My husband, the size queen

I always thought it was a few hormones and genitalia. But it's not. The difference between man and womyn is much more simple than that. It's not biological, hormonal or genital.

It's electronic.

All my life I could have cared less about a TV. I mean I watched it. I enjoyed it but I could care less about the size. Twenty inches, twenty five, twenty seven, whatever. I was fine with it. My whole freshman year of college I lived without a TV. I remember if we wanted to watch 90210 we all crowded around my friend Marcie's 12-inch tv.

I had no issue with my TV since my parents got me the one for my first place. It fit into my beloved entertainment center (the recipient of MANY compliments) and life was good.

Until.

It took a couple of weeks after the boy moved in for him to start dissing my TV. The one he had at his place was enormous. I gave up my office so he could make it into his den and fit his TV. His TV would simply not fit into my entertainment center and I wisely chose my entertainment center over that monstrosity of a TV. I was not sacrificing Pottery Barn life for a corner of Best Buy. No way. I got my satisfaction when the mother of a Halloween trick-or-treater poked her head inside my crib and said, "wow, what a beautiful entertainment center." I closed the door, looked at Stew, who by the way was dressed like a pirate, and said, "did you hear that. She called it beautiful. It took her breath away." He immediately dismissed her as "a broad' and said my entertainment center lacked entertainment. he went on to trash the fact that it only had two outputs and I committed the sin of all sins by adding to my crappy TV a DVD/VCR combo which he practically threw up knowing we had to watch a movie on it. Geeze, don't hold back. He told his friends about my small TV and my combo and they ridiculed me incessantly. I fed into it by sending them pictures of how my crap-tastic TV would somehow change to Spanish subtitled around 9 p.m. every night. It annoyed Stew but i loved it. It helped make me bi-lingual and that comes in handy.

So. It was no surprise when Stew's parents gifted us with a check ear-marked for a TV on our wedding day. Anticipating this I put an entertainment center I found comparable to mine on our registry. I knew nobody was going to buy it for us but just having it on there would earn us 20% off when we did purchase it. The week after the wedding we sat in Fortunoff's as the saleslady went nuts trying to figure out how to discount it. Sadly enough we didn't have the TV yet but I knew it was just a matter of time. I pushed the delivery out as far as I could go and within a couple of weeks, Stew happily wrote me an email saying he picked out his TV. He sent me the link (like I actually had an input on it) and I pretended like I actually cared. I only cared about one thing, how much was delivery of this thing going to fuck my day up. When he got home he told me how pissed his friends were because his Tv will be two inches bigger. TWO INCHES. That is when I realzed, a man's TV is like a how a girl compares her boobs with those of another girl. Size does matter.

The entertainment center came first. Actually, we cheated a bit. The one I had was vanilla distressed wood and so was the new one so we just bought the expandable stand and the bridge saving ourselves about $1000. I did a little returning, some gift card schmoozing, "what do you mean that promotion had an expiration date, nobody told me. Can you go get your manager?" It ended up costing us a lot less. I never take no for an answer. Unacceptable. When the entertainment center came, Stew literally sat on the couch in front of the new and improved LOTSAENTERTAINMENT center with a huge smile on his face. I swear if he could have put his hand down his pants at that moment, he would have. I quickly put my 20 inch TV in the massive void. I thought the smile was disappear but it didn't. He was thinking ahead.

We both played hooky the day the TV got delivered. They gave us the generous window of 12-6. Stew "worked from home" and I just took the day off. I actually did work at home tho'. Stew spent the day pacing, perking up and running to the window every time he heard a truck. We live next door to a shopping center and trucks are always making deliveries so stew's hopes were dashed - A LOT. The TV came around 5 like we suspected. As soon as he confirmed it was the right truck he quickly (seriously, I never saw him move that fast) pushed the door open and waited there like a kid at Christmas. As soon as the guys left he quickly got to work with the wiring (special cables only), hooking up the Blu-Ray dvd player. We had some minor set-backs with the cable box but as soon as everything was done, his world was complete. He misses the TV more than me during the day now.

I guess he won't miss me then when I reclaim my office so I can get some work done since the TV is always on. I need some compensation tho', he made me get rid of my beloved L-shaped desk and that's going to cost a trip to Ikea.