Like most men, I get easily confused.

Come on fellas, admit it. Most of us spend a fair bit of time in a state of total confusion.

Of course, it’s not our fault. It’s just the way we’ve been created.

And let’s be honest, it’s what makes us so goddamn loveable.

But it means we’re not good at multi-tasking.

You know, doing more than one thing at a time.

Like reading and … let’s say … breathing.

Admit it. You’re holding your breath right now while you’re reading this column.

I know I have to hold my breath while I’m writing it because typing and breathing at the same time is just so damned complicated.

It means I tend to pass out a lot in front of the computer but that’s the price I pay for literary genius.

My wife tends to worry about me when she’s not around.

When she’s with me, she can keep an eye on things and remind me to breathe.

She’ll see I’m totally focused on something complicated like cutting my own dinner up and she’ll gently nudge me and whisper: “Don’t forget to breathe.”

She hasn’t admitted it but I’m pretty sure she’s organised a few people at work to keep an eye on things while I’m there.

I mean, why else would they keep walking past and smacking me up the back of the head?

It’s the times I’m by myself which worry her.

Like when I’m driving to work.

What if I’m so focused on driving that I forget to breathe?

Who’s going to remind me?

So she’s put together a CD of my favourite songs and every now and then a voice screams: “Breathe you fool, breathe!”

Shocks the hell out of people beside me at traffic lights, I can tell you.

But men and women are different in so many ways.

My wife believes that by simply following a map you will be able to get to wherever you want to go with a minimum of fuss.

I say that’s rubbish.

If God had meant us to have maps, he would have sent them down from the mountain instead of those Ten Commandments.

And don’t get me started on those tricky little buggers either!

No, I believe that half the fun of going somewhere is the adventure of finding your own way from point A to point B.

It goes without saying that we spend a lot of time driving around aimlessly while my wife yells at me.

We’re different in much deeper ways, too.

Did you see that bloke on TV recently who can do amazing things with numbers in his head.

You know, multiply 727 by 361 and then find the square root … all within two seconds.

Apparently he’s able to do it because he sees numbers as colours and when he does a calculation those colours combine to form another colour, which is a number, which is the answer … I think.

Now that’s all well and good, and my accountant could learn a thing or two from him (can you imagine explaining to the tax office that your claim for $3.7 million is based on the fact that blue and yellow make green?), but what really got to my wife was this bloke’s ability to allocate colours to specific days.

The interviewer told him the date of her birth and he correctly told her it was a Thursday.

When she asked how he did it, he said that the calculation had resulted in a yellow colour – “sort of like marmalade jam” – and that was the colour of Thursday.

I was a bit nonplussed by the whole thing but my wife was left begging for more.

“So what about Monday?” she asked once the show had finished.

“Huh?” I said.

“Monday,” she said. “What colour is it?

“I’ve always thought it was a light blue but I’ve never been really sure.

“Of course, everyone knows that Fridays are red and Saturdays are green but what colour are Mondays?”

I thought she was joking until I saw the serious look on her face.

“Microwave,” I said, hoping it was close enough to the truth to get me out of trouble.

“Now you’re just being stupid,” she frowned.

So I held my breath and thought really, really hard … and that’s all I remember.

Apparently I passed out and spent the night on the couch.

A least I tried.