Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better...

If my résumé were to list even a fraction of the things that I'm capable of, it would take Chuck Norris roughly ten years to read through it. You see...I can do anything. You read that right grandma, no need to go digging for those reading glasses - I CAN DO ANYTHING. Even a cursory examination of the sheer volume of my overall prowess would boggle the mind of Stephen Hawking.

And yet, with all of my incredible skills and abilities, the power to convince my wife of this fact has thus far eluded me. Go figure.

Back me up here men - is there anything in the world short of growing an extra finger that you couldn't do if you were given ample time and appropriate resources? Archimedes got it. This man's man once said: "give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world." And yet I find myself constantly trying to convince my wife that I'm perfectly capable of performing such menial tasks as giving myself a haircut, assembling a wedding bouquet, making a decorative throw pillow or discovering on my own the "secret" recipe for the colonel's chicken.

Throughout history, courageous men with little more than an idea and a certain male-born conviction have defied convention and changed the course of the world. Newton, Gutenberg, Bell, Da Vinci, Edison, the Wright brothers and the guy who invented the Snuggie refused to listen to the nay-sayers and instead set out to prove that they could in fact do what they'd been insisting they could do all along. And now after a year and four months of marriage, I'm convinced that the true mother of invention has never been necessity. When these great men set out to create their game-changing inventions, they didn't do it for the money or the fame, they did it to prove to their wives that they could do it.

I can picture it now - old Tom Edison is sitting at home with his wife Mary, reading by light of a candle (Mary, on the other hand was probably watching HGTV or other such nonsense). Mary says something along the lines of "Tom, it's really hard hard to watch "Tabathas Salon Takeover" with all of that candle flickering going on." To which Tom responded "Yeah? I bet I could invent a light source that would be way better than this candle." Mary scoffed (which hasn't been done since 1921 but basically means laughed derisively) and insisted that Tom was full of some kind of animal excrement. Well, Tom took this pretty hard and disappeared into his workshop to prove Mary wrong. When he emerged seven years later Mary had died of consumption (no idea what that means) four years earlier - but Tom danced on her grave by the light of the brand new 1 million candlepower spotlight he had invented.

So - with all the many hundreds of millions of things capable of, isn't it ironic that the one thing I haven't figured out how to do is to somehow convince my wife that I'm capable...?