Dear Mordechai,
IF NOTHING’S WRONG, WHY IS SHE MAD?!
ANONYMOUS
Dear ANONYMOUS,
It’s not nothing, obviously. There’s something she wants to bring up, but women, in general, don’t want to start arguments. They want you to start them. That’s why they ask trick questions, like “Well, what do you think you did?” Like you’re suddenly going to start listing things that she may not even have thought of.
But until then, she’s mad that you haven’t brought up her thing yet. There’s only so long she can walk around slamming things.
Dear Mordechai,
What is my husband thinking about right now? Why won’t he tell me?
Dinah, Monsey
Dear Dinah,
He’s thinking about nothing. He just told you. It’s not like when you say “Nothing.” It’s honestly nothing. Even if he was thinking about something before you asked him, your sudden question caused him to suddenly drop everything mentally, and he’s scrambling around to pick it all up, and he can no longer remember what it was, and whether or not it will get him in trouble.
Dear Mordechai,
How come when my wife asks me to remind her of something and I forget, it’s my fault, but then when I tell her to remind me of something and she forgets, it’s also my fault?
Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
Um… Pass.
Ok, I’ll give it a shot:
Basically, the human brain has a finite storage capacity. It’s like how the human arm has a finite storage capacity, so if your wife has too much to hold, or even if she has nothing to hold but wants her arms free to find more stuff for you to hold, she’s going to keep handing you things.
So let’s say she hands you a baby, and 20 minutes later, she goes, “Where’s the baby?” And you go, “I don’t know. I forgot.” She has a right to be mad. Right?
“What are you mad about?”
“Nothing! You should know!”
My point is that when she tells you to remember something for her, it’s not that you’re BOTH holding it in your brains. You’re holding it for her.
Meanwhile if you give her something to remember, you’re totally out of place, because her brain is filled to capacity, because she’s holding everything in there. She doesn’t have room to hold your thing. She has too many programs running at once.
Whereas every time she asks you what you’re thinking, you say, “Nothing.” So here, hold this.
Dear Mordechai,
Why does my husband have only one pair of pants?
Bracha, Monsey
Dear Bracha,
Because pants have four pockets, and he uses them to hold everything, including his credit cards, his supermarket cards, an ever-changing number of pens and pen caps that don’t always go together, an annoying amount of coins, a key ring that keeps digging into his leg, a phone, some breath mints, things you asked him to hold, and a toy that one of the kids stuffed in there. And he can’t put the keys and the phone in the same pocket unless he wants to ruin the phone, and he can’t put all the supermarket cards in the same pocket unless he wants to sit on a slant, and he can’t keep his breath mints in his back pocket or they go soft. So everything has to go in a specific pocket in a specific way, which he has to redo every time he changes his pants.
Do you change your carryall every day?
His pants are basically a big smelly pocketbook with legs. Be happy he never tells you to hold his pants when you go shopping together.