Jan 18 2011

Congratulations!

Congratulations.  Now there’s a word we misuse a lot.

‘I’m getting married!’ ‘Congratulations!’  Why?  Why should this be cause for congratulations?  Is it a good thing?  Half of all married couples end up divorced.  (The other half just couldn’t be bothered.)  Is it an achievement?  There are no qualifications except being a certain age.  Which generally happens without any effort.  So you’re entering into a legal contract with another person.  Big deal.  Bet you haven’t even read the contract.  So you’re going to a church for some obscure sacrament.  What, Christmas and Easter wasn’t enough?

What’s getting married really about?  Proof you’re not gay after all.  Proof that you’re all grown up, gonna settle down, maybe start a family (like having a kid means you’re no longer a kid is the logic, I guess).  Proof that someone somewhere somehow found you loveable long enough to agree to marriage.  Yeah right, whatever.

‘I’m pregnant!’ ‘Congratulations!’  What?  Again, is this necessarily a good thing?  ‘Cause it can seldom be called an achievement.  I mean I’m sure you have succeeded at sexual intercourse before.  So now you got lucky.  Should we congratulate for luck?

‘I won the lottery!’  ‘ Congratulations!’   It sounds right.   But it sure takes the wind out of the congratulations we give to the person who wins a triathlon or a Beethoven competition.

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Jan 11 2011

Paying Stay-at-Home Moms

Every now and then, we hear the proposal that women be paid to stay at home and be moms.  That women are paid to be surrogate mothers suggests that regular mothers also deserve payment.  So.  Should we pay regular mothers the same as surrogate mothers?

For starters, who is this ‘we’?  Surrogate mothers are paid by the people who want their labor.  Who wants the children of non-surrogate mothers?  The state?  If so, for what?  There is no civil service labor shortage.  We aren’t at war.  And if we were, we would need more soldiers, not more children.  So the job paid for should be not ‘making a child’ but ‘making a soldier’.

Because if we’re going to pay, it would be a job.  You’d have to wait for an opening and then apply.  So not only would the state, should it be the employer of mothers, have the right to be quite specific about the job description (“Women wanted to make soldiers”), it would have the right to be quite specific about the qualifications (“genetic make-up must include average IQ or lower, above average physical health and fitness, pliant personality….”).  And it would have the right to be quite specific about the performance standards – no drinking on the job, or substance abuse of any kind except that prescribed by the employer, etc.

You want to be paid for being a mother?  Well, he who pays the piper picks the tune.

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Jan 01 2011

A Millennial New Year’s Resolution

This was written, of course, in January 2000.

I don’t do New Years’.  I especially didn’t do this New Years.  Though the chance to join in worldwide celebration of an error in addition (our calendar is such that there wasn’t a year zero – 1 A.D. came right after 1 B.C., so actually we’ve just begun, not finished, the 2000th year A.D.) (and A.D., well that’s a whole mess of mistakes, not the least of which is marking time across the entire planet according to a religious myth) – what was I saying, oh yeah, while joining with humanity worldwide to celebrate, indeed to proclaim in song and dance, our F in arithmetic had its attraction, I declined – because even if they’d gotten it right, the arbitrariness of it all is pretty insulting.  I mean, I’ll celebrate and reflect when I have good reason to – but our fascination with base ten is a mere evolutionary happenstance, and to rejoice at the occurrence of multiples of ten serves merely to reassure us that we do indeed have ten fingers and toes.

Nevertheless, I ended up watching several hours of the “2000” telecast.  Not the midnight champagne and crowds part, but the performance parts throughout the day: I realized early on that it would probably be another thousand years before so much art was given so much air time.  Certainly I’d never see Jean-Michel Jarre on tv again.

But pretty soon the irony (and the heritage schlock stuff) spoiled it, and I stopped watching.  I’m referring, of course, to the fact that  Continue reading

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Dec 26 2010

Why Do Men Spit? (and women don’t)

Why do men spit? (And women don’t.) I mean, is it physiological? Do males produce a larger amount of saliva?

Even so, why the need to spit it out? Why not just swallow it? Would that remind them of swallowing semen? Which is female, effeminate, gay? (I’ll ignore for the moment the assumption that all, or even most, women swallow semen.)

But no, that can’t be right: it seems too…reasoned. Spitting seems to be more of a reflex, a habit, a that’s-the-way-I-was-raised sort of thing, a cultural thing, a subcultural thing: to spit is to be manly. Little boys spit to appear grown up. Grown up men. So what’s the connection between spitting and masculinity?

Consider the way men spit. Continue reading

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Dec 23 2010

As if getting good grades…

Who among us has not heard the student in distress, claiming not to know ‘what the professor wants’? As if getting good grades is dependent on finding out each professor’s hidden idiosyncrasies – on figuring out how to please. This attitude has become very prevalent, and I’ve seen students paralysed by it. A professor will assign an essay, and students who are uncertain about how to proceed believe it’s because they don’t know what the professor wants; they truly believe they’re missing some crucial bit of information. Of course, the real reason for their uncertainty is usually their poor academic skills – they don’t know enough about the topic to generate some ideas or opinions with which they can then play around and organize into a paper. But instead of heading to the library, they wander the halls and poll other students, trying to discover ‘what the professor wants’.

My answer to this question, which is Continue reading

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Dec 16 2010

God: The Quintessential Deadbeat Dad

He left almost 2,000 years ago. Said he’d be back real soon. Yeah. He never writes. He never calls. He left us these notes though. But half are so cryptic, the rest so contradictory, he must’ve been sloshed at the time. ‘Wait ’till your father gets home.’ That got tired real quick.

Child support? It’s not just that so many of us don’t have enough to eat. A lot of us are starving to death! We have no roof over our heads. And we could use new clothes. ‘Cheque’s in the mail.’ Right.

They say the typical dad interacts with his kids for just two minutes each day. Half of us would weep with gratitude just to hear his voice for two minutes period.

Role model? ‘Like father, like son’ is an understatement. Lots of us have a temper, and we’re a vengeful lot. We kill, we torture, we loot, we lie. We’re racist. And women, well, they’re just not very important.

Bottom line is he’s guilty of neglect and abuse. His kids wouldn’t recognize him if he did show up. As for duty and responsibility, let alone love and affection, he may as well not even exist.

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Dec 07 2010

Christmas Elves

Generally speaking, I don’t do Christmas. At all. But when I see an ad in the classifieds for “Three female elves to work in a mall during the Christmas season”, well, I have to say something.

And the first thing I have to say is, I don’t think they’re going to find any – male or female. They may find three women to play the part, but I doubt they’ll find three elves.

Which brings me to the second thing I have to say: why do they have to be female? What must a Santa’s elf do that a man can’t do?

One, Santa’s elves are industrious; they’re notorious for being hard workers. Well, men are hard workers. No, seriously, some are!

Two, elves are pretty handy in the workshop, making all those toys. Again, I think men can meet this requirement. (Some men are even quite good with their tools, given a little instruction.)

But in the mall, Continue reading

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Nov 27 2010

The Absence of Imagination

We notice it when we say ‘Kids don’t know how to play anymore.’ Gone are the games of dress-up and make-believe. The more specific and recognizable the toy, the more popular; least favourite are the ambiguous toys, the ones with so many possibilities.

Later, we observe and lament the fact that the students don’t know how to amuse themselves. They can’t sit quietly. Discipline problems abound. They are bored, school is boring, everything is boring. Their style becomes, necessarily, one of passivity. Or perhaps reactivity. But not proactivity – it takes imagination to initiate.

Why is this so? Why is there this absence of imagination? Continue reading

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Nov 18 2010

Short Men

I recently watched, with horrified amusement, a tv program about short men who choose to undergo excruciatingly painful surgical procedures (which basically involve breaking their legs and then keeping the bones slightly apart while they mend) in order to become a few inches taller.

Asked why they would choose to undergo such a drastic, and excruciatingly painful, procedure, they said things like “Do you have any idea what it’s like to go through life as a short person? To sit in a chair and only your toes reach the floor, you can’t put your feet flat on the floor? To not be able to reach stuff on the upper shelves in grocery stores? To be unable to drive trucks because you can’t reach the pedals properly? To have people always looking down at you? Do you know what that’s like?”

Well, yes, actually I do. I’m a woman. And in case you haven’t noticed, we’re almost all shorter than almost all of you.

Which suggests that the real problem is that these poor guys can’t take their rightful place over women. As one man, 5’6” before the surgery, said, “I’ll be a better father and husband and son.” Yup. Sure you will.

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Nov 07 2010

An End to War

At one time, bank tellers and secretaries had a certain prestige – the time when such positions were held by men. Schoolteachers used to be schoolmasters – before women entered the classroom. People who boast that many doctors in Russia are women fail to mention that doctoring in Russia, well, someone’s gotta do it.

The thing is this: whenever women enter an occupation, it becomes devalued. It loses glory. It loses funding. It loses media coverage. It becomes unpopular, even invisible. So if we were serious, really serious, about ending war, we’d fill the military ranks with women. When becoming a soldier has about as much appeal as becoming a waitress (another archetype of the service sector industry) – Continue reading

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