I Went to
REI today to buy a
Platypus, a mission that brings about images of me driving home from the store, trying to hold a wet, squirming
mammal that survived an explosion in the waterfowl wing of an
evolution factory. Leave it to nature to come up with something so horribly strange, yet damningly cute. I'm counting down the days for when I can have a pet platypus, take it for walks around
Lake Monona and be the center of attention for all sorts of hot
ladies on
rollerblades. Any guy can have a
puppy, but that bucket of loose skin eventually grows up into a beast that eats house plants and
cable modems.
While a man may be impressed that his dog can tear a squirrel asunder in three seconds, it's a trait that will never make the womenfolk quirl. Men favor the functionality of an object (big truck = good, squirrel killer = good, Fargo woodchipper = good) while women are much more tuned towards aesthetics. These are necessary opposites, for if men ran the world everything would be made out of stainless steel and designed to win fights with everything else.
Everything else. The blender would need to be chained down to keep from going after the dishwasher. Fights would erupt daily between students and rogue floor scrubbers. Lampposts would battle for dominance of the sidewalk with mailboxes. Your casual walk to school would be a run through the gauntlet of gleaming, half-intelligent machinery.
Women are not impressed by destructive powers, nor most anything men do, as evidenced by 6,000 years of men destroying things and impressing each other. The pyramids were built so the Pharaoh had a private hill for pushing rocks. "Ha! See you now how I have crushed yonder slave under large bits of stone? I shall now send more rock tumbling forth from this fabulous incline!"
Was Mrs. Pharoah impressed? Hardly. Impressed by anything he had to offer? Not a chance. She was 25. He was 10.
I got my Platypus.
Kudos to Dane.