The Men...

The men… ahh, the men. How do you identify an OPUA man? You don’t, well not right away at least. Read the signs… you meet a guy, he’s nice, funny, smart and all of the other one hundred and one criteria you have for the perfect man (come on, you know you have a list). You guys get to talking and you find out he has a degree (one point in his favor) and a nice place to live, but no job. Hmm… puzzling? How does that work you ask, well he’s an OPUA!!! The OPUA are generally funny, nice and educated because they have the ability to take their time… at life.



Take my friend S. He graduated in December 2007, with a degree in Mathematics. Fast forward six months and all S had accomplished was creating a permanent dent in his couch, kept Netflix in business and quite possibly done irreversible damage to his liver. Oh wait, he did leave the country for a month to ensure his foreign citizenship. I’m assuming that he caught some flack from the parental units on that out of the country trip because when he came back…voila… he was going back to school. Now, S really is a smart guy (at least in the book sense), I mean there have been a few missteps, but who doesn’t have a few stumbles. There was this one night where he got locked out of his apartment…drunk. This is never a good combination, too many shots of whiskey never equals sound judgment calls. Anyway, he tries calling his roommate to no avail. Then gets the brilliant idea to make a ladder (out of the construction zone signs) and climb into his second story window. Okay, a good plan in theory, I mean the guy was a math major so the physics of the operation should have been simple for him. Apparently not, the ladder proved to not be such a smart move and collapsed beneath his weight. As I was saying, S is a pretty smart guy, so grad school is not a surprising choice. It’s just such a typical move for an OPUA… don’t know what to do… don’t feel like getting a job… I know, go back to school and kill some time.

How about E, my dear friend E. Actually, not so dear, we dated for a while and well… you know. He was one of those “good on paper” guys. Smart, nice and really funny, I would say he met seventy-nine out of the one hundred and one requirements. After moving around California, changing schools every year or two, E finally graduated this past May, at the age of twenty-seven. For years he has balked at the lucrative Vineyard Management Company his family owns, saying that he wants nothing to do with the business. He’s lived up to those words; in true OPUA fashion he has taken a job working for one of his father’s clients.

Here is a perfect example of the ambiguity that is the OPUA man. These men are completely different at first glance... but both have a serious case of OPUA.

photo credit: ME