separating,' you big lug, is not the point.

Empathy is purely abstract, being about something a person can never know. Your feelings as you feel them can never be felt or counted or seen by me. I must make a gestalt of compassion to even come close, but I will never ever have an objective measure to tell me if I succeeded. The fruits of empathy cannot be counted. Plotting love on a graph misses the point.

Systematizing is all about you reducing a thing or things to a size you are comfortable with and into pieces you can know. In other words, it is about making everything about you and giving you the sense that everything out there is known and possibly controlled by you. You spill a bag of M&Ms on the table and sort them into colors. Eventually, when the number of reds, yellows, and blues is predictable, you feel good because you know what to expect from your bag of candy. But even your Schroedinger figured out, with the help of his cat I might add, that you can't really know how many blues or reds you got, if any, until you open the bag.

One of the 20th Century's biggest brains, famous in the world of science and this is his Big Idea. See what I mean? I do not wish to dissuade men from trying to understand science even though they are constitutionally unfit for it. I know, I know. Men invented what they call the scientific method, but that was just to impress girls by showing that the universe is objectively knowable and therefore concrete like men are concrete and who wouldn't fall in love with a guy who was mentally, like, Mr. Universe? Aristotelian Logic to Newtonian Mechanics was the golden age, creating a basically male model of how things work.

Unfortunately, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has revealed a definitely female bent to creation. You can't get your subatomic particles to tell you where they are and how fast they're moving at the same time, and why should they? Just asking could change the answer. At the core, creation is such a girl that no man who is stymied by such a simple question like, "What do women really want?" could possibly figure out what the universe is doing here.

Friday, September 09, 2011

INNER-SHOE-NESS

So I bought a new pair of shoes. I took a man with me to buy them. It's a test . If he rolls his eyes and asks that question, I know he'll need a lot of training before he's an adequate sexual partner.

For what is a shoe, I ask you? You live a post-Freudian world. You know what Cinderella's slipper really was. Why should a girl at Starbucks be any different? Men have their outer-tool-ness. Girls have their inner-shoe-ness.

A girl tries out sexual ideas on her feet before she explores them more completely on her back. No one denies the tie-me-up appeal of four-inch spike heels. But every shoe on a girl is a form of sexual self-expression. If she only wears comfy shoes, she ain't going to be doing nothing kinky, though your Birkenstock crowd will engage in some earthy-squishy activities. But no costumes, please. Others, you can tell from their shoes, feel like Mae West did that "sure sex is natural, but not if you're doing it right." And it's all right there on her closet floor.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

THE SAFENESS OF SAMENESS

I know, I know. You missed me. I been right here, but there was a glitch with my personal software and I couldn't post nothing for a while. So I took a trip.

I visited my niece in Washington, DC, which you'd think would be so different from Lost Angeles that a girl might not want to go. I mean, here is just about perfect, so why leave the best of all possible cities for a place full of politicians and government contractors? Just look at Iraq if you want to know what they can do to a neighborhood.

Imagine my surprise when I couldn't hardly tell the difference between being here and being there. I mean, you get on an airplane and when you get off, everything is exactly like it was when you got on. The Starbucks is right across from the McDonalds. The highway is called the 95 instead of the 5, but that only means the ocean is on the opposite side from where it oughta be which you can't tell because it is too far away to actually see. They have a Westfield mall just like here with the same stores and movies. It's comforting to know a girl can travel without having to try anything new.

This is what makes America great - the safeness of sameness. Nothing bad is ever going to happen to you at the mall. You can have anything you want, and there are lots of people there to help you get it. And anybody who acts unpleasant is asked to leave.

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

GRAY SKIES

So it's overcast here in Lost Angeles and no one is moving. The streets are empty. The pools are quiet. The early matinees might as well go back to bed. Nobody's gonna show up for anything before 3, and then only if they have friends visiting from out of town.

Your people from other cities with more conventional climates - you know, rain, snow, hail, hurricane - they laugh at us. But think about it. Bad weather is all low pressure systems, right? Imagine your human is like a barometer and when the mercury drops, so does the circulation. See what I'm getting at? Less blood to the brain, and more sluggish. Low pressure, low spirits. High pressure, high spirits.

This is why people who want to feel good go to the beach. Down at sea level, the pressure is heavier and the blood zips around and you feel younger than springtime and clearer about everything. Opposite-wise, your people seeking the oxygen-deprived illusion of enlightenment go to the mountains to get away from it all, "it all" being the functioning of their brains.

This has ramifications beyond mere mood. Just look at the stores. Shopping is the greatest expression of optimism and satisfaction with life that I know. Compare how many shops and boutiques and stands and stalls and malls there are at the beach compared with the mountaintops, and you get my point.

So LA, with its normally blue sky high, is just about as optimistic and rich a town as you could hope for. Bad stuff don't seem real, even when it's happening to you. This is why people here pull the covers around their ears on gray days. Not because they're afraid of the clouds of rain, but because they're afraid of the clouds of doubt.

Next time some politician wants to get some work done, don't gather people at a 'summit.' Get them together at a 'beach.' In bathing suits, sandals and big sun hats, against the relentless obliviousness of the ocean, the zippy state of their blood racing to the brain with extra oxygen will guarantee something lovely happening.