Food Manners in the South -- In the South, we're big feeders. People come to your house, and you trot out more food just for lunch than they and all their kind can possibly eat in a month -- all in the name of hospitality. The guest is expected to rave endlesly about the quantity and, of course, the quality of this feast. The hostess is expected to disparage the whole thing as absolutely pitiful: It was all she had time to prepare, and not even close to what all she would have prepared if she'd had an ounce of human decency and another thirty minutes or so. This little dance should be repeated frequently throughout the duration of the visit.

My grandfather was once the guest of the most acclaimed hostess in the South. You could drop by her house at any hour of the day or night with a bus full of people, with no notice whatsoever, and she would lay out a spread that would feed and significantly raise the cholesterol level of the entire county. The table groand with the sheer weight of all the food she ahd prepared for my grandfather, and so as to be polite and not hurt her feelings, he dutifully sampled all of it, in no small way. He at eand he ate and he ate. She waited graciously for him to begin the praise cycle. He never did. He just kept on eating. She waited as patiently as she could, and still he said nothing. The whole rhythm of the meal was being thrown off.

She tentatively began to make brief unsolicited sallies into the denial/disparage/denigrate cycle of the thing. "The beans were a little mush, I thought. And the biscuits were hard, weren't they? I just dried that chicken out. I'm always so afraid it'll be red at the bone, I just overdo it. I never could fry chicken like my mama." He would dutifully refute all her unwarranted and untrue statements as just that, but he would not follow up with the culturally appropriate and desperately sought hymns of praise for her food. She grew more distraught by the minute until finally she could stand it no more and she broke the cardinal rule of Southern hospitality: She just flat out asked him if he liked the food. Being entirely cognizant the whole time of her horrendous discomfiture, he leaned back -- back being the only direction he could lean, so engorged was his belly -- gazed about the table at the ruins of the feast, and said, "Well, yes, it was pretty good -- (long dramatic pause) -- what there was of it." Knowing at last that she'd been had, she began beating him about the head and body with a wooden sppon.

This saying, "It was pretty good -- what there was of it," became the accepted code in the South for the highest possible praise for a meal.

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Now I have told my daughters about the Four Hour Rule and the Twenty-Four Hour Rule...

and you might want to look both of those up on the "daughters" page. It is up to girls to enforce the Four Hour Rule, however, so I'm going to tell you only about the Twenty-Four Hour Rule:

Twenty-four Hour Rule -- If you engage of any kind of sex with anyone, whether friend, acquaintance, girlfriend, fiance, or wife, at any level at all, then it is absolutely mandatory that you be in full complaince with the Twenty-Four Hour Rule. This Rule state flatly that within (WELL within if you has any sense and/or any hope for the future) 24 hours following said act of sex, you must telephone and/or email to repeat all of the pre-sex compliments that I certainly hope you paid her regarding everything from her eyes/face/hair/outfit and legs to the unbearable sweetness of her disposition. Plus, you should have thought up at least 15 minutes' worth of new and additional compliments about the act itself. These compliments should contain glowing references to the smallest efforts she might have made on your behalf. Graphic compliments regarding specific body parts not included in the previous listing are also nice. As a general rule, you should keep in mind that women prefer that some body parts be praised for their amplitude, while others should be lauded for being the tiniest thing you ever saw.

There are virtually no exemptions from this momentous decree. Only death or prolonged coma are even considered. Flowers are an extra-nice gesture, especially if the sex was extra-nice. Post-coital women are also very crowlike in their attraction to things that go sparkle, too. And remember -- women are like ice. There just ain't no substitute.

Don't settle for less than you deserve. And don't ever believe you don't deserve it all. But maybe your job isn't all that terrible. Your marriage is not really hideous; its just sort of beige. Flat, dull, lifeless - these are not good adjectives when they refer to your hair; they are infinitely worse if they apply to your life. If you are stuck, sweating, on a sandbar in the river of your life, you've got to find a way back into those swift, effervescent currents of joy that are your birthright.