This is an excerpt from an actual conversation between me and G as we prepared for work:

G (standing before me stark naked):  I’m running dangerously low on underwear…

E: You’re living safer than I then because this is Sharon Stone Basic Instinct Day 2 for me

G: I’m not as dirty as you.

E:  You could wash your own underwear, you know.

G: Hundreds of years ago this thing called ‘division of labor’ was conceived…

E:  Yes, which means individuals can do things for themselves.

G:  No, it’s really how we defined our country’s ability to trade with lesser nations to increase productivity.

E:  Then I’m the US and you’re China.  Sanctions on.  Starting now.

G: No, you’re not China.  You’re a smaller developing nation and I’m the leading country in the global economy.

E:  Yeah, that sounds about right.  I’m like a third world country, like the Sudan, that gets thousands of pounds of garbage dumped on their country by the U.S.

G:  It creates jobs.  And they’re happy to take it.

E:  They get paid to take it.  I’m being exploited for free.

G: It’s how you will emerge a prosperous and sovereign nation.

E (grumbling):  You should send your underwear to the Sudan for laundering.

This modern discourse makes both G and E long for a simpler time when G would have a wife in a pastel dress who’d have hurried to the basement to bleach his whites.  And E would have been a wife who sipped Brandy Alexanders all day and slipped sedatives into her husband’s meatloaf dinner.