What Men See

Disclaimer:  The following is an anthropological essay on differences between husbands and wives.  Mark, this isn't entirely about you, nor is it from a place of anger.  It is about most men in general, and comes from a place of utter mystery and confusion.  End disclaimer.

My husband is a good man.  You can ask him to do things and while he will heave a hefty sigh of "I Don't Want To" (which he denies, by the way), he will do it.  But, my utter mystification comes not from the things he/they are willing to do, but from the fact that he/they don't do it until you ask them to.  Let me explain.

If Mark suspects the computers, Internet, laptop, Xbox, or smart phones are running improperly... he can sniff that problem out from a mile away and devote endless hours to its repair.  Endless.  However, if the pictures on our walls need leveling and sticky tacking, even if he sits in that room to Xbox with the boys on a daily basis, either he doesn't see that the pictures are so crooked it looks like a blind person hung them, or he feels there's no time to get such a monumental task accomplished (which took me 10 minutes today to do all our pictures in our house) or he likes them like that.  I don't know the answer.  I only know that is man-land, it doesn't exist and will not get done until I ask.  Wait... let me rephrase.  Until I nag him to death.

Other men have similar blind spots.  Some men will use a glass, walk over to the kitchen and deposit the used glass either on the counter or in the sink, seemingly blissfully unaware of this machine just inches below that if you open the door and deposit said glass, it will eventually come out clean.  I'm not sure if its the abundance of science fiction that most men watch or sheer ignorance of how things become clean, but if you put the glass on the counter, its never going to get inside the washer without a human's help.  There's no teleportation.  There's no little arm that comes out of the machine and reaches for the glass and sets it on the rack.  Another person (I'll go out on a limb and assume its the other adult living in your home) has to do that step. 

Another conundrum...  In our house, we have a relatively new dog who occasionally seems to confuse our playroom with a park full of fire hydrants in the middle of the night and leave a little present on our carpet. See above where said husband plays video games with my boys in that room every day.  I'm guessing that his laser sharp vision is so acutely aware of the critical happenings on Lego Marvel that he is blind to the yellow circle on the carpet.  My vision must be more suited to pee spots than Lego versions of Pepper Potts, because I tend to spot them upon entry. 

These things are not worth fighting about.  They are not reasons for divorce or even the female patented snippy "I'm fine" followed by the silent treatment.  Its just something that I ponder.  If men are from Mars, who puts the dishes in the dishwashers there, and how many pictures are permanently crooked?  Wait, who would tell them to purchase and hang pictures in the first place?  Mars must be the land of blank walls and unlimited supplies of Solo cups.  I know that the genders are chromosomally different, but until marriage I had no idea the affect that Y chromosome has on vision.  That, or it stand for "y bother to clean up the urine if there's a digital citizen in peril on my video game?"