I probably spend way too much of my time trying to find answers to difficult questions, questions like how gravity works in a vacuum, why people like Celine Dion, and how companies survive without innovating.

Scientists trying to prove the existence of negative energy need look no further than watching the level of effort made by my son as he cleans his room.  Alternatively, they could be a fly on a wall in one of the millions of meetings that take place every day in American businesses in our post-Potter world.  Death by a thousand cuts.

We have all been in those meetings, the ones where you wish they were held outside so you could at least come away from the meeting with a tan.  You are a member of the warm-chair attrition cadre of the value-subtracted reseller for whom you work.  You enter the meeting room, your eyes scan from left to right to find the bagel-therapy and BIY (buy it yourself) cheapuccion—there are none.

You wish silently that this meeting will be the black-swan, a rare and unexpected meeting that proves to be worthy of your time.  The negative energy in the meeting room is palpable.   Most of the time, the only person vested in the outcome of the meeting is the person who called it, the person trying to unload their baggage-malaria.  Everyone else is wondering just how do I occupy an hour of time while still looking attentive?

Aren’t laptops wonderful?  You boot yours, angle the screen so the person next to you cannot see what you are browsing, and all of a sudden your mind is elsewhere—sort of like working from home only without the pajamas—the pajama-hadeen.  If you set it up correctly, the top of the laptop’s screen should be high enough to allow you to make eye contact and wide enough to help you carve out your laptop-zombie space.

If your connection to the internet fails, you become a digital nomad, a WiFi-squatter forced to use your cell phone.  You hope the next hour will not be a repeat of the last pancake meeting—one with a lot of breadth but little depth—but maybe an hour of downtime allowing you to further your hobby.  You are a Palintologist, following her tweets and texting until you are intexticated.

You scan the horsemen of the apocalypse to see if you can determine which are the hot-tubbers, the me-sayers who will co-ruminate, those individuals who want to sit closely to the adorkable meeting savant so as not to miss his wave-a-dead-chicken solution to the problem at hand.

You have employed information triage in the belief that if you pay attention to only the first and last words spoken you will be able to recombobulate ninety percent of the important content.  The meeting-gelincal, with his agenda, laser pointer, and PowerPoint charticles—his meeting-bling—announces the topic.  Translated loosely, it is nothing more than backlog-management, a rehashing the same topic as the last meeting albeit with a different slide deck.  You immediately begin to battle meeting-apnea.

There is a built-in disconfirmation-bias to ensure that the statements from any precariat—someone with little or no job security—attempting to sway belief away from the proletarian confession of faith suffer meet-lashing at the hands of the secret elitists.

The best way to avoid this mess is to skip the next meeting.  When nobody notices, skip another.  Your productivity will increase and your boredom will drop.

On weekends I put my mind on hold and write things that have nothing to do with business. If it gets either of us to smile it was a good use of my time.

A few years ago when I returned home from a 10k race in DC I discovered my wife had purchased a dog, a Bichon.  That may have been its scientific classification, but it looked a lot more like a feather duster.  She named it Lorenzo, after the name of the dog in the Wizard of Oz—I know that dog was named Toto, but telling her that was not going to correct the situation.  I learned she spent twice as much on the dog as I had on my first car.

I did not object—at least verbally—that her dog was about the size of an underfed gerbil.  We had a family of large turkey vultures living in the woods behind our house, so I often encouraged the dog to play outside and get some exercise.  My thought process was simple; perhaps one of the vultures would mistake the dog for a petit four.

Man-dogs should be big.  Big enough to go on runs, large enough to take up most of the bed, and require the use of a drool cup.  They ought not to be the size where one day you may find them inside the bag of your vacuum cleaner.  To be man’s best friend, they need to be friend-sized.  I do not have any friends the size of a throw-toy.  Lorenzo is sized more like something you would expect to find as the prize that comes with a Happy Meal.

What I did object to was taking the gerbil to Pets Mart for a haircut.  After all, the store was only a few miles from our house, and chances were I might run into someone I knew.  It was not healthy putting Lorenzo on a leash, as the weight of even the smallest leash could dislocate his shoulder.  It would have looked like I was walking a Q-tip, so I carried him into the store.

Face it, I was embarrassed, and concerned someone would see through the disguise I was wearing.  The store was full of manly dogs, most of whom were making fun of me.  A stunning blonde was being led down the dog toy aisle by a Great Dane.  I hid inside an eighty pound bag of puppy chow until she disappeared around a corner.

The dog stylist delivered the newly coiffed Lorenzo to me, pink ribbons affixed to his ears–the dog’s ears, not the stylist’s. I told the dog “either take off the ribbons or walk home.”

Turned out Lorenzo was a pretty good dog.  He died at the age of five.  Whoever created dog-year math was wrong on this one.  My first car, a Corvair, lived longer than that.  It’s not like we found him doing the back-stroke in the fish tank, but he was equally as dead.  It was not easy explain that to three children under the age of ten.  There were plenty of tears to go around, and photos of Lorenzo were taped as a eulogy around our house.  I mounted his collar in a small diorama box and placed it on my wife’s desk.

Well, taking on the role of Super-dad, I went out and adopted what appeared to be Lorenzo’s stem-cell clone.  I let everyone know that this time the dog would get haircuts at home, thereby eliminating the need for me to go skulking around Pets Mart.

The status of my lifetime membership in the He-Men’s club is being reconsidered by the membership committee of the Philadelphia Chapter.  To make matters worse, yesterday my client walked into my office and caught me listening to James Blunt.  I think it is time for me to quash the idea of going out to select new drapes.

There remain a few things which separate men from the no-opposable-thumbs crowd, but they are in rapid decline.  These come to mind for me, please feel free to add your favorites.

1. Fitted sheets.  If they were meant to be folded neatly, there would be instructions printed on the package.  They are folded when you buy them because they popped out of a machine that way; give me the machine and I will fold them.  Otherwise, that is why linen closets have doors.
2. The reason grocery stores went from using paper bags to plastic is because men do not like to do things more than once—like making repeated trips to the car to carry in the bags.  The volume of a grocery cart is designed to hold an amount of food equal to that which a man can carry from the car in plastic bags in a single trip.  Things laying on the bottom rack of the shopping cart do not count in the trip equation—items like eighty pound bags of dog food, cases of soda, and bulk purchases.  If you are unsure if an item is to be counted against the one trip rule, do not purchase it.
3. Housekeeping. No cleaning is required of any item whose height is one inch higher than that of your spouse—if it cannot be seen it cannot be dirty.  If the cord of the vacuum cleaner was meant to be coiled it would have a built-in coiler.  Your time would be more productive if you did not waste time coiling and uncoiling, a task with zero value-add.
4. Standardized tests.  Answering questions with the same letter more than three consecutive times will cause your head to implode.  The days when you could score an 800 on the SAT simply by placing your name on the scoring sheet are over.
5. There is nothing wrong with arguing, until you get to the point in the argument when you know you are wrong.  That part stinks.
6. Men will communicate better when Microsoft develops a sarcasm font.
7. If you don’t hear what someone says, and have to ask them to repeat themselves, that is okay—it is a Mulligan.  You get one Mulligan per conversation.  If at the end of the second telling you still have no idea what was said you are responsible to nod your head and act like you get it—this is what is meant by active listening.
8. On driving.  If a car is attempting to move into your lane, and the driver is not using their turn signal, you are not obligated to let them in.  If the men in other cars notice this violation, it is permissible for the group of men to align their cars in a ‘moving pick’ formation to block the other car from entering or passing.  If the violating driver begins to signal you by using sign language, you are obligated to maintain the moving pick formation even if it means missing your next several exits.
9. Friends never let friends wear Speedos.
10. 10. There is no reason to know how to iron or sew on a button.  That’s why there are stores.