Men and Women: Perceptive differences

I'm so glad tomorrow is Friday. It's been a long week, as I said yesterday. Fortunately, it's also going to be a long weekend which should make up for it.

It's been a quite social week for me. I've had lunches out and a couple of dinners. This is unusual for me. Generally, I tend to go home after work and stay there with the pups but I had a friend come into town this week and he wanted to have dinner as well as a coworker who wanted to get together and chat.

Both dinners were nice albeit different. I suppose that's the difference between dining with a male friend and a female friend. With male friends, most of the conversation tends to resolve around safe topics like pop culture, meaning movies, television and music. With female friends you tend to discuss more...real things. Things like men, work, life and everything in between.

It was interesting to contrast the two evenings. Tonight's was actually short because I had an eye appointment beforehand. It turned out to be one of those marathon appointments where you feel like you're going a little crazy because the doctor makes you wait forever in the exam room. Why is it they never leave you anything to do in there? There's always stacks of magazines in the main waiting room but, for the most part, the minute you pick one up, your name is called or you're handed a clipboard full of forms to fill out. Then they send you back, you do the initial tests and such...and then you wait. And you wait. And you wait. And there's nothing to do, no magazines, nothing. I usually check my facebook account on my phone but that takes two minutes. The rest of the time, I twiddle my thumbs and look around. In tonight's case, they made me take out my contact lenses, naturally so it was rather blurry to look around the room.

By the time the doctor came in, I was climbing the walls and also a little anxious because I was going to be late to meet my coworker. I endured the usual tests of, "which is better...one or two? Three or four? Five or six? Seven or eight?" and so on. I also have to look at my doctor's ear a lot while he looks at my eyeballs. He's a really nice doctor but he repeats everything so he always says, "look at my ear. My ear." Then, "focus on my ear. My ear." He doesn't have bad ears but sometimes I think it'd be fun if eye doctors wore fun ears for you to look at like goblin ears or elephant ears. It'd make it more fun to look at them.

By the time he was done with me, I still had to withstand the whole, "pick out frames for your glasses," thing. Since my contact prescription hadn't changed but my glasses prescription was a couple of years old, I figured it'd be nice to get new frames since my insurance gives us a great deal on them. That took forever because the glasses-picking-out-assistant-lady was very adamant I pick five frames I liked. It was actually nifty because they have this system where they take pictures of you in all the different frames so you can see what you look like in each pair, side-by-side, to see which ones looks best. It was nifty...but slow.

By the time I met my friend, she almost had to leave to meet her husband. It was a quick, but nice, dinner.

Last night's dinner was much different. It was also nice but since it was with a male friend, it was very heavy on the movie/TV talk and less on the, "So, what's going on in your life?" front.

The difference between male and females was also more fun to notice when we went walking around the mall last night after our meal. My male friend likes to walk so since we were eating at a place in the mall, we decided to take a walk. When we got to Bath and Body Works, I noticed they had their Halloween/Autumn scent collection. I got excited. You know I love Autumn. My male friend asked if I wanted to go in. I said no because it wasn't time to actually buy the scented stuff yet since it was still summer.

My male friend was perplexed. You see, he couldn't understand how I could get excited about the autumn stuff but not want to buy it.

For the most part, my female friends would totally understand that. It's not about the fact that I want to buy the scented things. It's that they're there which means the promise of Autumn is not far behind and when summer fades and Autumn begins, the scents and reminders of the season will be there.

It sounds like I'm stereotyping, I suppose but it's just something I've noticed over the years. Women tend to shop as though it's exciting, it's something meaningful. To buy new clothes is to make a change, to do something new, to make a statement. To men, buying new clothes is often an obligation- "I need shirts therefore I have to shop for them."

I used to have a friend who, on Tuesdays, when the new DVD's were released, would go to Best Buy or Costco and buy them all. He'd spend at least $100 because he wanted them. In contrast, it would take me days or even weeks to decide if I really needed a movie that I really loved. To him, building up his movie collection en masse was just something he did. To me, buying a single movie was a commitment. It was not only about spending the money but about needing to know if I loved the movie enough to own it.

I suppose that sort of mentality can be applied to all areas of life. I know there are a lot of exceptions to my generalizing but, in my opinion, with two brothers, a father and a lot of male friends, there are similiarities that do lead to stereotypes, just as I can say the same about myself and the other females I know.

One thing I do know is that life is more interesting with such different perspectives on things. I don't think life would be the same without them. It's something to ponder, anyway.

Happy Friday and have a wonderful long weekend!