Ravings of a Textual Deviant

X: I’m moving his Pop-Tarts to the top shelf. I wonder if he’ll see them?

Y: Are they moving?

X: No.

Y: Probably just as well; he wouldn’t want to eat them if they were.

For reasons which aren’t important, Ed and I need a key to his brother’s house. Now, that same house used to be Ed and Mark’s parents’ house, and Ed lived there for several years after finishing college, so he never returned the key.

No problem, I thought. We’ll just let ourselves in. But, being the careful person that I am, I asked Ed to make sure he still had the key. That led to the following exchange:

Ed: I don’t know.

Me: Please find out ASAP and let me know so that I can pick one up if you don’t have it.

Ed: Honey, the only way to know for sure is to go over there and try the 20 or so keys I can’t identify on my chain. We may need to find another way.

Me: Didn’t it used to be your housekey…for years?

Ed: A key looks like a key looks like a key. They don’t move. They aren’t good to eat. They aren’t dangerous, and you can’t have sex with them… why in the world would I pay attention to what it looked like? Hmmm?

I don’t even know where to start answering that question.

I don’t know if an excuse can be clever yet lame, but if so, this one certainly is.

In the seven years or so that Ed and I have been together, I have never known him to replace a used-up roll of toilet paper. (Fortunately, I have learned to store additional rolls within easy reach after being, er, stranded a few times.)

Apparently, hunters don’t care where an item is, so long as it’s “in range,” while gatherers are very aware of (and fussy about) the exact placement of items in their environment. This particular gatherer is of the opinion that the entire raison d’etre of a toilet roll holder is to keep the toilet paper in a specific place, and we’re bloody well going to use it. Even if I have to change out the roll myself every single time, for the rest of my natural life…which I exepct will be the case.

Alisa, Jennifer, and I recently observed that all the males in our respective households seem to have a chronic tendency to leave dirty laundry on the floor next to the laundry hamper, as opposed to putting it in the laundry hamper. I asked my friend, Sean, if he did that as well, and if so, why? His answers were “yes” and “I don’t know.”

I started wondering if this was one of those hunter/gatherer things Ed occasionally comes up with. Obviously, it wasn’t intended to demonstrate hunting skill, because how is a guy who can’t hit a stationary laundry hamper with a pair of undies from six inches away going to be able to hit a charging mammoth with…well, anything, at any distance? As it turns out, it has very little to do with hunting per se. The explanation is a two-parter.

Part one: it’s a dominance/territory-marking action. Any other males who might find their way into the bedroom will immediately become aware of the presence of another, established male, because of the socks and underwear scattered about. The intruding male then (theoretically) accedes to the dominance of the established male and leaves. Any females entering the bedroom also become aware of the presence of an established male, and occasionally express sympathy for the established female (who has marked her territory neatly with over-the-door shoe holders).

Part two: Once the clothing has been removed, it is no longer moving. Therefore, it is obviously neither food nor dangerous, and so the hunter no longer sees it. If he can’t see it, then he won’t pick it up. The gatherer, closely attuned to her environment, becomes acutely aware of the dirty clothing lying on the floor. This can create tension between the hunter and the gatherer, and at our house, occasionally results in an underwear crisis, as the gatherer is right sick and tired of picking up after the hunter.

One evening, Ed and I were hanging around the house, trying to decide what to have for dinner. “What do you want?” I asked. It seemed a safe enough question at the time. “I don’t know,” Ed replied.

“Well, what sounds good?” Sometimes Ed responds well to this prompt, but not that night. “Nothing in particular,” was his answer. So, I fell back to my own method of making this particular decision. “Let’s open the fridge and stare at what’s in it until something looks good,” I suggested.

“That won’t work,” Ed asserted. This threw me–what does he mean it won’t work? Staring into the fridge (or, alternately, the pantry) always works for me. I had to know, “Why not?”

“Because you’re a gatherer,” Ed told me. “You can visually take inventory of the entire contents of the fridge in a couple of seconds. I’m a hunter–I’m not going to see anything that’s not moving.”

This isn’t the first time Ed has used his own particular interpretation of evolutionary pyschology to explain his behavior. One morning, during the time when we were packing up to move from the Apartment of Avocado Doom into our house, Ed stopped for a few moments and stared at a pile of stuff waiting to be boxed up. He blinked a few times and kept looking at it.

“I’m going to pack that today,” I told him. “I have a box for it and everything.”

Slowly, his gaze settled on me. “It’s too early for me to be thinking about that,” he said. “I’m just trying to figure out if it’s food or dangerous.”