I want my own bedroom. There I said it. Go ahead and judge me. I’m too tired to care anymore.
I’m tired of waking up sandwiched between two children, one husband, a dog and three cats. If the fish could survive without water, I’m sure he’d be there too, hogging the last 2 centimeters of space left on my pillow. I want a room without a skateboard in it. I want a room where I don’t have to use one of those crumb rakes (you know that little silver knife looking thing they use at fancy restaurants) before I crawl in bed to avoid feeling like I’m sleeping on a damp beach towel dragged through sandspurs. I want a room where I can watch what I want on television then turn it off even though hubby isn’t ready to go to bed yet. Is it too much to ask, really?
Men might argue that we ladies already have our own room: the “family room/open kitchen.” It is the nucleus of the home, the heartbeat. It’s the place where your loved ones can yell their request for nail clippers at you from fifty feet away, incoming paper airplanes fly in to stab you in the face, and you can crack your shinbone open with a day glow plastic tricycle, all while you’re still burning dinner. Sure, we get our “own” room that can hold the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir and is flooded with natural light, but it’s as rowdy as Jerry Springer’s sound stage. Men, on the other hand, get a room that might not be as spacious, but comes complete with precious commodities such as lockable doors and soundproof tiling.
That’s right -- the media room. It used to be called the family rec room, but we all know that ended just as it began -- as a wistful, fleeting dream of family movie nights with microwavable popcorn and marathon week-end Scategories championships. One day you are thinking of putting in a ping pong table, the next, you’re ushering Junior out the door so he doesn’t see Dad launch a hand grenade into the bloody remains of a mutated alien.
Overnight, the media room has been booby-trapped with 12 remotes, 8 speakers, and endless cable wires crisscrossing the floor like tripwires. There are 18 different black boxes plugged into one main box that produces more emissions than a Hummer and needs its own personal cooling system. By the looks of it, you might wonder if my husband could in fact launch World War III from his barcalounger.
The other night, as I was dutifully doing dishes, my husband passed through my room, you know the family room/open kitchen, and announced that a few friends were on their way over and they’d be going down to the man cave “to mildew.”
That’s right, he said “to mildew.” That got me thinking of something besides the burnt bottom of my spaghetti pot. I had never heard it used as a verb before. Usually when I hear the word mildew, I run screaming and crying for the bleach. But it all started to come together. I, for a better understanding of the male species, would use the scientific method to prove men have the propensity to mildew even though they are not a fungus. What woman wouldn’t want to figure out what happens to her man when he disappears off the face of the Earth inside their own home, only to immerge stinky, glassy eyed, and sporting a beard the length of Charlton Heston’s Moses days later?
So, we have already addressed the topic we want to know more about, but what about the problem? How can grown men mildew seeing as they are not, technically at least, made of fungi or plant material? It’s time for some research.
As the boys commenced to “mildewing”, my first assignment was to figure out what the accepted definition of the word mildew is. I logged on to Wikipedia, the online, free encyclopedia that, as a mother of a third grader, I’m here to tell you is truly the mother of all inventions. I often wonder how I got into college back in the dark ages with only 12 bound volumes of red leather and a single globe to guide me. The Wikipedia definition follows below in quotations and I have included my own research notes in italics:
Mildew: “often used generically to refer to a growth, or mold, with a flat growth habit.” Aha! The subjects usually begin the process of “mildewing” sitting up, but quickly do move into a horizontal position.
“Mold can thrive on any organic matter, including clothing, leather, and ceilings, walls, and floors of homes with moisture management problems in unaired places such as basements…” Even more interesting! The subjects can cover leather couches, not to mention the floor when it becomes overpopulated. Additionally, the room must be as dark as possible for optimum big screen TV viewing and gaming. Couple this with the requisite moisture management problems being too much beer and bourbon and, voilà, the conditions are ripe for mildew!
Finally, “mildew can produce a strong, musky odor.” If there was ever a time an explanation was not needed, this would be one of them.
Now that we’ve done the research, it’s time to develop our hypothesis: grown men can mildew given the right conditions of 1) moisture, liquid; 2) darkness (or low source of illumination) and 3) stimulation. So now comes the fun part. For the sake of proving my hypothesis, I will conduct a series of experiments using 9 subjects total, separated into 3 groups, with varying conditions:
Test Group #1
Subjects: Salt Water Eddie, Mr. Buddy, Reno
Location: Placed in sunlit family room/open kitchen
Liquids: Hot tea with lemon
Stimulation: Roundtable reading of The Bridges of Madison County
Time in vertical position: 3 minutes and 2 seconds
Horizontal growth: none detected
Test Group #2
Subjects: Lockerbox, Fat Jack, Triple T
Location: Man Cave, candlelight
Liquids: None
Stimulation: A Wedding Story marathon on Lifetime Television for Women
Time in vertical position: 2 minutes, 21 seconds
Horizontal growth: 0
Test Group #3
Subjects: Cpack, Curly, Bird
Location: Man cave, no light
Liquids: 2 cases of Coors Light and 4 dozen Buffalo wings
Stimulation: Playstation 3 online blast fest and a review of every single Scorsese film ever made
Time in vertical position: 90 minutes, 55 seconds
Horizontal growth: I tip toe down at 2:00 a.m. to find all three subjects well into horizontal growth pattern. Distinct odor.
Results: Given the right conditions, men can definitely mildew.
A lot of you are probably thinking this isn’t rocket science. I’m no Madame Curie either, but I do think I’m onto something here. A male may never make the bed, but he does make for an interesting test subject. Madame Curie’s husband was a Nobel co-laureate and a brilliant scientist in his own right, but you can’t tell me she never wondered how to keep Pierre from leaving his polonium out on the kitchen countertop. Case in point, I just heard my husband on the phone inviting someone over for a “veg and pad” session. It looks like a woman’s work is never done. I just hope no one is hogging my computer.
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