THE ESTROGEN PAGE

If your marriage or significant other kind of relationship is anything like mine you have experienced, over time, a variety of revelations regarding the true essence of your “mate du jour” or “mate du life”.  Those discoveries inform, bemuse and in some cases distress the explorer and lead to one of several possible responses.  There is the “Oh gee, I can’t have dinner with you, I’m having a series of experimental root canal treatments scheduled over the next thirty or so years so I’m not allowed to eat anything…ever”.  Then there is “ I’m sure it’s me but moving in with you, your Mom the extreme tattoo artist and Killer, and your pet boa constrictor is not the direction I was planning for my life”.  Or perhaps, “You know I do like you as a person but naming children for the 7 dwarfs really has me thinking there is something about your childhood you haven’t told me.” 

So, once you get thru disappointing all those dear, damaged suitors and you find “The One”, discovering a teeny, tiny  peccadillo or two along the way seems…oh…not so awful bad.So, since you all already know who “The One” is and you also already know a couple of his idiosyncrasies, it’s probably time to let you in on what has become the truest test of our relationship, the one thing that has bent gender barriers way beyond the Venus-Mars thing….. He Who Must Race is a shopper!!!!!  What’s more, now that E-Bay has turned iconic and Overstocks dot com will sell you the Hope Diamond for pennies on the dollar, the chances of him ever recovering from this addiction dim with each passing day.

Consider this….it’s February and there is no more football on TV for the next 8 months so of course He Who Must Race elects to occupy his leisure time with buying things on line. Truth be told he buys things during football season too but I needed a segue for the new paragraph and that one seemed about right.   A couple of days later a box arrives and it gets deposited, rather unceremoniously, on the pile of other unopened boxes that now reside in the foyer. As months progress I implore, on more than one occasion, to please “DO SOMETHING” with the boxes in the foyer when suddenly it’s December and the box magically disappears from sight. Interestingly enough, one that has the identical shape and size as the one that has disappeared from the foyer shows up under the Christmas tree with a little bit of wrapping paper, a lot of scotch tape and a bow that doesn’t match anything (wait a minute, where do you think I get the bows?!? - editor). It is addressed to me with love from the Cat!  We knew all along that somewhere along the line the cat would figure into his reasons for shopping so much, didn’t we? If any of you were fooled by this please stop reading now and go back to Chapter One.

Now, to say that he is a “shopper” really doesn’t tell the whole story because it’s one thing to go out (or on line) and buy stuff but quite another to realize that the buying is really just the smallest part of the challenge.  What he really likes is the searching – which when you stop and think about it is really just shopping but with an attitude.  It’s the digital haggling he gets to do by jumping from offer to offer, web site to web site, in search of that great bargain on goodness only knows what.   I know that my life changes significantly each fateful day when he announces, in that victorious tone, that he just scored (yes, you can score something other than weed) #10 machined bolts for 0.4375 cents cheaper than the last time he scored them. And because they were so much cheaper and they probably won’t ever be that cheap again, he bought four gross!

Wanna hear my answer?  Probably not!  But I will say that on more than one occasion when he has made one of these absurd purchases I have been known to wonder how bad could naming kids Sleepy, Doc, Happy, Dopey, Bashful, Sneezy and that other one I can never remember, actually be?  And by the way, I will pay anyone of you five bucks cash American if you can give me five good uses for #10 machined bolts and one of them can’t be because you never know when you’re gonna need one!  The money is staying in my pocket, guaranteed!

Since we live in an age when anything and everything is for sale on the internet from an amazing variety of reputable and nefarious sellers, I find it more than a little amusing that there are hoards of guys just like “He Who Must Race” who spend hours and hours each week web site hopping, E-Bay wading and Craig’s List leaping just for the thrill of paying way too much for postage and handling….which to me is just another way of saying “Gotcha, Sucker”.

But…in the spirit of complete disclosure….a phrase folks running for elected office should be required to start every speech with… there is one teensy, tiny good thing about all this shopping over and above the shopping for the cat baloney….he finds some really neat stuff and most times its for me!

What a guy!!!!!