I'm so glad I'm a dude. As if I needed more proof of how much easier it is to be a guy - the ability to pee standing up, checkmate - my girlfriend happened to be planning a bridal shower/bachelorette party for the same weekend. My planning essentially involved a few emails, making a dinner reservation and reminding everyone to pay the guy who booked the hotel rooms.
Bachelorette parties and bridal showers, by contrast, seem to require detailed plans along the lines of the raid of bin Laden's compound if the attack included an inflatable penis. (Although, based on what has been discovered in the compound, maybe it did.)
My favorite part of the bridal shower is the games. Why do women feel the need to wrap each other in toilet paper as part of the pre-wedding festivities? I've seen many of you drink before; you typically don't need any encouragement or a running start. The only game I organized for my brother's party was Make Sure Everyone Gets Back to the Hotel Room At the End of the Night. (We won!)
Perhaps nothing summarizes the difference between bachelor and bachelorette parties, and men and women, for that matter, than this: some of the girls at the party my girlfriend planned brought multiple pairs of shoes. My cousin only brought his toothbrush.
Sake bombs are stupid. I'll be the first to admit I'm a lightweight and a novice when it comes to drinking. I'm also terrible at chugging, a fact I attribute to a narrow gullet and that I like to enjoy whatever it is I'm drinking.
But to keep with the spirit of the evening I did my first-ever sake bombs during dinner. OK, my glass was only half-full of beer, but I was definitely in the spirit afterward. What I don't understand is the elaborate ritual leading up to the drinking. Placing the shot glass atop chopsticks on the glass, then banging the table hard enough so the sake falls into the beer - why not just pour the shot in and get on with it? More of the alcohol landed on the table than in people's mouths. We could've used some of those toilet paper dresses.
There's always a strip club involved. My brother had only one request for his party - no strippers. (To the guys at the party who have not yet told their girlfriends or wives about this part of the night: you know she's going to find out eventually.) And I made his wish known in one of my emails to the attendees.
Yet there we were at 1 a.m., standing in line outside a gentleman's club. Girls give the bride-to-be lingerie. Guys give the groom-to-be dollar bills to stick in the lingerie of women with fake breasts.
A bachelor party always seems to find a strip club the way Monarch butterflies always migrate to the same forest in Mexico. No one knows exactly how they know. In our case, we had one guy insistent on going who also knew the neighborhood. He had us at "the strip club is around the corner."
Once we got inside, no one in our party really wanted to be there. In fact, no one in the strip club looked like they really wanted to be there, except for the fat guy standing right in front of the stage. That included the one group of women I saw in the audience. Why they - or any females - would go to a gentleman's club is beyond me. But I'm pretty sure the woman who forgot the inflatable penis for the bachelorette party learned her lesson.
