A Pleasant Side Effect

I spent some time over The Holidays at my aunt's house in Long Beach, helping her and my cousin take care of my grandpa and lending a hand around the house. One of the projects she wanted completed while I was there was to have some bookshelves put up in her bedroom.

Enter the...gaggle? Mess? Rafter? Oh, no. That one is for turkeys. You know what? Let's go with "rafter"...rafter of frat boys that often descends on my aunt's house. Somewhere between five and nine 20-somethings, including my cousin and the sub-letter.

"Who better to hang shelves," I think to myself, "than a bunch of drunk kids with power tools?" So, I give them the rundown of what needs to happen (two shelves, two walls, go!) and let them have at it.

First Funny: my dad has a saying (which is apparently a Chinese proverb) "One boy is a boy. Two boys is half a boy. Three boys is no boy at all." The meaning of this proverb was instantly apparent as these young men started hanging the shelves. My aunt's bedroom is small-ish. Certainly, not room enough for all half-dozen frat boys to accumulate, so they took turns - usually in twos and threes. If there were two boys in the room, the work would be slow, but progressing. As soon as a third boy entered, work would grind to a halt and stay stopped until a) an independent party (myself) intervened or b) one of the boys left the room, allowing the two remaining boys to continue. Sometimes the only way to get work re-started was to shoo one of the boys out of the room. (See? My dad and the Chinese were right!)

Which leads me to the point of this post.

My cousin and I are standing, observing this phenomenon with varying degrees of amusement when he turns to me and says, "Now I understand why you're a lesbian."

Which made me laugh like this: 

But, amusing as his statement was, it was also false.

It's true that not having to put up with the collective incompetence of males, particularly large groups of young males, is a pleasant side effect of my sexual orientation, however:

I'm a lesbian because I'm attracted to women.