What planet are men from?

Do you think men are really from Mars? Because sometimes it seems like they’re from that other planet. You know. Uranus.
What I mean is that.....well, they're a mixed bag.
Take Hot Firefighter Husband, for example. Once, just after we had started.....um....dating.......yeah, that’s it, we were dating......he let himself into my apartment when he knew I was working late and baked me an apple pie. That same year, he went on a trip to San Francisco and brought me home a 2-inch plastic Buddha statue.
It’s been like this ever since, though I write this with some trepidation, knowing that Husband is quite possibly the best thing that ever happened to me other than finally having my uterus removed.
When I left the house this morning, for example, Husband had just gotten off his shift. He was wearing his favorite beat-up shorts, a t-shirt and a backwards baseball cap, and he needed a shave.
And he was preparing to vacuum.
Uh-huh. It was like suburban mom porn, I tell you. I might have been interested in delaying my exit had I not been afraid it would make him lose cleaning momentum.
Husband does not buy me flowers “just because.” His gift-giving abilities -- well, they suck a little bit, as you might have guessed from the Buddha, which I still have. He once gave me a wooden flying pig with removable wings for Christmas.
But my man cleans, and I find that incredibly gratifying, and pretty sexy, too. He can do some pretty amazing things with those Scrubbing Bubbles.
Yet for every totally rockin’ task he completes, there seems to be some sort of payback.
This morning, as I left the house whistling in anticipation of a clean house, he called for me to take the Jeep. So I walked to the Goddamn Yellow Jeep and opened the door, and stuck my shoe into the 3-inch puddle accumulated atop the floorboard. Somebody forgot to put the top up last night.
The Goddamn Yellow Jeep has long been a source of contention. I was very proud that he sold his little Mazda on Craigslist, and looked forward to lowering our car payment. But he came home with the GYJ, which is the color of an irradiated banana and can certainly be seen from space. Though it’s supposedly “almost new,” it has a huge dent in the side and the gear shift is on upside down. Initially, it only had two seat belts in the back. “We have three kids,” I screeched. Really, I can be an irascible shrew at times. In his defense, he did order an extra seat belt online and has since installed it. It’s purple.
The point is, he didn’t think anything of sending me off in a burgeoning thunderstorm driving a flooded Jeep with half a top and the back windows resting unhelpfully in the garage.
The whole porn image dissipated quickly, I can assure you.
He laughed at me for not wanting to take the Jeep, which made me mad, which made him laugh even harder, which....well, you know where this is going. It ended with me taking the Motorized Landfill instead, screaming at him unconvincingly to have a good day and then calling from the road to apologize 10 minutes later. But still, he shouldn’t have left the top down last night.
None of this would be an issue if I hadn’t last week accepted an actual job that requires me to be someplace on time. It’s just one class that I’m teaching at the University of North Florida, but I do have to show up a couple of times a week. I tried to not take this job by explaining that I would have to come straight from my boxing class on Mondays and so would be late as well as sweaty for those classes, but the department head seemed amenable to that.
On the first day of my back-to-back classes, I taught boxing, changed into my street clothes, flew out of the gym parking lot and promptly got stopped for speeding.
I normally consider it a little embarrassing that the Motorized Landfill is plastered with firefighter union paraphernalia. At least there’s no snarky bumper sticker involving firefighters and poles or anything like that.
On this day, however, the deputy appreciated Husband’s service to humanity and gave me a written warning. Husband later asked me to please stop doing things that required him to write thank-you notes to police officers, and I said I would try.
Are men and women different? I never wanted to think so. But now that I’ve been living with a man for going on 20 years, I feel certain our brains are wired differently. What woman would put a dish towel and a bra in the same load of wash? Or forget her mother’s birthday? Or suggest tying her son’s hand behind his back to practice being a lefty pitcher?
The bright side is that I’ve learned to forgive Husband for these deficiencies, and I’ll learn to forgive him for buying the Goddamn Yellow Jeep which he swears will be with us forever.
But I tell you, that house better be pretty fucking clean.

Update: Okay, the house was pretty fucking clean. But listen: guess how many times I had to hear about it?