He Blogs/She Blogs: "Can We Make A Quick Trip To The Mall?"

Captain Dumbass: The Male

My partner in crime shot me an email Tuesday with our topic for the week. Actually, it wasn't so much an email as a bunch of gobble-de-gook with the word "shopping" in caps. She's been a little busy of late. I don't know how she manages all of it. I'm happy if I remember to put on pants in the morning.

So, shopping, always a contentious issue between the sexes. Love it or hate it, it's something we all have to do at some point and more often than not, we have to do it with our significant other. Men are always made fun of for our lack of patience when it comes to following their wives or girlfriends around the mall or wherever. Personally, I love shopping. For myself. Add other people to the mix though and things start going sideways fast. Thankfully, with the invention of smart phones, iPods, PSP's, etc. things have gotten a little better. Not like the old days where you'd consider yourself lucky if the change room had a chair for you. They just need to get wi-fi in the store and it would be perfect.

Personally, I'm pretty lucky. My wife isn't a clothes hound and never has been. When we do have to go out it's usually pretty quick and painless. Unless we're shopping for something like wool. My wife likes to knit and she's pretty good at it. Pretty good at starting projects, anyway (hey, Petra, there's an idea for a post!). When it comes time to head off to Micheal's or wherever though... that's when I usually start hoping for an earthquake or the beginning of the zombie plague. The minute we hit the store I'm overwhelmed by fake flowers, glitter and the cloying stench of potpourri. "Which colour do you like?" Which choice will get us out of here faster? Colour has lost all meaning. It's a rainbow kaleidoscope of despair. Its pretty much the same if we're looking at cooking... stuff. Yes, that Stainless 17” Open Oval Roaster is to die for, but it's like a whole mortgage payment. I understand what the end result of this shopping will be, but unless the food is actually in front of me? Meh.

I'm kidding. Honestly, honey. Besides, regardless of what we're shopping for these days, it's always painful unless it involves a trip to Toys R Us, and even then that doesn't guarantee happiness. I love my children, but they have a special way of sucking our will to live every time we need to go buy something. Unless we're at Best Buy standing in front of the big screen TVs. I love my boys.

Petra a.k.a. The Wise (Young) Mommy: The Female

Shopping.

Just the word sends shivers down my spine. Shopping and I have a love/hate relationship. I love to shop for clothes, shoes, stuff for my kids, and gifts for other people. I HATE food shopping. I love finding just the right outfit or a bra that finally makes my boobs not look like oversized traffic cones. I HATE not having money to buy the things I need. I love shopping by myself. I HATE shopping with my kids or my husband.

It's not that I don't love going on outings with my kids and my husband; they are just not the best shopping companions. With the kids, it's for obvious reasons. All they are interested in is the toy aisle, they tire and bore easily and my quest for jeans that make my butt look half its size turns into a competition in which my kids try to see who can outwhine and outshout each other and I end up spending the time gritting my teeth, giving them the evil eye and trying to restrain myself from yelling at them in public. And as if I don't hate grocery shopping enough, somehow my two children always end up hyper and off the wall as soon as we enter the supermarket and I have to constantly apologize to the shoppers around us for the noise, mayhem and almost carriage collisions. Not my idea of fun.

As for shopping with my husband. it's not so bad. Except that he actually takes longer than I do to pick things out and is much more methodical about his shopping. For me, I go in, I grab a crap load of stuff that I like, go try it on, decide what I like and buy what works for me. For him, it's a much longer, more drawn out process of comparing and contrasting, and being completely thorough in perusing what is available. Yes, you could say this is a much better process of going about making responsible purchases, but I'm on a tight schedule people! I don't have the time or the patience to watch him look at two shirts that look almost exactly alike for 20 minutes to decide which one is better suited for him. Nor do I have a good enough eye to tell whether they are going to fit him, because he refuses to try things on. He would rather buy it, bring it home and try it on there, then take it back if it doesn't fit. This again eats into my very busy schedule of working, yelling at my children, um, I mean taking care of my children and keeping the house in tip top shape. Well, maybe tip top shape is a bit of exaggeration. It's more like I prevent it from falling in on itself. But it takes time to do all these things. So shopping, for me, has to be quick and efficient.

And don't get me started on the glassy eyed, slack jawed look he gets when we go into Home Depot. I may as well clear the whole day ahead of time for those trips.

So basically, I love shopping, under the right conditions. Me, by myself, with no financial constraints and nobody slowing me down. As you may have gathered already, this doesn't happen very often, or well, ever. So I guess my love/hate relationship with shopping isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Maybe someday I will have exorbitant amounts of money, a nanny and a personal assistant to help me make my shopping trips more efficient.

Somehow, I doubt it.