If Men Came in Candy Wrappings

If men can only come in candy wrappings, said Z the exiled one, with a sigh, but they do especially the Syrian variety, they do have fancy wrapping its only when you unravel them….M the Latino said with a wink, no cream but just nuts, too nutty for my liking said L as in local, MEN can’t live without them can’t live with them. This is my local sex and the city crowd. We are a bunch of girls cum women of indiscriminate age, who love to hang out and talk trash. We call it therapy. We laugh loud make fun of ourselves, gossip to the hilt and go back to our stressed out lives with a light and fresh prescriptive.

We love men and strawberries, some of us are happily married with children, some still looking to get hooked up, some indecisive about the guys they are with. Some single and going on strong. What draws us together is our multicultural backgrounds, our tolerance to accept and accommodate the worst. We are liberal, not in our action but in our thoughts, we think and we reason and sometimes accept even the most absurd of ideas.

That day our conversation started with Y the exiled and lost one, talking about her guy and his noncommittal attitude. One year in a relationship for which she has no name, he is there yet he is not there, such a convenient ploy men use when they are afraid to commit or admit. We were prodding her to be the man in the relationship, admit to what you feel, draw him out, confront him with his emotions, drop him like a piece of cold dead meat if he shies away. We were sitting in a restaurant drawing deeply on our urgeelas we told her explicitly what she can and can’t do in both the cases. Between peals of laughter and our graphic language we were in the world of our own. Damascus is mostly English free zone, so we talk straight, sometime in places where we feel that people will eavesdrop we use analogies and intellectualize our talk.

All of us have men problems at sometimes or the other, the Z we also call her the flirtatious one, is for the very first time in her life passing through a dry spell, by dry spell we mean, when it’s not raining men. She is at odd with this alien phase of her life last year she speed dated men from cradle to grave. They all had one thing in common, all fell for her looks and ran with their tails between their legs when they discovered she has a brain. Unfortunately she cannot for long sounds dumb, doing ooha and ahhs lasts for two dates, then she starts yawning over their amazing stories of what not, fourth and fifth date finds her staring in her soup, trying to block out the incessant machoistic chatter. After this, the so called relationship goes down the hill. To sooth her we all gave a picture of a brighter tomorrow, at least two of us are raising boys, who we hope will one day respect women for their intelligence.  But our sincere attempts to present a brighter future were hooted out by comments like, Sure enough we can’t wait to be in the s… with mama’s boys.            

Out of us all, probably I the true blondie, is the most level headed, with Russian blood in her vein she can kill any guy with her icy no nonsense stare. one fine morning years back when she was feeling less of Russian and more of French, she lost her intellectual head and her well guarded heart to this cherubic, Syrian who smiles and jokes a lot. As she describes it he lit up her heart with his hundred watt smile, and the rest is history. She understands men like the back of her hand but usually keeps her opinion to herself. Often when we are at odd with the issue we ask her, she tells us what to do, a very level headed solution like, dump him, keep him for dessert, wrap him up and ship him to a far island, feed him till he stops complaining about the food and start retching, say hmm, tell me your name again and roll over, usually her advice makes us cringe as we believe in it but can’t use it, as for her, she keeps him dancing on his toes. And let me introduce the Nagasaur the reason for which all the dinosaurs in Jurassic age went extinct.  Me… This is how my group describes me.. I am a nag I admit, but I nag because I want no one to get hurt, or exploited, or taken advantage of, or to be blamed for the thing they didn’t do, or …or…or. Yup that’s me, they say that in Jurassic age all the dinosaurs jumped to their death because I nagged them about the coming of the ice age. I somehow survived and now my nagging will drive all my friends to become lesbians. But this is all hearsay, I believe in the heart of my heart that men, other than my husband, father, brother and son, evolved from invertebrates, i.e. they don’t have back bones, so you can’t take a free ride, no matter how heavy you, or the commitment is they wiggle out of it. Unfortunately my voice is hushed, as I am not in the market to sample new stuff, so I am considered out dated and obsolete. But L (as in the local one, we also call her wild and unexpected), though very much like me as being in the same boat, is considered a pro.. her lectures on strawberries from selecting, sampling to eating are listened with reverence, her word on the matter is considered the last. She believes that when God created men, He did it to please women. And when God created women, He wanted them to have fun, hip, hip hurray. After her simple logic every intellectual argument about creation seems frivolous.  

In most of our outings, we usually keep a ‘candy’ to amuse us, we keep on changing our candies, as most, can last for single sitting. Oh by the way candies are not boy toys, but the girls/women with very little grey matter, under their luxurious well set hair, and a lot under their well plucked eyebrows. When we grow tired of talking trash, we amuse ourselves by asking them about their life and the men they live or go out with. Let me tell you what they say is  always an eye opener. For example one day we had R, (rich and spoiled to the hilt, her Barbie like looks make men go weak in their knees) we asked her what do you think about men…. Men hummm they are so nice, she said by flicking the ash on the table and raising one delicate eyebrow, but you know I don’t go out with them because they are not nice, she finished her thought on the subject by blowing a perfect smoke ring and by putting a full stop on the matter by punctuating the ring with her cigarette. So for the rest of the evening we talked about men without actually saying men…

Yes readers, women talk men, they think men, and they dream men, we often don’t admit it, as it suits our vanity, but then we are women born to be pleased and to do as we please.