Why in God's name did someone invent baby and bridal showers? To torture us? It's a necessary evil we all have to do or else we lose our chick license, apparently. Men get off so easy on this one — they get to sit home eating wings and watching the NFL while we sit and fake "oohs and ahhs" over every pink booty. The whole time I'm thinking about the two hours of my life I'll never get back, and the only thing to show for it is a hat made of ribbons and bows for a stupid picture. A real "I coulda had a V-8" kinda moment.

Let's narrow it down to baby showers, in particular, for lack of space and patience. If I gotta play one more "Baby Bingo" or "Pin the Sperm on the Egg" game I'm gonna spit my teeth out. At my baby shower they played a "Baby Poop" game that was so gross I almost broke out in tears and claimed "PRE-partum depression" thinking of all the crappy diapers I was gonna have to change. This is a game wherein they squirted various condiments, from mustard to soy sauce, on several diapers and you had to guess what food some fake baby pooped. Needless to say I was horrified and couldn't eat the buffet after that.

Being single and going to one of these showers is the worst — you just want to stick a fork in your eye. You're not engaged and considered over the hill by the matriarchs of the family, with Great Aunt Edna sitting next to you saying, "So, you never did get married, did ya?" when you're only in your mid-thirties. Or if you did get married, they're bugging you about having kids with, "So when's it gonna be your turn to start a family?" before going into the horrors of waiting too long and having a Down syndrome baby. Gotta love those older relatives that unintentionally make your stress level go through the roof so you go home hysterically crying to your man who's slathered in wing sauce, drunk, and mumbling about "on side kicks."

And why is it that when you go to these baby showers and there's a bunch of other prego's present, they're all anorexic skinny with just a little beach ball in front? Yup, just a little itsy bitsy bloop and looking radiant and oh so chipper and happy — what's up with that?! Yet, when YOU were pregnant you broke out in horrible acne, had bad breath, stunk to high heaven, became a raving hormonal lunatic, puked for the whole nine months, suffered with grapefruit-sized hemorrhoids and gained weight in your butt — and there ain't no baby back there! When I was NINE months pregnant and the size of a small African elephant, people exclaimed in shock and disbelief, "Wow, you don't look pregnant at all!" I took it as an insult since they obviously assumed that this enlarged state was normal for me and I was just morbidly obese. It was all I could do to keep from yelling back, "Hey, I'm busy makin' eyeballs and toes here — have a little respect!"

This last shower I went to over the weekend was your typical "nails on the chalkboard" event. It takes forever to open up all the gifts, doesn't it? Ugh. Nobody in their right mind likes sitting through all of that. Even though they put out a gift registry, the poor girl got 35 pink blankets. That kid will never get cold, that's for sure. She can't even return half of them since they were all knit and crocheted by hand. I imagine Great Aunt Helen wouldn't like hers donated to the animal shelter for dog cages, either. Maybe she can sew them together to make a parachute and jet on outta there for the kid's future teen years. That's what I would do — leave a note saying, "Took your 35 baby blankets and parachuted into Hawaii — call me when you're not fifteen anymore."

The only good part of the whole thing was when the future momma opened up my present of baby bottles and a bristly nipple brush. She looked at the brush dumbfounded for a minute and then said, "Oh my gosh, this looks like it's gonna hurt." I didn't have the heart to tell her it was for the bottle nipples and not hers. I just smirked and said, "Good luck with motherhood, dear, you're gonna need it."