Men vs. Women, In a Fight To The Finish

As a senior at NC State in the Fall of 1995, I wrote what vaguely passed as a humour column for the TechnicianNCSU’s student newspaper. One day I’d love to do something like it again, but for now, like Charlie Brown’s Dad, posting them 10 years later is my form of sitting at the kitchen table, eating bran flakes and looking at old highschool yearbooks

These columns have been preliminarily reproduced here in original form. Printed, they make great bathroom reading material. I recommend HP Glossy Paper. Less chafing.

p.s. I really did buy that ring in kindergarten, and really did get that answer. Truth is far funnier than fiction.


Last week, Jay’s Corner was on vacation, mostly because I got caught in gridlock with myself about whether or not I should increase my weekly Chick-Fil-A subsidy and I went over deadline and couldn’t afford to pay my 6.5 estimated column readers.

Seeing as how I can’t raise taxes or even tuition, I had to come up with more creative ways of raising money so that I can again write my column (the original handwritten transcripts of Jay’s Corner, sealed in a mayonnaise jar that has been sitting on Funk and Wagnall’s front porch, can be yours for only $19.95, call now and reserve your matching imitation Gucci handbag).

I finally decided to sell 20 pints of plasma, not my own of course, to the local blood bank. Thus proving that Jay’s Corner does indeed go on, especially when the government doesn’t, because Buckwheat would have really wanted it that way.

The time off did give me an opportunity to sit in the kitchen, eat cold cereal, and look through my old high school yearbook. Somewhere between the third and fourth bowl – I was eating a mixture of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs and the the Really, Really Big Bran Cardboard Fiber Flakes – it hit me. (Pretty hard too, want to see my scar?)

I finally became convinced that there is no such thing as evolution. I say this because men’s brains have not evolved to the point that they can understand women, or that it even can adapt to understanding women. Don’t even begin to tell me that understanding women is some sort of recessive trait that we men are better off having, because you know and I know, and even Buckwheat knows that we would be a whole lot better off if men could actually figure women out.

Case in point, me. I should have learned everything I needed to know in kindergarten. When I was in kindergarten, (I’m not making this up), I decided to sacrifice my weekly allowance to buy this girl I liked a ring from one of those quarter bubblegum machines. The next day, we were on a field trip and I gave Adrienne (name preserved to subjugate the guilty) the ring and asked her to be my girlfriend. She handed it back to me and muttered something about liking some guy in the first grade.

The audience can “aahhh” now, (canned “aahhh” is available from the Jay’s Corner Home Shopping Network for only $19.95, call now and we’ll throw in the boxed “Dis!” for only $9.95 more, as a special bonus, the first 100 callers will receive the matching set of ginsu knife earrings)

This gets rather more complicated and expensive when you decide to sacrifice a whole year’s salary to buy a ring, only to give it to the woman and have her give it back, muttering something about being in love with some guy that plays first base, (or first bass, depending on her particular taste).

Another thing that we men don’t quite understand, but should have by now is the female dictionary. The way I figure it, sometime around 5th grade when they split the boys and girls up into separate gym classes, all the female teachers took the girls off to tell them stories and teach them the finer points of the female dictionary (meanwhile we boys were learning really how to speak in monosyllables and make lots of really neat sound effects).

Take for example, the word “nothing” as in the answer to “What’s wrong?” To the male, that’s exactly what the word means, or if stated with a pained expression, means that we just came back from eating 5 Taco Supremes at the campus Taco Bell.

To the female, “nothing” has a wider degree of usage, ranging from the actual meaning to “I don’t want to talk about it, but you better ask me anyway,” to (if stated with a pained expression) “You just ate 5 Taco Supremes at the campus Taco Bell, didn’t you?”

In retrospect, I should have bought the bubblegum.

_Jason Young is a Senior majoring in financial management. He’s currently being “visited” by the CIA for allegedly selling state secrets, which by the way, can be yours for only $19.95, and come sealed in a red and green mayonnaise jar just in time for the holidays. _