MSN Mondays: 23 surprising things that guys like

1. Women

2. Girls who pretend to like action movies but deep down really prefer foreign movies and documentary's about all the ills in the world.

3. Women who pretend to be into high fashion and clothes and bags and stuff like that but who secretly squirrel money away in Swiss bank accounts and have an interest in investing more fully in their 401K.

4. Women who pretend to not enjoy cooking and say that they want to eat out all the time but who secretly make peach pies every weekend and watch Martha Stewart occasionally to get good ideas.

Aside: I want you to know that the generic MSN article had a bunch of random dudes texting in things like "a chick who will play ps3 with me" and "women who wear boy's shorts all the time." I'm just updating their shoddy advice and should probably be remunerated properly.

5. Women who enjoy traveling. More specifically. Women who are good at figuring out complex train schedules in foreign locales, so you don't end up in some backwater village without a hotel reservation.

6. Women who aren't afraid to give credit to their boyfriends/husbands for stuff that they've done. I mean, the world didn't couldn't have existed as a patriarchal society for a few thousand years without this system.

7. Women who not only say, "I like those flowers," but women who point and say that they enjoy heath aster and primrose and the rails of a stand of lodge pole pines.

8. Women who enjoy taxidermy. Nothing says that a lady is ready to settle down like a nice stuffed moose just hanging out in her apartment. It says, hey, I'm beyond the catch stage. I'm doing things. Look here at this raccoon I've stuffed and put in a life-like replica type scene near this eagle that's trying to eat it.

9. Women who enjoy french doors. Taking a liking to French doors pretty much tells a dude all he needs to know about the sort of aesthetic trappings that a woman likes. If she's attaching herself to such a profoundly good architectural structure, she's probably a catch.

10. Women who understand that Pottery Barn is a nice place to look at furniture, but that you should probably go buy it at Crate and Barrel outlet or Ikea. This appreciation for beauty, coupled with an appropriate frugality really turns men on in the 18-26 range because that's the sort of thing they are concerned about.

11. Women who enjoy bull fights. That's right. The kind of woman who knows enough about history to appreciate the mystical act of animal sacrifice in the scope of humanities relationship to religion and itself. Who understands that the transaction is certainly not merely material but spiritual as well, even if in a sort of retrograde way. That kind of girl.

12. Women who enjoy screen porches. Any woman who lives west of the Rockies and isn't agitating for a screen porch in here future is the sort of woman you want to avoid. You want a woman who knows about malaria, and dengue fever, and West Nile and has a healthy fear of them as well as that Frankensteinianesque company that developed male mosquitoes to wipe out populations in the Cayman islands.

13. Women who don't like pets. You want the type of woman who understands that the attachment that she's formed with her pet is the sort of thing she should be lavishing on other human beings and that the arrival of any offspring will necessitate that offspring crawling through bits of fur, and practically subsisting on dander if she just resists the temptation. Fish are okay though because of their truncated lives.

14. Women who enjoy being outdoors. Men want the type of girl who can appreciate the pleasing light at the end of the day and who can identify cloud shapes and types, and who understand that people who live in cities are pretty stressed out because of all those dirty people that live around them and that the very fact that they think of them as all those dirty people is indicative of the problem.

15. Women who pretend to like abstract art because it's the sort of thing that a person is supposed to do but who secretly love photography and sculpture way more. Women who understand the complex relationship and are emotively moved by the connection between Michelangelo's David and the idea of a creator God molding them from clay. Also, they should like pictures of trees.

16. Women who enjoy boat races. No, I don't mean those type of races that take place on yachts. Do we still have the America's Cup? I mean the type of races that take place in the gutter or on a river between two bits of bark or sticks. Women who understand that this sort of simple competition evokes their own childhood innocence and that it is beautiful.

17. Women who enjoy sun browned hills and live oaks.

18. Women who enjoy staying up all night to talk.

19. Women who enjoy eating garden fresh vegetables.

20. Women who enjoy silence.

21. Women who don't mind sitting in the sun, if the proper amount of sunscreen is applied, and reflecting on their life and the strangeness of a plane overhead full of other people with other problems that they will never meet.

22. Women who laugh frequently.

23. Women who enjoy long train rides through foreign countrysides, streams cutting like ribbons through old valleys, where older women string clothes on lines.