I’m back-on-my-back.
A nasty little ankle sprain had been elevated and iced for the better-part of four days, with intervening trips to the doctor and physio and a regimen of careful range-of-motion enhancers, to speed recovery. To goal was to be fit for last night’s doubles match in the Burnaby Open Tennis Tournament. Let’s just say the effort came-up a little short.
Photo credit: explosivemusclegrowth.com
As a one who grew up in a household of stunningly talented, self-confident women, I was always impressed with the blunt idiocy of the boy-to-boy exhortations “Be a man!” and “Don’t be a girl!” These never corresponded with the way I selected my role models.
Don’t get me wrong: I like glib, razzing smack like “Grow a pair!” and “Show some sack!” as much as the next guy. The misplaced misogyny implied in the slight only adds to the silliness. The problem is that these insults are usually slung with only half the requisite irony. And it’s rarely edifying to inform people who have just cracked an almost funny joke that they have failed to understand the root of the humor, essentially revealing their own metaphorical impotence, not that of their quarry.
The crude, anatomical, synecdochic insults “Don’t be a pussy!” and “Don’t be a dick!” are, of course, the highest forms of the art. They are also the most telling. The former says to men: don’t behave in ways we find virtuous in women. The latter says: don’t behave like the man you are. Small wonder that the former never sounds smart and the latter always stings.
Do you have something to add on this topic? Don’t be a pussy; leave a comment. Just don’t be a dick about it.
Say what you will about His Giggliness the Dalai Lama, but the lessons he has taught the world about the power of forgiveness are pretty significant.
I count myself in the camp, ugly as it may be, who draw a degree of strength from the art of the grudge. Somehow, I find both creativity and motivation from the self-righteous sense that someone has done me wrong, even as I understand that the energizing feelings it engenders are probably more-than-counterbalanced by the negativity of focus, and know that such enmity is hardly the thing I wish to be propagating in the world.
So, I work on forgiveness. The process is, perhaps, all-the-more interesting because it does not come easily to me. For that matter, it may not come that easily to anyone, even the Lamaisto Giganto himself. Forgiveness is a concept we throw around pretty easily. It is not difficult to utter the words of forgiveness; it is altogether a different proposition to work through the resentment and excise the satisfyingly ingenious, mouse-trap acts of revenge the mind cooks-up, to arrive at an attitude of true indifference to the slight.
I’m glad to have grown up the lone male in a house of amazing women – my mother, sister and, for a short-but-significant while, two sister-like close friends. As a consequence, I have always been deeply suspicious of traditional designations of gender norms and have tried to develop a strong sense of myself without leaning too heavily on the easy crutch of normative male privilege. (You-all can judge how well that’s going.) More importantly, I am one of the few men who reflexively returns the toilet seat to the down position. No one has ever accused me of failing to “get in touch with my feminine side.”
Until last week, that is.
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