Getting a handle(bar) on life

Belle and I were leaving dinner the other night as a mustachioed man was entering. As he held the door for us, I gazed admiringly at his face. He had almost two mustaches in one, handlebars growing from a bushy soup strainer, as if the facial hair of Grover Cleveland and Rollie Fingers were spooning.

"That is a great mustache," I said with a smile and a nod.

"Thanks," he replied with a smile and a nod.

What do you think Belle did as we turned to our car?

a) Smiled and nodded with us
b) Turned back to get another look
c) Hit me in the stomach
d) You foolish, foolish man

If you guessed "c", you're a woman. If you guessed "d", you're probably a married (and clean-shaven) man.

"I can't believe you said that," she said after hitting me. "That's disgusting."

Mustache disagreements aside, my life has been transformed for the way, way, WAY better since I last typed on these pages 11 months ago. It's been a journey of self-discovery and forced discovery with a lot of laughs, some tears and plenty of TLC. As in the television channel. HGTV, too.

I've learned that when it comes to home improvement, I'm more Tim Taylor than Al Borland. I've gone from a bachelor pad to "The Bachelorette."

(Incidentally, as I type this, Belle is in the other room watching Emily go on the "overnight dates" with the remaining guys. Where else can you find stilted dialogue and cooked-up scenarios that lead to an "overnight date"? Oh, right. Any adult movie ever made.)

It's hard to believe that less than six months from now I'll be a married man. I've never been happier. Yet I always thought that finding The One meant I would finally understand women. Instead, I feel like I beat a video game only to discover there are additional, secret levels to conquer.

Lest I get hit in the stomach again, this is not a bad thing. Like an anthropologist living with the local tribe, I feel like I've been able to see Woman up and close and personal, but finding one answer leads to five additional questions.

Case in point: We went to the bathroom during an intermission of a play we were attending earlier this year. The men's line, of course, was moving much faster than the women's. We got to talking about this on the way back to our seats and I learned something that shocked me: where men spread out and get in line behind a urinal/stall, women remain in a single-file line.

This means that, even though there are fewer stalls in a women's bathroom and, with the tickle fights, it obviously takes women a little longer than men, the line snaking out into the hallway is a bit of an exaggeration.

Our conversation led to my breakthrough discovery, however: I finally knew why women go to the bathroom in groups. Two guys might walk to the men's room in a conversation; once inside, each surveys the room and calculates which line will be the fastest.

But two women walk to the bathroom and see a long, single-file line, so what do they do? Continue their conversation as they wait. It's only natural.

Whether the single-file bathroom line led to the conversations or the conversations led to the single-file line is a chicken-and-egg conundrum that we'll never be able to conclusively answer.  

What I do know is, mustaches are disgusting.

The Bachelor (Party)

I planned my first bachelor party last month, for my brother, and I'm going to call it a success because he was able to go to work the following Monday. In the process, I learned a few lessons.

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.