Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Mars & Venus (TM)

While checking my backlog of emails , the piece below caught my eye, and my readers deserve to share it with me . Plus I want to know your opinion on how you think women/ men reason ? I sometimes get the impression that this is really what happens when males and females talk lol Enjoy ....

Here's a prime example of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" offered by an English professor from the University of Phoenix.

The professor told his class one day, "Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. As homework tonight, one of you will write the first paragraph of a short story. You will e-mail your partner that paragraph and send another copy to me.
The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story and send it back, also sending another copy to me. The firstperson will then add a third paragraph, and so on..... back-and-forth. Remember to re-read what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent.

There is to be absolutely no talking outside of the e-mails and anything you wish to say must be written in the e-mail. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached."

The following was actually turned in by two of his students, Rebecca and Gary.

THE STORY :

(1st paragraph by Rebecca)..... At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl.His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So chamomile was out of the question.

(2nd paragraph by Gary) Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. " A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle BEAM FLASHED out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.

( Rebecca) He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel," Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth, when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspaper to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. "Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she wondered wistfully.

( Gary) Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anudrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace disarmament Treaty through the congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien> > empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anudrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarineheadquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion, which vaporized poor, stupid Laurie.

( Rebecca) This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic semi-literate adolescent.

(Gary) Yeah? Well, my writing partner is a self-centered tedious neurotic! who's attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. "Oh, shall I have chamomile tea? Or shall I have some other sort of F**KING TEA???! Oh no, WHAT AM I to do? I'm such an air headed bimbo who reads too many Danielle Steele novels!"

( Rebecca) A**hole

(Gary) Bitch

( Rebecca) F**K YOU - YOU NEANDERTHAL!

(Gary) Go drink some tea - whore.

(TEACHER) A+ . . . I really liked this one.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes that was pretty funny :D

In fact a similar litterary excercise could be done here on your own blog. You could ask two of your fans, male & female, to write alternating paragraphs. Could turn out to be quite interesting!

programmer craig said...

I think it's very funny, and true. But this is an extreme case. Gary chose not to participate in a story that he considered to be inane, so he he changed it. And took a cheap shot at Rebecca, which she took personally. And it all went downhill from there. If Rebecca had chosen a storyline that had at least a little appeal to a guy (she knew her partner was a guy, right?) this may not have happened :P

By the way, in Gary's defense, I think he viewed it as kind of inconsiderate that Rebecca tried to force a "chick" plotline on him. Which is why he responded witha macho plotline of his own, which he knew would get under Rebecca's skin.

So, she was passive-aggressive, and he was aggressive. Very much a mars & venus example.

Highlander said...

Adam, Redenclave, Programmer_Craig and NBA, the funniest part is that this type of dialogue happens in comment sections on the blogs too ;) .
Readers sometimes miss each others point and go on a tangent resulting in weird misunderstandings.
In Arabic we say : 'ana fi wadi wa huwa fi wadi' i.e. I'm in one canyon and he is in a totally different canyon'.