Road Apples
Jan. 5, 2009


Do we really need Oh Happy Day Coconut Sapphire-scented underwear?

By Tim Sanders

A new year has arrived, and the last thing we need is another tired old diatribe about feminine logic. No, what we need is a brand new diatribe about feminine logic. More specifically, this diatribe is about a certain feminine lack of logic which we men, who are nothing at all if not logical, cannot come to terms with.

Take, for example, the newly popular Aqua Globes, which are advertised on TV. These are brightly colored, long necked glass bulbs which you can fill with water, turn upside down and stick into the soil of your potted plants. You might think this was not a bad idea if you were going on vacation and wouldn’t have to look at half a dozen of those things cluttering up the houseplants, but I personally know some ladies who leave them in their houseplant soil all the time. I was talking to Marilyn about that not long ago, and her answers, which seemed perfectly logical to her, left me scratching my head.

ME: Why do women want plants in the house in the first place? (a perfectly logical question).

MARILYN: It gives the home a natural, outdoorsy flavor.

ME: And right in the middle of all of this greenery and natural outdoorsyness you want to stick some goofy red, blue, and pink glass bulbs that look like something you’d won in a carnival whack-a-mole game?

MARILYN: They keep your plants green.

ME: Why not just buy green plastic plants and leave the Aqua Bulbs at the carnival where they belong?

MARILYN: Plastic plants look so ... they don’t look real.

Those discussions never really accomplish anything, and I go away with a headache, while she makes a mental note to order some Aqua Bulbs. Another example of how feminine logic eludes me involves laundry.

First there is the logic, or lack of logic, required for sorting clothes before washing them. When I was in college, where we studied very logical laundry experts like Aristotle and John Lennon, sorting clothes before washing them was not really a necessity. Most of us sorted afterwards. If your underwear got little darker than normal due to washing it with your Levis, who would notice? It was UNDERwear, after all. But marriage put an end to all that. Marilyn has more laundry categories than Illinois has indicted governors. She sorts baskets of washcloths and towels, white clothes, dark clothes, in-between clothes, perma press clothes, delicate clothes, new clothes, old clothes, really old clothes, Baptist clothes, Presbyterian clothes, and four or five other denominations which I can’t remember right now. And sorting is only part of the complex feminine laundry ritual. Other rules include never loading dark washcloths and towels with other dark clothes due to a destructive substance called terry from the terrycloth, which can be lethal to the rest of the congregation. On the other hand you must load white washcloths and towels with other white things needing bleach, terry or no terry, and must never load white dress shirts or tennis shoes with the bleached load ... simply because she says so. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I’ve tried to learn these rules over the years, but to no avail.

Which brings us to last week, when I offered to wash a load of white clothes for Marilyn. I did this out of the goodness of my heart, because that’s the kind of a caring, thoughtful husband I am. I also did it because she wasn’t feeling well and I was almost out of underwear. So she explained to me once again all the cold/cold, warm/cold, warm/warm, full, half full, etc. water settings on the washer dial, and how I should put detergent and bleach into the water and let it agitate before I put the white clothes in, and how after it ran I should put it on rinse cycle again and add fabric softener, and so on and so forth, and off I went. Hey, I’m a logical guy, and I can remember all that stuff.

But then I ran into the detergent dilemma.

My wife uses GAIN detergent. In the basement where the washer and dryer reside there are two containers. One of them is a small reddish plastic jug with a green top. On the front of that jug it says "ultra GAIN" followed by "joyful expressions" and "de joi," and then "apple mango tango." I know that this one is fabric softener because I am a logical man, and because, following all of those nonsense words, I can read the words "FABRIC SOFTENER." The other container is also a reddish plastic jug with a green top, and it also says "ultra GAIN" on the front, followed by "joyful expressions" and then "apple mango tango." Aside from its size, this one is almost identical to the other one, except that it doesn’t say "FABRIC SOFTENER" on it. Unfortunately it also doesn’t say "DETERGENT." No, that would make too much sense, and these products are designed for women. Again the futile conversation occurs:

ME (holding larger of the two jugs): So is this fabric softener or detergent or what?

MARILYN: Don’t be silly. That’s detergent.

ME: How can you tell? It doesn’t say detergent, unless "Expresiones de Alegria" is Spanish for "detergent."

MARILYN: I can tell because it was on the store shelf with the other liquid laundry detergents.

When I ask her just what in the dickens "joyful expressions" and all of that apple mango tango stuff has to do with anything, she just sighs and says those things indicate the detergent’s "flavor." Detergents have flavor? There’s feminine logic for you.

If you need any more proof, you might want to think about the good people at STP, who make automotive additives, just like the people at GAIN make laundry additives. But since more men than women use STP products, STP clearly indicates what is inside their bottles on the outside. STP gas treatment bottles are marked "GAS TREATMENT," and their brake fluid bottles say, not surprisingly, "BRAKE FLUID." They do not label those bottles because we men are stupid. No, they label them because we understand logic. There are no STP "joyful expressions" bottles, and whether or not your octane booster has an apple mango tango "flavor" is immaterial.

And until the marketing people at STP decide to target women, we fervently hope it will remain that way.