two things need 'splaining:

1. People who post stick figures of their entire family (and pets) on their car's rear window

2. People who include quotes from famous philosophers in their e-mail signatures (Even better, the people who do this but don't actually follow what the philosophers suggest.)

seriously? just one penis?

Now that I've got your attention....

I am perplexed by people who marry their high school sweetheart. Not people who date someone in high school, break up and then find them years later. I mean people who date in high school, continue to date in college and then marry as soon as they graduate.

Amazingly, I have met three such couples in the past year. I am intrigued and slightly repelled by them. Especially the men. Simply put, I can't believe they don't crave more vajay-jay.

But the women are not off the hook, either. Sometimes, especially when I'm in conversation with this one couple who hooked up when they were 16 and are now 29, I have to fight my urge to take the wife by the shoulders, point to her husband and say, "You've only had sex with HIM??"

Okay, I know sex is not the only thing that keeps a couple together. But longterm attraction has got to be tough if you never dated other people, or dated a relative few. The world is a big fat amazing place, with lots of amazing people. How can you be sure at 22 that you have made the best decision for the rest of your life?

I asked my psychologist friend D to weigh in on the issue. He advised that I was trying to wedge people into my view of the world and hypothesizing. However, when pressed, he agreed that marrying one's high school boyfriend or girlfriend was weird. (Or, as he phrased it, "potentially limiting.")

D also pointed out that some people experience fear that they will never find another person if they break up, and that fear influences their decision to get married.

I shudder to think what would have happened if I married my high school/college b-friend. I recently blogged about running into him at a restaurant and being shocked by his bad taste in clothes. I definitely needed to have more life experience, and much better sex.

So in conclusion, I submit that it's better to date a lot and have life experience before taking the plunge into marriage. Or, to be blunt, have more than one penis before you settle into a life of just one penis.

can't help it

I just paid $200 for a lamp for Magnus's room. I know, I know.

But it's a sweet lamp!

cut my mutton chops and shut the hell up

I have to thank my parents for certain genetic attributes. I have really great skin, with half the wrinkles that women younger than me have. My teeth are excellent and cavity-free. And I'm naturally thin and with great metabolism. That's the good stuff.

The not so good stuff is the Hair Gene, courtesy of my father. If you've ever met a Middle Eastern person in your life, you know what I'm talking about. You would think being half Persian would mean I'd be less furry than the full-breeds, but I drew the short end of the DNA stick. Hair was omnipresent in my life, starting at an early age. In preschool and through high school, it was the unibrow. When I hit puberty and begged my mom to help me pluck, she forbade it, worried I would whittle it away and wind up looking like Jean Harlow. In junior high when I had to don those tacky blue gym shorts and start shaving my legs, the hair would return the next day thicker and nastier, almost like Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.

And then, the sideburns, probably the most unsightly of all Persian hair issues. How I wished, growing up, for the thin, wispy sideburns of my fair white girlfriends. They could wear their hair back in a ponytail and not be mistaken for a werewolf. I was not so lucky. At every haircut, I insisted that the stylist break out the clippers and tame my long Elvis chops.

This process worked fine until recently. I changed salons and found a great stylist. She had the audacity to go on maternity leave and refer me to Kelly, who is in the anti-clipping camp. Upon seeing my burns, she refused to touch them.

"You should go natural!" she chided me. "By cutting them, you are making them grow back even thicker!"

"Yes, but that theory also goes for shaving my legs," I retorted.

"I am not touching them," she declared, "and all those stylists who cut them were foolish to do so."

I couldn't believe it. She really wouldn't touch my sideburns. I asked her again at the end of the session to trim them and she balked and said she couldn't. She couldn't.

At home, I decided to give them a chop to shorten them. But I was distracted watching Magnus out of the corner of my eye, so what I thought was a straight clip was actually a bad angle. Luckily my hair is long enough to hide the boo boo, but I was still pissed. I'm the client. Can't you set aside your self-righteous opinion and do what I want?

Clearly not. I commisserated with a girlfriend who also has the sideburn issue. She said she's been told not to clip and to accept her natural gift of bushy, unsightly side hair.

It's a ploy, I think, to keep them all laughing at us.

blech

Crappy movie spoiler alert: if you haven't seen "The Killer Inside Me" with Casey Affleck, don't.

J and I sat through this film and aside from trying to follow a meandering storyline and mumbly dialogue, we were caught off guard by its violence. I'm not talking gory, slasher-style violence; I mean extended scenes of unflinching brutality. Affleck in one scene puts on gloves and punches Jessica Alba in the face until her eyes swell shut. Later, he spits in Kate Hudson's face and kicks her to death. I loathe stylized violence and watching two women being attacked on screen is unnerving, especially when the roles these women have in the film are thin to begin with.

There are film critics who will likely defend the film, who will say that those scenes are necessary because they show the character's psychological underpinnings and have to appear realistic, but I call b.s. You can convey a lot in a scene and not be exploitative.

I think its back to Pixar movies for a while.