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.

Fine print

I've read newspapers my entire life and have wanted nothing more professionally than to write for one. Beating deadlines, asking the tough questions, wearing a fedora with the "Press" card sticking out from the side - what's not to love about the life of a newspaperman? (That term is no longer politically correct, of course. We in the business prefer "stewardess.")

Sadly, I might be the last of a dying species. More people are getting their news online than from any other source, according to various reports I've read online. The Internet is fundamentally changing journalism, and all of us in the newspaper business are still trying to figure out just how big we need to make Sudoku puzzles in order to turn a profit.

The death of the print newspaper is a matter of "when," not "if." Some people believe the last print editions will roll off the presses by the end of the decade. I already can see myself shedding a tear in my flying car when that day comes.

So I decided recently to begin preparing for the worst. I gave up up reading newspapers for one week. This meant no sports section with breakfast, something else to occupy my time in the bathroom and purchasing wrapping paper for the first time.

My ban included one important exception: I still read the comics every day. I can imagine a world without newspapers, but I choose not to think about a world without Beetle Bailey.

I began my newspaper fast on a Sunday, my big newspaper reading day. Big Newspaper, probably fearing the loss of one of its last young, loyal subscribers, somehow convinced the Obama administration that night was ideal to announce Osama bin Laden had been killed. I sensed this was not going to be easy.

Yet somehow I managed to avoid reading newspapers all week. The hardest part was picking up the newspaper on my doorstep each morning. It practically cried out for my warm embrace, but I quickly threw it in my recycling pile and zeroed in on my Cinnamon Life.

The best part of the week was not dealing with newsprint. There are so many fingerprints on door frames in my house I could hold several sections of a forensics class. (My mom, in her infinite wisdom, always wondered aloud why my dad and I didn't use doorknobs. I'm not sure, but I believe it's related to the fact neither of us can find things we're looking for that are directly in front of our faces.)

Not reading newspapers also cleared my schedule. As a journalist, I find newspapers to be a sort of continuing education resource, so I tend to read every word of most stories to see what works, what doesn't and maybe pick up a story idea or two. Sections of Sunday papers might last me until Friday. Naturally, I spent much of my free time trying to cut down the pile of Esquires I had yet to open.

Interestingly, I didn't read more news online as I thought I would. I wondered if my consumption of print media fed my consumption of Internet news and vice versa, a chicken-and-egg kind of relationship. Or, perhaps more accurately, a dodo bird-and-egg relationship.

That was the sad realization I had at the conclusion of my experiment. There will probably be a point in my lifetime I won't even have the option of giving up a newspaper. It'll just be gone, like Beetle whenever Sarge is in a foul mood. Call me a romantic with blackened fingertips, but I find something very comforting about holding the daily paper in my hands.

So I will keep reading newspapers until the last one rolls off the presses. I just need to figure out what to do with all of this gift wrap.