When I was attending high school, a friend and I decided to write a little “Ask Abby” type column, except it would be funny… at least to us.  The other night I was going through some stuff in our basement and found a little pamphlet that my friend had written for a class, that included our two columns, and I will share the funny one with you!  So without any further ado, I give you “Mr. Smarty Pants”.

Q.  Why do girls have so many colors?

-Oomyek Nomyeknom

A.  Dear Oomyek,

Mr. Smarty Pants knows where you’re coming from.  Mr. Smarty Pants once had to find his date’s house (Don’t be so surprised!  I have a long list of girls who want to date me!) using a set of instructions that included “turn left at the Burgundy/Rock house”.  Now I know what you men are thinking.  Your exact words are, “BURGUNDY?  What the heck is BURGUNDY?”  But that is not what Mr. Smarty Pants thought.   Being the Mr. Smarty Pants that I am, I immediately recognized that Burgundy was a former region of Europe.  Mr. Smarty Pants was very concerned.  Was this some kind of hint?  Was she trying to tell me to FLEE THE COUNTRY?

So I treated this the way I treat anything that concerns me, namely, by ignoring it altogether.

This tactic eventually proved successful, as I did manage to find her (which, incidentally, was not in Europe, though it was in Bear River City, which is probably just as foreign as Europe, only more remote).

Later that evening I consulted my “Mr. Smarty Pants Dictionary” concerning the term “Burgundy”.  By that point, I had determined that my date was not trying to send me to Germany, but I thought that maybe this word had some sort of secret meaning (I couldn’t help but notice that the letters in the word “BURGUNDY” could be rearranged to spell “DRUG BUNY”).

Indeed, I was correct.  The word Burgundy not only referred to  a certain regioun in Europe, but also to a certain alcoholic beverage that makes this region famous (True story!  Look it up for yourself!) and the term is also used to describe the color of this beverage.

So there it was!  Finally I began to understand.  She wasn’t trying to send me to Europe, she was merely trying to get me drunk so that she could steal my wallet and car.

No, I’m only kidding, but we’re getting to my point: girls are not content to give you a vague description of an item’s color.  Girls have loaded their memory banks with the names of hundreds of different colors so that when they tell you what color something is, there will be no question in your mind as to the exact tint, shade, tone, degree, and flavor of the object in question.

Of course guys don’t do this.  What a girl would call “burgundy” a guy would call “purple”.  If he wanted to be extra descriptive, he might call it “kinda purplish” or “sort of, ya know, a purple color.”  Only if he wanted to be EXTREMELY specific would he ever get even remotely close to being as descriptive as girls, and the he would call it “the color of the beans in a five-week-old burrito.”  What a guy would call “blue” a girl could call navy blue, azure, periwinkle, midnight blue, cerulean, sky color sapphire, aquamarine, turquoise, dusty blue, powder blue, kitchen blue, French blue, decaffeinated blue, fat-free blue, my baby done made me blue, or (my personal favorite) blue on a stick.

Mr. Smarty Pants thinks that life would be much simpler if girls adopted the guy method of color distinction.  In my example, for instance, I would have been a lot less confused if my date had just called the house, “the color of wine made in a former region of Europe.”

So what make girls this way?  To answer this question, you must dig way back into your childhood,  Remember a simpler time, a carefree time, a time when your social status was based on the cartoon character on your lunch box.  Now think about your crayons.  Everyone had to have crayons.  This was when color differences arose between genders.  Girls packed around huge 128 crayon sets that came in a carrying case that resembled designer luggage with wheels, built-in-crayon sharpener, and a V-8 engine.  Boys on the other hand had little boxes with seven or eight crayons in them.  Parents didn’t buy their boys huge crayon sets, because boys didn’t use crayons the same way girls did.  While girls were painstakingly coloring the chicken mauve, boys were in pain from sticking the green WAY too far up their left nostril!