I just don’t get some stuff. I don’t mean the complicated mysteries of the human body or the nature of the deity or anything lofty like that. I mean little everyday things. I’ve had a list going for a while of the things I don’t get, and since I didn’t really have anything else to say this week, I thought I would share.

Pennies. My family used to play a lot of board games, and we enjoyed them even though they usually degenerated into hysteria of one sort or another – Trivial Pursuit, which my father always always won even if the rest of the family used the kids’ box of question cards, and when he reached the center hexagon, we would attempt to stump him with “pink” questions, which he professed to hate, but inevitably he would win the game by answering some impossibly obscure question on Joan Crawford’s favorite brand of facial cream or something; Risk, which we never actually got around to playing because by the time my parents finished explaining the voluminous rules of the game to us, my brother had fallen deeply asleep surrounded by the little game pieces, and I had somehow gotten into yet another argument with my father over the fate of Communism, which had not one thing to do with the game per se; Scrabble, which generally ended with my mother putting down “syzygy” in a triple-word-score space and spiking her tile holder in the end zone; and of course Monopoly, also known in my house as “Coming To Blows Over The Little Doggie Game Piece” and “Stop Calling Your Father ëRepo Man.’” We never used the dollar bill denominations when we played because Dad, in his official capacity as “the Bank,” didn’t feel like dealing with them, so we just rounded up. I feel the same way about pennies. I can’t use pennies to buy anything, really, unless I fill up a wheelbarrow, but apparently the average penny also serves as a repository for a staggering number of germs and bacteria. Why doesn’t the Treasury just abolish pennies and tell everyone to round up? I don’t get that.

The “khakis swing” Gap ad. I understand the ad itself, I guess, but I want to know how they set up that shot where the girl jumps over the guy and does a sort of modified split, and then they freeze the frame and rotate it about 45 degrees, and then they press “play” again and the girl lands, and they keep dancing to that Louis Prima song. Obviously it has something to do with computer imaging, but how did the computer substitute the rest of the image unless the camera operator rotated the shot in real time? I don’t get that.

Long fake nails. On the one hand, we have false claws with little rhinestones stuck onto them that cost 40 bucks a week to maintain. On the other hand, we have the ability to open a can of soda without a winch. And yet, some people choose the claws. I don’t get that.

This guy that wrote to me. The other day, my friend the Diva went out of town and asked me to do her a favor and pinch-write her CyberSleaze column. I actually like doing this, because I get a free link to Tomato Nation and it gives my writing routine a bit of variety. Anyhow, basically, I had to cull the best stories from the wire reports she sent to me and write them up – no big deal. Evidently, I didn’t do a good enough job for one guy, who had the following insightful comment: “You may want to find another line of ëwork.’ With your feeble command of english [sic], might I suggest fry cook. Now go fetch me some, dolt.” Huh? Anyway, Mr. Relevant then went on to call me “dolt” several more times. Ouch, that hurts. Well, except for the “hurts” part. And the “ouch” part. Now, let me explain what I don’t get about this guy. You won’t see me on the catwalk. I don’t run fast and I don’t jump high. I talk too much, I can’t cook, and I have absolutely no self-discipline. But the last time I looked, I could write, so I don’t get that “feeble command of english [sic]” thing, and when someone who hasn’t mastered the rules of capitalization expects me to feel insulted when he tells me to get a job as a hash slinger, I don’t get that.

Stirrup pants. I didn’t get them back in high school when girls wore them with two pairs of fluffy socks over the calf and Keds and a big old poufy shaker-knit sweater on top, and I don’t get them now. First of all, aside from some sort of casual-wear-in-zero-
gravity situation, I can’t think of a single reason why a woman needs to anchor her pants beneath her instep. Second of all, stirrup pants erase any hint of a nicely turned ankle, and quite frankly, the average stirrup-pant wearer needs all the help she can get. Third of all, when I hear the word “stirrup,” I don’t think of a pleasant canter through the countryside, if you know what I mean. Sorry, but they look terrible and they remind me of my annual pelvic exam, and I just don’t get that.

Why nobody ever calls a woman an asshole. We have epithets specifically for women, of course, but none of them means quite the same thing as “asshole.” Calling someone an asshole implies a certain thoroughness of bad behavior that you don’t get from calling someone a bitch. The same goes for calling a woman a dick – obviously women don’t have dicks, but they can act like them, because “dick” has a connotation of willfulness, of deliberate buttheadedness. For example, in the documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a drunk guy in a zebra-striped spandex outfit starts going off about how much heavy metal rules and how much every other kind of music sucks, and in between shaking his feathered zipperhead haircut indignantly and bouncing the microphone off his front teeth in a haze of Jack Daniel’s, Zebra Dude observed that “Madonna sucks, she’s a dick.” After I stopped laughing at his hideous taste in clothing and flagrant inebriation, I thought about what he had said, and I had to agree with him – my feelings about Madonna aside, I would have to say that overall she acts more like a dick than like a bitch. The words don’t mean the same thing, quite, so why don’t we differentiate between bitches and, well, dicks? I don’t get that.

Christian groups that condemn homosexuality. This makes no sense to me. Apparently, some passage of the Bible clearly states that people of the same sex should not lie with one another, or something to that effect. If I look at this in the context of a pre-industrialized society – one that had fairly high mortality rates compared to our own, particularly among infants – I can see the logic. The writers of the Bible, hoping to drive up the birth rate, couldn’t condone homosexuality because same-sex couples wouldn’t procreate. But those conditions don’t apply today, at least not in the United States. Besides, I seem to remember the phrase “judge not, lest ye be judged” in the Bible somewhere. I don’t pretend to know chapters and verses, but I think turning the other cheek and loving thy neighbor figured fairly heavily in the teachings of Jesus. Somehow, the Christian groups that protest the existence of gays and lesbians so loudly have taken a selective view of the Bible, and I don’t get that.

The Backstreet Boys. For reasons that should go without saying, I don’t get that at ALL.

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