My best girl is about to lose her house.

She lives in South Lake Tahoe and that fire is coming like a nightmare, straight at her place. Her neighborhood has been evacuated. She gathered up her dog and her boyfriend and now they are at a friend’s house watching the fire come.

 This fucking sucks.

What I Did This Weekend, or

Things I Learned From My Baby Niece-y, Who Is A Genius 

1. When you are tired, take a nap. 
2. When someone is irritating you, turn around and scream until they go away. 
3. When you don’t agree with something, say “NO” and shake your head vigorously. 
4. When you are hungry, eat something.
5. When you are grumpy, bitch about it and then make someone you love hold you for awhile.
6. Don’t mess around with the DVD player.
7. It’s fun to run around naked.
8. When you see something new, pick it up, look at it from all angles, bang it around and put it in your mouth so you can understand what it is.
9. If it doesn’t interest you, drop it.
10. Don’t put electrical cords in your mouth.
11. Look around periodically to make sure someone you trust has got your back.

In terms of simple literal lists that are intended to have a deeper symbolic meaning that reminds us of the important things in life and someday turn into best-selling three-inch by three-inch books that make great generic graduation/birthday/Christmas presents for people you don’t know that well or work colleagues, I thought that one was pretty good.

Especially number five. I’m partial to number five.

Oh, how we see the world through our own self-colored glasses…two interpretations of the same e-mail:

The e-mail goes like this:

“Women are like apples on trees. The best ones are at the top of The tree. Most men don’t want to reach for the good ones because they are Afraid of falling and getting hurt. Instead, they sometimes take the apples From the ground that aren’t as good, but easy. The apples at the top think Something is wrong  with..them when in reality there amazing. They just have To wait for the right person to come along, the one who is brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree.

Now men are like a fine wine. They begin as grapes, and it’s up to women to stomp the shit out of them until they turn into something acceptable enough to have dinner with.”

My response: “Humph. Sounds like a woman wrote that to make her perpetually single-self feel better.”

His response: “I thought it was from a dude, downtrodden from the married life.”

I, of course, thought he was wrong.

Fill in the blank at the end of the question:

After a week of badgering a woman to have sex with you in the middle of the night, she surprisingly does not arrive at your home at previously discussed (for various reasons, such as your earlier cancellation to watch baseball, your middle-of-the-night badgering and your expectation that she would arrive at your home ready to fuck you without so much as a “Hey, I’m home now” phone call), you text her the next night and say, “I thought you were coming over last night?” She does not respond. The next night, you call her and text her between the hours of midnight and 1 a.m. She does not respond. This leads you to believe she is done playing with you. So what you do is, you continue to text her between the hours of 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. all week. She never responds. You keep texting.

Fill in the blank: You behave this way because _________.

Today, we saw a lovely sight.

We’re here in Big Sky Country. There is a lot of empty space here. Just empty prairie. Makes me get down on my knees and thank God all over again that I was never a pioneer wife. There’s a lot of goddamn work that would have gone into that business. It would have forced me into taking up the position of Village Whore. That’s way less work than cutting wheat and pounding it to make bread ‘n shit. Seriously, a girl can only do so much manual labor before it feels just as crappy as sit-ups, and that’s not the way I roll.

But today, we saw a lovely sight that came close to turning me into a prairie wife.

There was a cowboy working in the pasture. We drove by him on our way home from an early morning Starbuck’s run, which is the perfect metaphor for the situation. The city girl on her way home from a Starbuck’s run spied a cowboy working in the pasture and she found him captivating, similar to the way little girls are captivated by music boxes or things that sparkle.

He was wearing his Wranglers and his boots and his hat, with a fluorescent orange t-shirt. Had it been hunting season and were hunting allowed in the city limits mere feet away from a main road, that would have explained the fluorescent orange shirt. But it wasn’t, and it isn’t, so we’ll just have to chalk that shirt up to whatever other explanation we can conjure.

His arms were melanoma-brown and you know when he takes off that fluorescent thing, his shoulders and everything else from the waist up is pasty-ass white.

But a man in a pair of Wranglers can be forgiven for a pasty-ass white and melanoma-brown two-tone tan. I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t feel the need for forgiveness, but just in case he should, it’s there. Men are delicious in a pair of Wranglers.

I was ready to marry him for his Wranglers and his two-tone skin and his first-hand knowledge of hard work (a man’s man is still very sexy, politically incorrect though it may be), but mostly because he wasn’t a proud card-carrying member of the young professionals’ I-work-60-hours-a-week-for-a-senator-hence-I-am-more-important-than-you-club, his arsenal of pick-up lines wasn’t a string of psuedointellectual condescending negative remarks about obscure legislation or mid 18th-century Russian literature intended to prove he is intellectually superior and therefore sexy, and because he doesn’t consider a string of e-mails  exchanged during the work day to be the equivalent of wooing a girl.

It’s possible none of these things are true. It’s also possible that he’s loaded down with a list of entirely different issues that wouldn’t fit on a 80 gig memory stick. Or that he’s missing teeth. I didn’t see his face. And yes, that would count against him.

But in the drive-by version of my romance with him, he’s a salt-of-the-earth cowboy who wears boots and Wranglers and cowboy hats and is concerned with things that matter, like insulating the house properly for a prairie winter and loving his wife.

In short, I fell in love with him for at least five seconds based on everything that he is not.

It was a lovely sight.

Bonus Points for the following word problem:

When the girl does not come over because you tell her you have to be somewhere at one, you console her by saying she can just come over later that night. You’ll be home around five or six, so what’s the big deal? When she does not come over, you text her the next night at 10:30 and say, “I thought you were coming over last night?”

When you behave in this manner, you are:

a) Just playing it cool

b) Making sure she does not feel smothered by your affections

c) a douchebag

d) In-bred

The answer is D. Because seriously, did it really take you 24 goddamn hours to notice she didn’t show up?

Congratulations, you are among the distinct ranks of men who have completely blown a sure thing.

I am never kidding about these things. Let’s all remember the one who pulled out to break up with me. Before he climaxed.

Alas, moving on. 

Answer the following multiple choice questions. You may not use your notes.

1) You meet a girl on Saturday. The following Wednesday, she engages you in phone sex. Your next move:

a) Text-blast all your buddies to tell them you got tele-laid.

b) Make arrangements to see her as soon possible and close the deal.

c) Call her the next night a little bit after midnight and ask her if she’s horny.

d) Don’t call her for three days. Everyone knows that rule.

2) You meet a girl on Saturday. The following Wednesday, she engages you in phone sex. The following Friday, she sends you text messages at work alluding to you, her and your desk. Sometimes she is on the desk, other times she is under it, depending on the text message. Words such as “Please” and “please, please, please” and “begging” are used, in addition to a phrase that went something like, “anything you want.” Your next move:

a) While she is in her heightened state, convince her to break her plans for that evening and go out with you instead.

b) Turn her messages into a PowerPoint and share them at work. This is too good to keep to yourself.

c) Nothing, you have plans to go out drinking with your roommate tonight.

d) That night, between the carefully selected hours of 12 a.m. and 2 a.m., text her twice and call her four times. This is an important phone call because this is when it is convenient for you to fuck her, and she is clearly doing nothing but lying around fingering her pussy and fantasizing about you anyway.

3) In response to some cajoling from you, this same girl (The Saturday, Wednesday, Friday girl) text messages at 4:30 Saturday morning with two texts that use the words “need,” “want,” and “you” in the same sentence. You see these when you wake up later in the morning. Your next move:

a) Call her. Get her all hot and bothered and then ask for her address. Google map it and head over there pronto.

b) Ask her out for that evening. This girl is officially begging for it.

c) Nothing.

d) Nothing.

4. This same girl (Saturday, Wednesday, Friday and early Saturday morning girl) calls at 1 p.m. Saturday afternoon. She leaves a message and uses the words “crazy”, “frustrated”, “wet”, “you”, and “when”, “when”, “when” in the same sentence.

a) You put her on speaker for all your friends to hear.

b) You say “Right now” and give her your address.

c) You torture her a little bit with some phone foreplay, then ask her out for that night.

d) Don’t respond.

5. That night, at the carefully chosen hour of 2 a.m. (see possible responses to question #2), you call this girl and ask her to come over. She says no, I have a migraine and am puking. Your next move:

a) Badger her to come over. Tell her migraines aren’t that bad.

b) Ask for her address. Come over and nurture her, because women go crazy for that shit.

c) Tell her you want to see her when she feels better and to call you.

d) Tell her to man up and come over and fuck you.

6. She responds that she’ll come over in the morning if she feels better. Your  next move:

a) Call her back twice and ask her what time.

b) Tell her you’ll be waiting with breakfast and warm hands.

c) Wash your sheets and buy condoms.

d) Call her back twice and ask her what time. Then call her at 9 a.m. and wake her up. Text her at 10:30 and ask her how long it’s going to be. Call her at 11:45 and ask her if she’s left the house yet, because you have to go and watch the baseball game with your buddies at 1 p.m.

If you answered c, d, c or d, d, a, d, then you too have just destroyed your opportunity to have sex with Mela. This is most likely because you are 26 years old and are still behaving as though you are in undergrad, when a man courted you by calling you at 2 a.m. and asking you to come over and fuck him. The fact that you are from Mississippi may have something to do with it. We hear y’all are in-bred down yonder.

The lesson we have learned here today is that even when a woman is begging you to fuck her, you cannot rely on her to fuck you at your convenience. It is best to book her time at least 24 hours in advance and refrain from rushing her so you can watch a baseball game. It is very, very difficult to ruin a sure thing, boys, and you have to try very, very hard to do it. As you can see, once a woman is hooked, she will put up with a lot of your bullcrap. This will last until you fail to close the deal by simply demonstrating your clear lack of skill and mojo.

We here at MelaLane.com, Inc., hope this has been a useful exercise for you. Please feel free to retain our services at any time.

Great and Powerful Best Friend: “Why are you having phone sex if you live in the same town?”

Right.

I just remembered something very important that I feel like I should cop to.

I once had phone sex with a wrong number when I was 18. At my parents’ house. I hadn’t even left for college yet.

Wait ’til I tell my therapist; that’s going to be awesome

Note: When possible, date men who can benchpress at least 1.5 to two times your weight. It makes you feel really skinny.

Note: Ask male friends if telling a dude you want to ride him like a pogo stick is hot or laughable.

Note: “What the hell” is always the right decision.

Note: Ask November to validate self for engaging young man in phone sex. Ask him to give the talk that begins with, “Yes, you are still a good person, no, this does not make you less of a person, yes you are still worthwhile, something something something do it in the butt.”