I participated this week in the awesomely cool challenge posed by the innovative folks over at Indie Ink. Check em out if you haven’t done so. I j’adore them.
Challenge: Is our society still worthy of the debt metaphorically being paid to it by criminals?
Uh-oh.
Listen, I’m that snarky writer chick from Orange County, CA. A redhead in a sea of blondes. Those are a lot of serious words for a girl like me:
Society.
Debt.
Metaphorically.
Paid.
Criminals.
Wow, when I received this prompt relayed by Indie Ink editor Stacy (who rocks), I immediately reached for my coffee. Realizing it was too late in the day for caffeine, I thanked the heavens for timing and made myself a dirty martini, double, extra olives. Phew. I clearly required an extra bit of, um, creativity for this project de-deconstruction.
Because, see…this is what I do. I deconstruct things. Well, usually men (a man is a thing, right? Noun = person, place, or thing. Oops.). I’m known as the Mancode chick. In fact, I’m writing a book about it. Er, them.
I observe male behavior and dare to ask WHY? How can men change the world but not a toilet paper roll? How can they check out a woman’s rack and think we don’t notice (um, as if)?
Now, granted, not all men do this. The seemingly perfect ones (who leave comments on my blog or Twitter stream, by the way), will be the first to disagree with me and tell me that I’m wrong. They’re right. That women actually owe a debt to men for all the wonderful things they do for their women, all the time. Obviously, I need to pull my head out of my ass. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Other times I talk Chickspeak, where I parse out long-held maxims of the Mystery Female Society to dudes, along with a secret decoder ring. Most guys are willing to take the walk with me, given that they’ve more than paid in advance in sweat, blood, and tears while failing in their attempts to discover what “I’m fine,” or “I’m tired,” really mean. These essays tend to be some of my most popular for some reason. Hmmm.
So what does all this have to do with criminals? Jack, really.
Though, as I watched the vodka swirl in my martini glass from my cozy perch here in my warm (albeit small by OC standards) comfortable home, I did have this thought: