A Guy Thing

(Editor's note: The following contains a very un-P.C. sexist rant. The author is not normally a pig, but Yuletide avarice has affected his reasoning. Please forgive him.)

Here's a conversation that's been taking place about every week lately at a certain married couple's Northwest Dallas home. Their names have been changed to prevent scorn and shame from being heaped on one spouse for being a hard-hearted Scrooge.

John Doe: I wanna Xbox for Christmas.

Jane Doe: What!? They cost 300 bucks, not counting games, and you already have a PlayStation 2, a Nintendo 64, a computer and 8 million games. Besides, you're almost 40.

And with this, Becky...I mean Jane Doe, not Becky...cruelly walks away, thinking she has made some sort of point. God--and maybe other women--knows what that point might be, coming from someone with two feet and roughly 1,100 pairs of shoes. Nevertheless, rationally or not, the prospects for an Xbox at my...I mean poor John Doe's...house seem dim.

Obviously, there is some vital male-female logic gap that's not being bridged here. Maybe Taylor Darnell, the Xbox Odyssey games goddess, could help. Unfortunately, the goddess is off with the odyssey, a massive, multi-city interactive tour described as a traveling arcade/rave that features more than 50 playable Xbox game stations. It makes a stop in the West End this week. An odyssey public relations person--also a woman--offers this suggestion: "You might want to bring your wife and show her how cool it is...Maybe a visual will do."

I don't know what made her think I was talking about my wife.

But it's not a bad idea. Maybe Mr. Doe should do that, perhaps bringing a food offering and incense for the goddess to get the heavens behind him. He's going to need all the help he can get. I hear he wants a Nintendo GameCube for his birthday in a couple of months.