Why It’s Mother’s Day, and Not Mother-In-Law’s Day: The Disturbing Conclusion

May 1,2008

The final dinner went very appropriately, considering the whole mess of the last two months.

We decided we’d take MILfH to Montana Ale Works.  She has to drive separately because my car only fits two adults and the two carseats in back.  It must have been nice, back in the days before car seats, to actually fit everyone into one car.  Anyway, she followed us to the restaurant.  The problem was, the place was so packed that there wasn’t even a place to park.  We imagined it would be pretty loud inside and would take a long time to get service, two things that just don’t work with kiddos.  So Jesse said, “Let’s go somewhere else.”

I turned to leave the restaurant.  For whatever reason, MILfH turned the opposite direction.  “What is she doing?” I said. 

“Who knows.  Let’s just call her.”

It would have been a real mess to have to find a way to turn around and get her in this narrow parking lot, and chase her with two kids just to have to tell her that we were going somewhere else.  So we instead hit the road and called her.  She has been attached to her cell phone from the moment she arrived, so we didn’t think that tonight would be the one night that she didn’t have her phone.

But she didn’t.  We called three times and she didn’t answer.  We headed for Old Chicago and waited.  We waited for her to check her messages, surely she would do that, she wouldn’t wait around for us at the place we had originally gone? 

But she did.  She waited there for an hour.  And we were waiting at Old Chicago, hoping that she would check her cell phone.  She has been strapped to that phone the entire time she has been here.  Of course she didn’t have it this time. 

So finally after an hour, she figured out “hey, they must have gone somewhere else” and went back to the house for her cell phone.  She showed up at Old Chicago and we had already given up and ordered.  She was very upset and I’m certain she thought we did this on purpose.  Like I said, it was an appropriate ending to the whole ordeal.

Unfortunately, it was not the end.

May 2, 2008

Friday.  She is leaving tomorrow. 

Joy.  Elation.  Life.  Happy.  Alone with my family at last.  Montana to ourselves.  Our house to ourselves.  Joy.  Greatness. 

Jesse was going out to take some pictures.  I was taking the kids to Butte for the weekend and spending Saturday out on the land. 

“Just so you know,” she said, “I’m coming out to visit tomorrow to say goodbye.”

“To the land?”

“Yes,” she said.  Deflation.  Shrinkage.  Ulcer. 

“Okay,” I said.  “Well you won’t make very good time,” I pointed out.  “Long way back to Colorado.”

She shrugged. “I’m in no hurry to get back,” she said.  “I don’t want to go back to him.”

“Well, I guess I will see you tomorrow,” I said.  Smothering.  Suffocation.

May 3, 2008 9 AM

I arrived out at the land.  My dad was in the cabin making coffee.

“MILfH show up yet?” I asked.  “I’d really like to get the visit over with.”

He gave me an annoyed look.  “Not yet.  Want me to call her?”

I was surprised.  “You have her number?!”

He nodded.  “Yeah, I think it’s in my phone.  She’s been calling her every night.”

Shock.  Anger.  Butt out.  “For WHAT?!”

“I don’t know.  She keeps showing up here too.”

“What!?”

“We usually talk about grandkids,” he said.  “We had a couple of beers and some good talks.”

He explained that she has been showing up to his place, uninvited, for the past several weekends.  

“It’s getting strange,” my dad said.  “I think she likes me or something.”

“WHAT?  How did that…”

Too late.  The car pulls up.  MILfH enters, carrying a box of donuts and a small cactus plant with a bow on it.  She enters the cabin and sets it down like she owns the place.  Obviously she’s been here before.  I am pissed.  All those weekends, she told Jesse and I she had been visiting Yellowstone.  So not only has she been lying to us, but she’s been visiting my dad.  I am immediately suspicious.  (Not of my dad…the last woman that spent time with him like this did it for years, she was a lot prettier and nicer than MILfH, and he told even her he’d already been married and he’d never do it again, thanks much.  I wasn’t worried about this nutjob who’d been around a week or two.)  

She really seemed to love the place.  “Heaven on earth,” she called it.  I think so too.  “Can’t you just sell me an acre?” she asked me.  “All I need is an acre.  I could have a garden, and a cabin.”

What I said:  “No way,” I said.  “What about your house in Colorado?  Besides, half of this land is my brothers, and neither of us would ever sell.”

What I thought:  Not for a million dollars, you dolt.  I would rather squeeze my eyeballs with tweezers than to sell a teaspoon of this dirt to you, much less have land next to you, you crazy, crazy demon woman from the ninth circle of hell.

Since she couldn’t have the land, she started in on asking for what was on it.  She’d point to something, say a pair of antlers.  “Can I have that?” she would ask.  If it wasn’t tied down and could fit in her car, she wanted it. 

“Sure,” my dad would say.  “See something you want, take it.”  He says this to everyone.  He’d give away anything if someone asked for it.  He’s like that.  She thought it was because she is special. 

“I like this chair,” she said, referring to the wooden chair she was sitting on.

“Uh, so do I,” I chimed in.  She gave me a dirty look. 

Later on she asked for the chair overtly.  “Can I bring it back with me?” she asked.  “Do you mind?  I really like it.”

“Actually I’m pretty sentimental about that chair,” I said.  “My dad made that when I was four.”

“Is that a yes?”

“No.”

We’ve seen this odd behavior once before.  When Jesse and I bought new furniture for our house in Divide, she showed up to see it.  She came under the guise of a visit to AJ who was only a couple of months old, but really she was there to scam for things.  She asked if we “really needed that bookshelf.”  She wanted the armoire we had just spent a grand on. 

No.  We.  Just.  Bought. It.  God.  Who does that?

She was genuinely annoyed when we said no, too.  She is just so entitled.  And for what?  Her contributions to the world?  She of the “I’m too good to work” ethic?  Alas, perhaps I am too hard on her.  All of this could very well be behavior caused by mixing all those unprescribed drugs she carries around with her. 

I digress…

She spent the entire day out there on the land.  What happened to the nice day I was going to celebrate with my family…celebrate her leaving the state?  Sigh.  The evening came, and I had to take the kids back to Butte.  MILfH stayed for a while past that.  I know this because my dad called me later, and said she “was worried about finding the hotel in Whitehall,” so he drove in front of her so she could follow him there. 

Now color me crazy, but if she managed to find that piece of land in the middle of nowhere several times over, would she really have a problem finding the ONE hotel in the only nearby town?  The town with one road?  Perhaps she thought she’d be able to manipulate my unassuming dad into a room in said hotel?  Instead, he politely showed her the way to town, then said that he was going to meet some friends in town and get drunk. 

He called to tell me all this.  “I told her I was meeting some friends…but really I just turned around and went home.”  Way to go.  Sad that you have to find elaborate ways to ditch an adult, but I understand.  She’s been sucking the life out of my household for two months now.

Then she called me.  Ulcer.  Anxiety.  I was still on my way back to Butte.  “I’m worried about your dad,” she said.  “He’s going out to town to drink with some friends.  What do I do?”  This phrase in itself perfectly illustrates just how little she knows any of us.

“Uh, okay?” I said.  “And?” 

“Well, I tried to get him to stop,” she said, taking ownership.  “I really tried to stop him.  He just wouldn’t listen.” 

“Yeah.  He’s a grownup,” I said.  “And you wouldn’t be the first to try and get him to do anything.  No one can get him to do anything.” It’s funny that he really wasn’t at a bar this time.  He was trying to ditch the crazy woman.  If he would have told her he was going back to the land, she would have just followed him there. 

What happened next pretty much wrecked the wreckage of the wrecky relationship we all had with MILfH.  This is mostly translated from my dad, who is now mentally traumatized from ever having meeting her.  I can relate. 

It all started during one of their “friendly conversations” when she asked him if he “ever thought about getting back with <MY MOM’S NAME>”  Like most men, he didn’t hear what she was really asking him.  He said from that moment, everything changed.  He started getting endless phone calls.  She brought him gifts.   That’s right, my mother in law from HELL started chasing my father. 

“I’ve heard of crazy women like her,” he said.  “But holy &#%…this has never happened to me in my entire life.”  It’s so very embarrassing that my husband’s mother is the one who he is talking about. 

Instead of leaving even the next day, going back home to her house, her mom, her dog and oh yeah, her husband, she came back to the land.  She asked my dad if she could stay for the summer “to help out with the garden.” 

“No way,” he said.  “If I need help out here, I’ll find me a Mexican gal.”

“But the other night you were practically begging me to stay here,” she told him.

“Bullshit,” my dad called it.  “I told you that if you had one more beer, I wasn’t going to let you leave,” he said.  “I wasn’t going to let you go get killed on the highway so that my kids blame me for giving you beer and letting you drive.  And I said you could sleep in the cabin, and I’d stay out in my truck.”

“But you practically begged me to stay,” she insisted.  (Desperation apparently leads people to hear what is not there.)

“That’s not the same thing,” my dad said.  “I wasn’t going to let you leave and drive drunk.”

She whined and pandered.

“I think you better leave,” he said. 

And she did.

But fifteen minutes later, she called him.  He didn’t answer the phone.  He didn’t answer when she called fifteen minutes after that, either.  In fact, he had to turn his phone off.

The next day he turned his phone back on. 

You have eight messages, it told him.  He had to listen to every single message in order to delete them.  She had called him eight times.  I’ll shorten the messages because they were long and dramatic, but here is a summary for your entertainment.  I wish I could tell you that I was exaggerating or better yet, completely inventing it all.  I am not:

1. Hey, I’ve decided to go up to Glacier Park instead of going home.  Should I stop and visit on my way back?
2. Why aren’t you answering?  I thought we were friends.  I’d like to come up and stay for the summer.  Seriously.  I could stay until September or something.
3. I really don’t understand this.  Why aren’t you answering?  Call me back.
4. Look, I’ve never met anyone like you.  I thought we had something really special.
5. I love you!  I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.  Please call me back so we can talk about this.
6. Never mind that last message.  I’m just confused as to why you aren’t calling me back.  Call me right now! 
7. Why aren’t you calling me? What is wrong with you?  What kind of person are you?  Apparently you are evil, for doing this to me.
8. I’m really disappointed in you.  I thought you were better than this.  Stop being so evil to me.  Call me back right now please.  Please.

Of course he didn’t call her back.  The whole time, he thought they were two friends with grandchildren in common. 

Over the next part of the day, she called four more times.  Now my dad is drinking down at the bar for real, because he is scared she is going to show up with her dog and try to move in.  He said he watched this week’s ‘Desparate Housewives,’ and the voice at the end of the show said: “Be careful who you invite into your life, because they may never leave.”  He said he laughed, because that was really happening. 

In the meantime, she called her son (Jesse) and was crying.  “I’m so confused.  Should I go home, or should I live at <The Land> for the summer?”  WTF?  No one invited you to live there.  Where do you get off?  Who do you think you are?  Why aren’t you spending all this energy on your husband…use that energy it to fix it or get a divorce, already! But…

What the hell was she thinking?  My dad is one of the friendliest, give-the-shirt-off-his-back sort of guys that you will ever meet.  She interpreted it all wrong.  All wrong.  Besides acting like a socially retarded teenager with a crush on the lifeguard, was she not thinking about who he was? 

I mean, in no way was there ever a chance that my dad would be seriously in to her, but let’s say in another plane and another dimension…was she not at all concerned about what her son would think?  Did she think that maybe her oldest son, my husband, might resent her a little bit for attempting to make him a step-sibling to his wife?  Why do I suddenly feel like an Appalachian cliché? 

My husband left a message for her (she wouldn’t answer the phone…she was probably on the other line) telling her to please get help if she ever wanted to see any of us again.  I’m almost certain she will tell this story quite differently to everyone else she “vents” to.  She is one big bag of crazy.  I never want her around my children again. 

So that’s how it all went down.  I feel icky.

Oh, by the way.  When I got home from Butte that Sunday, I tried to make a pot of coffee.  But there wasn’t any. 

She stole my coffee. 

I asked Jesse if he had touched the coffee, and he had made a pot that Saturday morning, but the bag had been full.  Jesse had bought me a brand new bag of coffee on Friday.  The bag was now empty with a few consolation grounds dusting the bottom. 

She won’t be invited back. 

Happy Mother’s Day.

 

Character Assassination

It’s hard to be a female Marine.  To be the fewest of the few is to hold a bouquet of roses in one hand and a cluster of thorns in the other.  I don’t have many complaints about the male Marines I served with, oh, there were some doozies alright, but for the most part they were brothers.  And those doozies I mentioned?  Well the brothers thought they were doozies too.  That’s something that doesn’t get pointed out a lot, I’ve noticed.  That for every female in the military that screws up, there are ten males doing the same or worse.  “Slipped through the cracks.”  “The ten percent.”  Whatever we used to call it.  Just before my enlistment was up, our battalion had the esteemed pleasure of a getting hit with a major drug bust.  Seven of “our” men were running a major GHB (that’d be the date rape drug) business, which including recruiting a sixteen-year old Onslow County teenager to assist in their sales.  That wasn’t on CNN, if I remember…

So let’s take a week when there aren’t any assassinations of political leaders, exploding airliners, or hurricanes.  And let’s face it, hearing the presidential candidates vote for change is already smelling stale.  Now let’s add an attractive blonde Marine who was in a legal battle with a man she accused of assault.  Let’s say she disappears, and wait for the news outlets to attack.  Let’s quote her presumably evil mother calling her a “compulsive liar” and watch as the picture gets painted…woman gets pregnant by man who outranks her and takes off on a bus, eight months pregnant, to hide from her lies.  That’s pretty much the story I’ve been reading.

Being about eight months pregnant myself, let me tell you there isn’t much running from anything.  That little detail in itself was enough to make plenty of people question the accuracy of the reporting.  What, was she planning to deliver in a bathroom?  Up until the time, she had made all of her prenatal appointments (even though dear mommy was pressuring her to give the baby up for adoption). 

Well it’s good that people questioned it because she is dead.  She didn’t run away.  She and her nearly-born baby were murdered.  It’s probably too early to tell whodunit, but my money’s on Mr. Assault.  Didn’t have anything to hide, did you?  Well apparently you did.

It’s unfortunate that we’ll never really know what happened, not everything, to LCpl Maria Lauterbach.  We’ll only know the warped version we hear through the news.  The Marines in her battalion will only hear the rumors and the speculation, and inevitably take sides with either she or the others involved.  As groundbreaking and human-interest driven this story seems to be to the public, I can tell you from my four years in the Marines that it’s not anything new.  Maybe the details are different…it’s not always a death, it’s not always a rape, it’s not always a particularly good-looking individual.  However, one common theme - woman cries foul, investigation ensues, woman pressured to drop charges and “remember what really happened,” everyone starts questioning woman.  Until woman ends up buried in a shallow grave. 

“Oh, damn, we must have missed something,” say the investigators.

I got to see a lot of changes at the time I enlisted in August of 1996.  My boot camp (excuse me….recruit training) platoon was the very last pre-Crucible platoon.  Halfway through boot camp, our female drill instructors lost the lame red cords and were allowed to wear the Smokeys like their male counterparts.  The PFT run time for females went from 1.5 miles to 3 miles while I was in boot camp, making the PFTs equivalent (let’s not get started on arm-hang vs. pull ups, shall we?).  

One thing that becomes apparent right off the bat when you join the Marines is that you better be good.  This should be more apparent to the women than the men, but your personal reputation follows you everywhere you go in the green machine.  Screw up on your first day and it will never be forgotten.  I was a lucky one, and I have an older, wiser female Marine (let’s call her Q) who visited me on my first day on duty, post boot camp, to advise me to hide out in my room for at least three weeks until my newness died down and someone else replaced it.  She was a quite the intimidating one, that Q, and I followed her advice.  It was probably the best advice anyone ever gave me during my time in the service.  I repeated it with each duty station.  I turned down every offer that was made to me “to go out and party” or “come hang out in my room” until I had made my own group of friends and over-protective brothers. 

But I was lucky.  Let’s take a look at those who are signing enlistment papers, shall we?  Straight out of high school, typically these are Generation Y kids who may have never held jobs.  Fueled by freedom, hormones, and a paycheck, temptations lurk at every corner.  Would someone like LCpl Lauterbach have been easily pressured by an older, saltier Marine who pressured her into something?  Or just the first person who took her side?  It’s often the older, crustier “women shouldn’t be in the Marines” men who pull this crap, from what I’ve seen. 

However:  Nothing a person does in their own life, whether you agree with or not, entitles anyone else to threaten or hurt them.  Nothing. 

I can name three women in my battalion who had experiences similar to this (of course I won’t name them).  Guess what.  At times, there were only 5 women out of 500.  Those aren’t good odds.  The odds get worse too as the “good women” pull away from the “bad women” because it’s too easy to be guilty by association in the military.  So the “bad women” (whether they’ve done anything to deserve the title or not) end up having no one to turn to.  Might make it pretty tempting to turn to the first predator that offers a hand…especially if your mommy is the kind who would talk smack about you to CNN.   

Then again, we can’t trust the picture the media paints.  I mozeyed over to the Jacksonville Daily News, where Maria’s uncle is quoted:

“She was a very beautiful, athletic young lady. She volunteered to join the Marine Corps. She was very committed to the Marines, and she is being portrayed in a way that does not look well. She was petrified; she has been continually intimidated and harassed by people (Marines). She was not protected; she was not well looked after.”

We’ll never know.  I do have friends that were in that still carry the mental scars of not being believed.  I even admit there were times I didn’t believe it all.  Until one accused man eventually got himself in trouble somewhere else, getting shot down from an E-7 to an E-3 must have really stung, eh?  Or one of the other ones, who lost a stripe and a hefty chunk of his future retirement checks.  Those women are at least still alive to carry their scars, though.  When I moved into my barracks room at Camp Lejeune in 1997, one of the first things I was warned about was to not go out at night alone.  I guess a few years before, one woman from the battalion was raped and murdered on the stairwell fifty feet from my room.  What a warm fucking welcome that must have been.   

Would I do it all over again?  Hell, yes I would.  Joining the Marines was the best thing I ever did in my life.  If you find this blog in a Google search, and you’re pondering joining, and especially if you are of the female persuasion, just do it.  But please, I beg you.  Be good.  For yourself and for the other WMs that you’ll be working with. 

And please, please don’t turn on each other. 

 

Renegade 1998-2008

Goodbye old buddy. 

 

You were a really good friend, and I’ll never forget you.

I’ll miss you.

 

Sicko

I finally saw SickO, the latest documentary but the love him or hate him Michael Moore.  I know it’s been out for a while, but I don’t see movies until they are available through our pay-per-view system.

Of course there was a lot of controversy surrounding the movie, it wouldn’t be a Michael Moore movie without that; but I have to say it should be viewed by everyone in the U.S.  I thought it was a movie addressing the fact that so few people have health insurance…but no!  As Mr. Moore points out in the first five minutes…this is a movie for people with health insurance. 

Just rent it and see what you think.  Health care has always been a big point of contention for me, since the majority of people in my family have no access to it.  Many of the points made throughout the film confirm what I am starting to see more and more with my own insurance–and the insurance of people around me–it’s really not the benefit it ought to be.  I have great health insurance at the moment, but over the past few years there have been signs indicating that it is going downhill along with everything else Corporate America has to offer.  I haven’t experienced any of the major crises that have happened to the people in the movie.  My problems have been mostly of the annoying variety.  For example: 

I get billed for things that are supposed to be covered.  I call the insurance company to fix them, and all it takes is for me to say, “hey, this should be covered” and they fix the bill.  It’s like they send a bill hoping that I will pay it and not notice.  The problem is I have to go through the bills line by line, and if you’ve ever glanced at a medical bill, then you know they are written in a language with otherworldly origins.  Completely lost in translation.  If I am really lucky, the next bill comes with the charges removed. 

Other annoyances:  I have to see the same doctor every time I get sick–the doctor that is listed as my “primary care physician” on my insurance card.  The problem is I that my doctor is often unavailable, but dang it, my kid is sick now or I have a broken appendage now or something in my abdomen is exploding now…so give me whoever is available.  Sure, I could wait a few days, like the woman in SickO who had to wait be transferred to an “in-network” hospital, (in the process, her child died from a high fever resulting in eventual cardiac arrest) but no thanks…as of now I can afford to splurge on the doctor bill.  So instead of paying a co-pay, I have to pay the co-pay and then wait for a bill that usually amounts to a couple of hundred dollars, just because I saw the other doctor the next room over.  What a complete crap system, if you think about it.  But these are just minor complaints…there are real horror stories out there.

In SickO, one man (some kind of lumber worker) sawed off two of his fingertips in a work accident.  The powers that be told him they could sew on the ring finger for $12K, or the middle finger for $60K.  He opted for the cheaper finger.  Months ago when the movie came out, I remember hearing some medical dude on the radio defending the practitioners, saying that the facts in the movie concerning the lumber man’s fingers are skewed, that would never happen, yada yada yada.  But I can assure you, that it can happen. 

Years ago my dad was doing some remodeling work and he cut off his thumb on a table saw.  I was reading the newspaper in the kitchen and I heard some serious yelling.  I ran to see what happened; my dad was holding his arm to his chest and said “take me to the hospital!”  I was fifteen and wearing socks, but I (thinking the worst) thought he must have sawed off his whole hand and that he might be bleeding to death.  We ran to the car and I drove us up to the emergency room, sans shoes. 

It took forever for my dad to be seen at all.  It was horrible to watch him, shocked and turning gray.  I demanded to know what was taking so long, but they nurses were waiting to verify some paperwork.  No one seemed to be in a hurry.  They wouldn’t even provide a painkiller.  Being fifteen, I deeply, silently hoped that one day they would stand in my shoes with a loved one missing an appendage (I was a lot less nice than I am now, when I was fifteen) and then told to wait.

About an hour and forty-five minutes went by before the doctor could attend to the severed thumb.  I remember it well…there was his mangled thumb, sawed off at the base, hanging by a thin strip of skin. 

They reattached a couple veins or vessels or whatever so that the thumb could live.  They told my dad that if he wanted to actually feel his thumb, that he would have to travel 200 miles and pay out of pocket to see a micro-surgeon to work on the nerves.  It was going to be a lot of travel and money.  So we’re all happy that my dad still has a thumb, and it’s a neat party trick in the winter because it turns blue and cold.       

 

I Think They Deserved It

From the pages of Weird, Weird News:

Apparently a couple convinced several people to give them over $800,000 with one of the most ridiculous scams I have ever heard. 

The man collected the pay, a lot of it, by telling people that his wife was a government agent who would use satellites to conduct body scans to diagnose various maladies.  You know, with the body-scanning satellite technology available today.  The real deal-sealer was that if the scanners found any ills, secret agents would administer treatment to the inflicted folk during the night, as they slept.  It sounds so…lame.  

Apparently someone turned them in, as the couple is headed to the slammer.  They are also supposed to pay back the money that they essentially stole. 

But part of me wants to let them keep the money.  First of all, it’s quite an elaborate story.  They should get kudos for coming up with something like that.  Second, they got people to believe them.  I find it hard to believe they found enough gullible, stupid people to get $800K worth…but they did.  Wow.  Then again, I’ve laughed at enough conspiracy websites to believe that there are folks out there that will believe just about anything. 

 Read it here.

 

Guilty Pleasure Alert

I know I will regret admitting this, but I am hooked on a summer show called Age of Love.  I guess it’s not that hard to believe…I watched every episode of Joe Millionaire, too.  I think I like to live vicariously through people who choose to act like retards on national TV, or something.  Anyway…

The show is centered around Mark Philasomethinorother, a 30 year old Australian tennis star.  He’s edited to be a very good catch.  Enter Team 40’s.  Six forty-somethings (the oldest chick is 4 compete to win the Aussie’s heart right there on NBC!  This is entertaining in itself, mostly the expression on Mark’s face as he learns he signed up to date older women.  (You’d never know it from the way these women look, though)  Things get really interesting in the second episode, when they bring out Team 20’s…you got it, a bunch of recent college grads who look hot, but compared to the 40 somethings raking in $250K a year…well, they seem like babies. 

Of course much editing is done to make the 20 somethings look like bumbling idiots.  The 40 year olds come across as smart, smooth operators.  But I have to say, the 40 year olds are really running over the 20’s during all the competitions.  The camera often cuts away to one of the women, who have an opportunity to make commentary on how they think they are faring against the other chicks.  There are lots of snipes about how the 40 year olds are “decrepit” and “barren”.  The 40 year olds are at least smart enough to acknowledge their competition, but also confident enough not to freak out.  All of the 40 somethings have shrugged at least once to say, “It’s just a man.  We’ll see what happens.” (I am so rooting for the older team!)  But as the show goes on, the competition heats up, and pretty soon all the women, regardless of age, are acting like ‘tards, all googly eyed and drooling over the dude.

And I guess this is what makes the show entertaining for me…the imaginary competition that these women have fabricated.  It’s a big social study on sorry, sorry behavior.  The women inevitably resort to backstabbing and weeping into the camera.  And for what?  To eventually run each other down over an (albeit very hunky) ape who will choose one of them, date her for the mandated 30 days after the show ends, and then break up with her after they discover “it’s just not going to work out?”  Why the competition? 

It’s something that has always driven me crazy about my own gender.  It’s pretty well known that women don’t dress up for men.  They dress up for other women.  They constantly compare themselves.  And for what gain?  To feel bad about themselves?  To ensure that they weigh a half a pound less than their friends?  To boost the microscopic level of self esteem that has been eroded from reading too many issues of Cosmo?  I know, I know, these shows are edited for maximum ‘tard display, but some of these ladies’ comments make me want to bust through the TV and shake them and quote that song: 

“The race is long, but in the end, it’s only with yourself.” 

So ladies, I urge you to join me in watching Age of Love.  Men, if you are secure enough, with your chest hair and your ability to sing the Star Spangled Banner with your armpit, then feel free to participate too.  Join the social experiment to see that all women, not just the young ones, who go on dating shows are pathetic and most likely hunting for an acting career. 

Yes.  It’s a total waste of time.  But great for insomnia and cheap entertainment.