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The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

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Relationships

Who is Middle Aged

May 8, 2008 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

America is a culture that is obsessed with youth, or so I hear the pundits say. Pundit, now there is a term that is relatively meaningless. Just one more way to describe a person with an opinion that is not necessarily based upon expertise in the field they are commenting upon.

I am going to be 39. There, I said it. That is twice in one week. My birthday is Friday. In a year I am going to be 40. How many television shows or movies have I seen about people turning 40 and their struggle with middle age. Far too many.

I don’t consider myself to be middle aged. Here is my formula for determining when I am middle aged. I have two grandparents who are 94. Take their age and divide it in half. Once I reach that age I might be middle aged. So I have a few years left.

My concerns with aging are relatively simple. I don’t like the new aches and pains that seem to show up. That crick in my neck didn’t ask for permission to hang out. It doesn’t pay rent or contribute anything other than aggravation. The freeloader just hangs out and reminds me that I can’t sleep in certain positions anymore.

I played two hours of basketball today. I feel pretty good, but tomorrow morning I’ll pay for it. I’ll wake up and for the first five minutes or so my posture will resemble a question mark.

Aging is not something that I fear. I am not ready to die. There are so many things to do and so many things to see. When I spoke with my friend about her marriage I spent the majority of the time listening, but I did make a few comments. The primary one was about living life.

Life is not meant to be floated through. It is not something that you just kind of show up at. Life is meant to be participated in. You can’t stand on the edge of the room and watch everyone else do a Viennese Waltz around you. You need to grab a hold of your partner and do a little Tango, quickstep your way across the room and back.

We all have moments of fear and doubt. I get that. I understand it. I have made so many mistakes, so very many. Most of my regrets are not about what I did, but what I didn’t do. Sometimes my fear paralyzed me and that is what makes me sad.

I can’t say that she should live as I would. I can’t tell her to do things just as I would and expect her to live like that. Some major decisions are only for her.

But, we have a special friendship and if I wasn’t completely honest I would be untrue to what we have. There is a reason why you can find so many quotes in my blog. In fact, I think that it is time to share some of them again. I’ll do that in the next post.

Filed Under: Life, marriage, Relationships

This Will Strengthen Your Marriage

May 7, 2008 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

I wonder if the people who make this TwoDaLoo are familiar with the pink version here. For those of you who are salivating at the idea of sharing this intimate moment with your loved one, here are the specs:

The TwoDaLoo features two side-by-side toilet seats with a modest privacy wall in between. An upgraded version includes a seven inch LCD television and iPod docking station.

Suggested Retail Price: $1,400.00

Filed Under: Couples, marriage, Relationships

Chores for two: Why men don’t pitch in

April 21, 2008 by Jack Steiner Leave a Comment

I don’t know how I stumbled onto this article, but something tells me that if I had somehow ended married to this amazing catch I’d be divorced.

It is a polemic about household chores and who does more. As you might have gathered this woman goes on and on and on about how hard women work and how men do not do anything around the house.

Call me what you will, but I found her shrill rant to be annoying. And the poor schlemiel she is married to, whatever is he going to think of her portrayal of him. Let’s take a look at this.

“And yet everyone acts as if Jeremy deserves some kind of medal just for making a run to the supermarket. No one has ever suggested that I’m a heroine for doing the things every mother is expected to do. I admit that my husband helps out more than many men, but here’s another news flash: It isn’t because he’s such a fabulously enlightened being. Left to his own devices, he would doubtless park himself in front of the TV like some sitcom male-chauvinist couch potato while I did all the work. The reason Jeremy “helps” as much as he does (an offensive terminology that itself suggests who’s really being held responsible) is simple: He doesn’t have a choice.

From the beginning of our relationship, I made it very clear that I wasn’t going to be any husband’s unpaid servant. If Jeremy wanted to be—and stay—married to me, let alone have kids, he couldn’t stick me with all the boring, mundane stuff nobody wants to do. We were going to share the work, or we were going to forget the whole deal.Unlike my first husband, who announced after our wedding that he didn’t like the way the French laundry did his shirts and he now expected me, the Wife, to wash and iron all of them, Jeremy recognized both the righteousness of the principle involved and the intransigence of the woman he’d married, and proceeded to pitch in.

That was 17 years ago, and while we haven’t exactly achieved equity, we’ve come a lot closer to it than most of our peers, judging by all the dreary surveys proving that men are slugs and their wives are superwomen. So how have I accomplished this? By holding my husband’s feet to the fire every single day of our lives, of course.” (emphasis added by me)

It must be nice to be married to a stereotype, a caricature of a person. The poor husband couldn’t possibly do anything by himself. Of course by using sex you can get your way. No really, you can offer it as a bribe or cut it off, just ask the amazing author.

Yes, dear readers, it’s true: Maintaining some semblance of parity in your marriage requires you to deploy the same kinds of nasty tactics you swore you would never stoop to as a parent but nonetheless found yourself using the minute you actually had a kid. Bribery and punishment work; so do yelling and complaining. Threats are also effective, as long as everyone knows you mean business. With husbands, tender blandishments and nooky are particularly useful, as is the withholding of the aforementioned.

Who wants to be married to Cruella Devil. If she is half as nuts as she comes across in this piece I’d tell the man to run to the nearest divorce lawyer and get the hell out.

My word.

Filed Under: marriage, Relationships

How to Train a Husband

February 18, 2008 by Jack Steiner 5 Comments

File this Newsweek story under the “We’re Not As Stupid as You Think” category. Before we comment on this story let’s take a look at a story from a U.K. publication that provides the average time it takes for a man to propose.

“The average man proposes two years, 11 months and eight days after first meeting their love, research has revealed.”

And it takes the average married man five minutes to tell the newly engaged man to run and never look back, but I digress. Let’s take a look at this ridiculous Newsweek story.

“Attention, frustrated wives: if you want your husband to start listening to you and stop leaving his socks on the floor, all you need is a little patience and a lot of mackerel. Such is the putative relationship advice of Amy Sutherland, a journalist who spent a year at an animal-trainer school and decided to apply the trainers’ techniques to her husband’s annoying habits. According to Sutherland, the key to marital bliss is to ignore negative habits and reward positive ones, the same approach animal trainers use to get killer whales to leap from their tanks and elephants to stand on their heads. So to teach her husband, Scott, to stop storming around the house when he couldn’t find his keys, she practiced what trainers call Least Reinforcing Scenario, which means she ignored his outbursts, and didn’t offer to help with the search. To prevent Scott from hovering over her while she tried to cook, she engineered “incompatible behaviors” by setting a bowl of chips and salsa at the other end of the room. Soon she had a key-finding, salsa-eating mate and, she says, a happier marriage.”

Sounds like a great marriage to me. It is so easy to picture her putting out her dear spouse’s water bowl for him. Of course none of this accounts for her behavior and that she might have more than a couple annoying habits of her own.

“While Sutherland claims that animal-training techniques work on both genders, in another new book, “Seducing the Boys Club,” Nina DiSesa advocates a gender-specific approach to changing people’s behavior. DiSesa, who was the first female chairman of the ad agency McCann Erickson, argues that women should use their femininity to manipulate the men they work with and advance their careers. Instead of criticizing an employee’s ad proposal, she flatters him for his “brilliant” idea, then sweetly asks if he had any other inspirations. “Women use these tactics with men all the time,” she says. “We’re mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters. We know how to handle men, we just don’t do it at work.”

Blah, blah, blah. How many times have I heard/read the same foolish comments about how women control men. Most of us are very aware of what is going on. Don’t think that our response is solely based upon your master manipulation.

“While DiSesa’s tactics may appall feminists, the appeal of Sutherland’s approach is obvious: no tearful couples-therapy sessions, no tantrums about unmet expectations. But Sutherland says it’s not a quick fix. In fact, she was the one who wound up being retrained, as she taught herself not to take her husband’s actions personally, and not to react when he did things that annoyed her. DiSesa also says she retrained herself to stop criticizing and confronting the men she worked with, and instead use “S and M,” seduction and manipulation, to get her way.”

Right, bat your eyes and we’ll swoon. We just can’t help ourselves, especially if we think that helping you we’ll lead right to your bedroom. It is laughable. Actually the part of Sutherland being retrained is kind of funny.

Whatever. Treat us like children or animals and you get what you deserve.

Filed Under: marriage, Relationships

The Couple That Pees Together

June 29, 2006 by Jack Steiner 11 Comments


If you have accused your spouse of not giving a crap this is for you.
Happy Valentine’s Day sweetheart.

Thanks for the tip Gail.

Filed Under: Couples, marriage, Relationships

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