>>> Casual Misanthropy
By staff writer JD Rebello
July 18, 2004

I can't talk to girls. No, not like I start a conversation, and occasionally stutter over words like “date” and “rendezvous” and “Treponema pallidum”. I can't talk to girls. I'm awful at it. Horrendously awful. This season of SNL awful. I don't know why. I'm reasonably intelligent according to my transcripts. I usually have some interesting things to say, and am quite eloquent at communicating my point, although you'd never know it if you read my columns (WHOO! Must be self-deprecating zingers month here at PIC!). But when I talk to girls, my brain shuts down. Why does this happen?

I called up Dr. Thomas Bogwell at the Boulder Neuroscience Institute and he told me this: “When talking to someone from the opposite sex, your pubic regions and cerebrum tend to disagree on the correct verbal courses of action. As a result, you are unable to correctly communicate your point the way you'd like to.” Sure, this isn't a terribly coherent medical opinion, there's no research to back this up, and in fact, I completely made up both Dr. Thomas Bogwell and the Boulder Neuroscience Institute.

Still, I've given a lot of thought to the matter and have theorized five major causes of brain shutdown when talking to girls, at least in my case. Oh quit your bitching, self-indulgence has always been a major factor to this column. I'm so self-involved, I don't even need porn, I just whack off to the Casual Misanthropy Archive.

1. The Sense of Humor
Studies have shown that 95% of women prefer sense of humor as their most important trait when selecting a lover. Well, I conducted a study of my own, and 100% of women are full of shit. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume the most important traits are: 1. Looks 2. Money 3. Car 4. Wang Size …. 1,093,287. Sense of Humor. How do I know this? Easy. Because I'VE got a great sense of humor, and I get less ass than Bill Buckner at the Cask an Flagon (translation to non-Boston residents: I don't get laid.) My point is, wait, I had a point, I'm sure of it, oh, there it is. My point is this: I often use my sense of humor to communicate with people but because of this annoying PC culture we live in, I don't know what's going to offend, so basically my entire repertoire of jokes that don't involve turtles crossing the street to go to the Shell Station are pretty much unusable.

2. I Hate Listening
Obviously when talking to girls, girls really could care less what you have to say. Girls don't talk to people, they talk AT people, and so most of the time, the guy just has to sit back, relax, and ask questions to keep the bitch talking about herself, just to make her happy. This is easier said than done. The problem is, having a prolonged conversation with someone is so hideously torturous, you just want to stab yourself in the face with a salad fork. Even with guys, all I like to talk about are sports, beer, Family Guy, and boobs. Since three (maybe four) of those topics are typically unusable with girls, I'm forced to listen to horseshit about mothers, ex-boyfriends, inane rivalries with other girls, and Tampax. Well, I'm not a very good actor, and it's really tough for me to mask my helpless boredom as this chick drones on and on like the first hour of Pearl Harbor. Most of the time, I black out. Sometimes I just run away. You only get about 80 years to live, why waste so much time listening to garbage.

3. I Can't Deal With Bullshit
You know that feeling you get when you're watching George W. Bush talk on TV and you just want to huck the remote at the TV because you can't believe he's being given $400,000 to make up lies? Well, that's how I feel when talking to girls. Girls exaggerate, they overly dramatize every facet of their lives. Allow me to present to you my latest invention: The Bullshit Detector. Here's how it works. You take whatever hideously overblown sentence some chica hurled your way, and you run it through the Bullshit Detector, and it will print out the truth. Watch!

Hideously Overblown Sentence: “She's trying to destroy me! She's going to kill me! She wants to ruin my life!”
Bullshit Detector Output: “I walked by her and she gave me a dirty look.”

Hideously Overblown Sentence: “His name is Rick. He's really successful. He's got a five year plan.”
Bullshit Detector Output: “I met this guy who stole a car. He got caught and is serving five years in prison.”

Hideously Overblown Sentence: “These boobs are all me!”
Bullshit Detector Output: “Well, I PAID for them!”

See? Women are full of shit. And listening to such blatant lies really wears on a person.

4. Too Much Initiating
I'm a journalist, so you'd think I would enjoy talking to people, pumping them for information, hearing what they have to say. Sorry. Like a straight art history major, I'm the exception to the rule. I hate initiating conversations, and I hate having to keep the conversation going. Unfortunately, girls think the same way. They're under the impression that it's the man's job to start things and to keep them going. Well, that's a load of shit. I was under the impression the feminist movement would bring about equal rights. Well, now girls can vote, work, and wear pants, so why can't they initiate conversation? Do you realize how much pressure you put on us? Every conversation in a bar is like an interview with Saddam Hussein.

5. The Hot Girl Effect
The most earth-shattering theory since Darwin and natural selection. The Hot Girl Effect has been hypothesized, proven, theorized, and passed into law. It goes a little something like this: “The presence of any attractive woman will cause a man's entire central nervous system to shut down, and he will begin to look, sound, and move like a Special Olympic weightlifter.” And this is really the issue here. Women who are hot cause us to forget our bearings, make us ill-prepared to handle a social situation, and flounder about helplessly like the cast of “Finding Nemo 2: Beached!” I'm not saying girls should be less hot. Quite the contrary. It should be every girl's burning desire to be attractive to men, because we dominate society, run the show, and write completely sexist columns once a week on obscure websites. But girls need to step it up, realize that some guys are just shy. Initiate a conversation, feign interest in one of our passions (hey, you probably know as much about defensive tackles as we do about feelings), and be nice. Just be nice. Don't act like a guy is wasting your time. We'd rather be playing NCAA Football 2005 and throwing back Heinekens, but we're taking the time to talk to you and hear what you have to say. Throw us a bone, and we'll throw one back. Awful choice of words, I know. Allow me to quote a great American: “Fool me once, shame on, um, me….but, uh, fool me, I won't be fooled again!”

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