and I'll flee,

because reality's much too hard for me to bear;

you can never say never, while we don't know when;

don't let me go

Can't live with them, can't live without them;

I don't know when it started, but I realize that for a good amount of years of my life, I've been trying and failing to understand the mystery of the female homo sapiens.

What are females to us men? Rather than merely objectifying them as trophy wives or sex objects, I think they are the salt to our pepper, the Yin to our Yang, the ... well you get it. They are the cool breeze that blows to calm the raging tempest in our souls, the ones that we can really lie down, gaze up at the stars and talk for hours with about nothing at all. Us guys, we like to initiate HTHTs (for the uninitiated, that means heart-to-heart-talks see also MTMT: man-to-man-talk) but really, we normally tend to open up and bare our souls more often to females (or maybe that's just me.)

Females have a way of tugging at emotional cords entrenched deep within us. It's the truth. The two times that I've cried so far in the army, were both because of females. The first was because I was so extremely touched by my mum's efforts in taking care of me and the fact that I realized that I was taking her for granted, that I bawled like a child on a taxi to White Sands during BMT. The second, was because the overwhelming sense of sadness due to the realization that one of my close friends had really left and the raw, almost bestial desperation at knowing that other ones I hold dear to my heart would soon follow hit me like a sledgehammer to the head and I just started tearing in my bunk in Pasir Laba.

It's much easier to do something for a female friend than for a close buddy. With us guys, most things are common understandings, and we don't go out of our way to do something special most of the time, because firstly that's gay and secondly being from RI, we've got so many bro-mances to keep up with that to do such things for all of them would not only burn a hole in our wallets and leave dark circles around our eyes, it would also incinerate the ashes from the hole burnt out of the wallets and cause the dark circles to become black holes that sucked our eyeballs in. But with females, it pleases us to see the smile lighting up their porcelain features and their eyes sparkling with happiness when they know that you've done something meaningful for them.

But females drive us completely, utterly, irrevocably out of our minds. They drive us crazy. They drive us up the wall. They are creatures that have honed their skills to a fine edge, with exceedingly well-crafted expertise. They know what strings of ours to pull, and are adept at giving us certain bits of information while withholding the essential stuff. We are almost always at a loss as to how to approach them. We can't fathom for nuts what they are thinking, and often misinterpret their words and actions to be signs or hints or anything along those lines, and we act and think accordingly but most of the time turn out to be 99.9% wrong. Girls are like ninjas and we are the samurai. They are masters of stealth, disguise, sleuth, and sometimes deceit and deception, while we are strong, brash, loud, barrel-chested, concentrating on brute force, while sometimes boorish and inconsiderate.

I remember reading a Marvel book one day and Wolverine, with a cigar in his mouth, took a puff and blew out the smoke while looking at some other costumed chick striding away angrily (I guess good ol' wolvie had done her some injustice), and he shook his head and said 'Women, eh? Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.' Wise words. But not everyone's like Hugh Jackman (the only guy I would turn gay for other than Brandon Flowers)'s titular character, with the savoir-faire to score with any woman they wanted, and only strip down their tough exterior to share true love with the one that they chose (who of course was attracted to him first due to aforementioned savoir-faire in the first place).

Females, rather than being pirated playstation games, are the real deal that you find in arcades: with them, there is no such thing as unlimited lives. You get one, maybe a few chances (did I mention that these arcades are out of tokens for you to exchange?) and that's it; you're done. They don't really care, you know. Because ultimately, females are simply humans like us as well. They want what's best for themselves. They live their lives with the basic human instinct of survival. And so, if you don't fit into the plan that they, with their incorrigibly meticulous and cautionary attitude, have carved out for their lives, well then that's just too bad.

It is the worst imaginable fortune to become beguiled with a terrible beauty.

Pray that it never happens to you.