The other night Kristin and I had a couple of friends over for dinner and beers. Kristin was chopping some vegetables for a salad and I asked if I could help. It was a one person job, fairly rote, and not conducive to assistance, so she just asked that I hang out and talk to her while she assembled it.

With these instructions, right out of the holster I fired off, “So I says to Mabel, I says…”

If you recognize what that’s from, congratulations, dork. If not, here you go.

Kristin laughed, sort of, and then asked me to remind her where that was from. After Geek Bowl (where one of the teams actually had that quote as their very team name), she had been inundated with quotes from The Simpsons, Family Guy and a whatever the fuck else came to mind, so this was sort of in her consciousness.

Compare this to virtually every song ever, which is always in the consciousness of what seems like every woman on earth, and you have a key difference between men and women.

Whereas my friends and I can hold entire conversations comprised of dialog from a multitude of media texts (which I briefly touched on here), the women I know cannot. But what they can do is jump into the middle of a song like Dr. Sam Beckett leaping into a new life and be totally at ease within three notes. It’s like a pickup game of “Name That Tune” that you will never ever win.

Women remember songs (in particular pop songs) the way men remember obscure dialog from shitty movies. The difference is, they’re totally ninja about it and don’t feel the need to flaunt it constantly. Geek Bowl was a prime example where Corrie pulled Maroon 5 and Bowling for Soup out of thin air based on impossible to locate melodies, and Kristin is basically the sole reason we’re competitive week after week because I suck shit at music rounds.

Get a group of drunk chicks together and watch them have “dance party” to whatever comes through the air. They’ll bounce around, know every word, and sing the thing to completion. It’s a hive mind fueled by vodka and white wine that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s like the crazy offspring of Rain Man, that sorority from college where none of the chicks would sleep with you, and KISS fm all rolled into one. Women can do this with music they don’t even particularly like.

One time we were in the car and “Man In The Box” by Alice in Chains came on Lithium on SiriusXM because Lithium on SiriusXM always fucking plays Alice in Chains (seriously, them and Soundgarden, neither band of which I want to listen to ever again after OD’ing on them thanks to satellite radio – also Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” a song I never liked in the first place), and Kristin was doing something on her phone.

After the opening “baugh-waugh, waugh-waugh-waugh, waugh-waugh-waugh-waughhhhh” guitar riff, Layne Staley was all set to chime in with his dead-voiced delivery of the opening line, and like she was auditioning for Lorne Michaels, Kristin, with alarming and pitch perfect mimicry, lazily offers up, “Iiiiii’m the man… in the BOX.”

I didn’t even realize she was paying attention, so I turned to look at her. She didn’t notice, kept doing whatever on her phone and just jumped right into, “Buuuurrrrried iiiiiiinnnnn… my SHIT.”

Just busy with whatever else, but so good at picking out a tune she wastes a flawless Layne Staley impression on a nothing car ride when she thinks no one’s paying attention. She loves “Groove Is In The Heart” by Deee-Lite (and yes, that’s the correct number of ‘e’s – she’ll tell you), can differentiate six different Katy Perry songs and remembers which song belongs to Toad the Wet Sprocket vs which one belongs to The Toadies.

She’s a woman, and she knows more about music than you ever will. Put her on your trivia team.