OK, I'm back but I don't know for how long.

You know, men and women are different. Well, duh, you say? OK, the physical difference is obvious, I grant, but that's not exactly what I was talking about. I wholeheartedly approve of the physical difference, one of the great mysteries of life we all need to explore as often as possible. But I really want to talk about something different.

I can't prove it scientifically, but all my experience and in particular information from my wife tells me that men and women think differently. Oh, sure, we tend to think about different things sometimes, and we frequently have, as a general population, different opinions on things. But this goes farther than that. It a difference in the WAY we think.

Women, ever ask a man what he's thinking about and he replies "Nothing." Well, he may not be uncommunicative, he may actually mean it. Men do have that ability, to literally turn their minds off. When I told my wife that, she couldn't believe it. She said, and I have seen it repeated here on some women's blogs, that she can't turn her's off, that there's always a hundred different thoughts going through her head.

I think that women have a variey of thoughts going through their heads most times. Men, I believe, tend to specialize, to think about one thing to the exclusion of most other things until it's pretty well exausted. This makes men particularly good at problem solving (as long as there's not more than one problem at a time), and women at working chaotic situations. We stick a male doctor in a room with one patient to handle the problem, we put a female nurse handling the hundreds of patients requiring attention at the desk or in the waiting room. OK, so there are female doctors and male nurses. This isn't a diatribe against women, it's just some observations.

For example, there are few women in computer programming. I think that is because men, because of their method of thinking have an advantage in it. Not saying women can't make good programmers, as a matter of fact the few I have known have been extraordinary. But they were even better on the tech desk handling a multitude of problems at once.

Men, ever listened to 3 or 4 women talking? They all talk at the same time, right? On multiple subjects? And they seem to catch everything that's said? That's multi-tasking, that's the female brain operating at its highest. And they don't even know they're doing something extraordinary. Because it isn't to them.

Women, ever wonder why your man says so litte? Well, could be a lot of reasons, but one possibility is that he just can't keep up. When a man hears a subject being discussed he likes to marshal his thoughts, check out his memories on the subject, his current information, his interesting anidotes(sp?), and then find a place to slip into the conversation. Now with men, with all this preparation going on, there is all kinds of silences so that can happen. With women, by the time he can slide in, the subject has changed three times and he just sounds like a fool. So we generally keep our mouths shut.

On the other hand, I'm sure it is so frustrating for women when, after doing all that inward contemplating, all the man can come up with is a non-commital, "Sure" or "OK" or "whatever". But women, hard as it is for me to say, that is all he has. On some subjects we just don't have anything to say. We are so serious about not cluttering up our minds with stuff uninteresting to us that we literally just don't let it in. You know, those times when you tell us something and we absolutely refuse to hear it or remember it? We have such a great need for linear thinking that if it doesn't connect to something we've already determined is important, we have trouble holding onto those slippey thoughts. Women, on the other hand, seem to remember everything, in the smallest details.

Thus, I find that women like spontaneity, men in general want to plan everything out. Men just can't handle the quick laying down of new information very often. Oh, they handle it, I suppose, but they really don't like it all that much. We ALL mostly rise to whatever occasion we have to rise to, but we gradually, over the years, structure our lives to run in a particular mode that we're most comfortable with.

In short, men's thoughts and the subjects he prefers run linearly. Most sports, for example, are well laid out, run in predictable ways with only very short periods of unpredictability. Just right for their way of thinking. How else could they watch something so completely boring, right ladies?

One final point. I've read on several of the teenage girls' blogs that they don't understand boys. And of course, if there were more boys here, we'd be hearing them say the same thing about girls (as if teenage boys would be here, pouring out their hearts). Basically, that is the truth of the world. Men are not being particularly dense and women are not being particularly air-headed, that's just the way WE preceive the opposite sex's way of thinking. By the way, when a teenage girl asks "Why is a boy so complicated?", talking about why a boy who says he likes her then refuses to even acknowledge her when he's with her friends, she should realize that the boy isn't complicated, he's really quite simple. It just looks complicated because she doesn't understand boys.

First of all, boys live by ego. Later we men get over some of this but it never really changes. To ask us not to live by ego goes again everything that we are. It shapes much of what we do. There comes a time in a boy's life when he becomes interested in girls, but the boy's peer group has an effective way to keep him from moving away from them, they tease him about it. Oh, having sex with a girl is OK (well, more than OK, actually), but having feelings? That threatens the group, will break it up. So when a guy finally stands up to the group dynamic and takes the ribbing, you know he's serious about the girl. If he doesn't, girls, he's not really serious.

OK, so how can he say he likes you if he's not really serious? Remember that linear mind? When we're young, boy or girl, we are largely self-centered creatures. It does change somewhat later, but at core we are always self-centered (after all, we're the only one here inside our skulls, so it's natural we'd think most about us). Anyway, that self-centered boy has certain goals in life and one very strong one is to have sex. The sexual drive of a young man would drive a space ship to the moon in nothing flat.

Young girls also have goals, but they usually revolve around relationships and love. Hence the problem. These two goals have much in common, look a little alike, especially if helped along by a few words that appear to say one thing but really mean another. When a guy says he likes you he may mean he wants to be around you and doesn't care who knows it. Or he might mean he likes what he sees and would like to become more familiar with it. And he has learned how to say the words so you women can't tell the difference until you've have a little more experience.

You see, not really complicated, just the linear mind trying to solve a problem. Question is, what problem is he trying to solve? If it's one of relationship then he's speaking the truth and will pride himself on that. If it's one of sex then he easily says things meaning one thing, knowing you're going to interpret them to mean something else and it doesn't bother him at all. It really doesn't. So girls, just consider the difference and ASK him what he means, that'll totally fluster him.

Anyway, a few differences I've noticed. I'll let you in a little secret women, one that men would never want you to know. You scare us to death. Maybe it comes from our mothers, maybe just your difference. Also, our emotions, no matter which ones you're talking about, aren't as strong as yours. And when you become emotional, we just can't handle it, it's outside our abilities, too much chaos, must straighten out.

OK, so I've wasted almost all of my alone time this morning on this. Hope it has some meaning to someone. I know that my wife says she's learned more about men from talking with me than she'd learned the whole rest of her life. And I've learned more about women. Communication can be grand (as long as my favorite show isn't on - can only concentrate on one thing at a time, you know).