Man Cold Theory
/It's that time of year again.
It's cold and miserable out and Christmas is over, so that thing where the weather seemed charming and festive is done; Now it's just cold and miserable and we're all back to being dead inside. On top of that, cold and flu season is in full swing. Donna at the office blows her nose once and you're like 'Donna, you sniffly bitch. Go home and stay the hell away from the rest of us before we all catch whatever plague you dragged in here'.
One thing also comes around without fail this time of year; an absolute tidal wave of people making that joke about Men vs Women when it comes to being sick. You know the one, I'm sure. "This is how a woman acts with a cold... and THIS is how a MAN acts with a cold!"
If you aren't familiar or need a refresher, it's basically this:
While I love marginally funny observational humor repeated ad nauseam as much as the next guy, I actually have something of a theory on this matter.
Generally, being a man involves a lot of acting way more stoic and tough than you really feel.
Tired? Shut your face and go lift that bag of rocks.
Slightly chilly? Hike up your frilly pink ballerina skirt and man up you quivering weenie.
Chopped three of your fingers off with a table saw? Screw you! Rub some dirt in the holes, tape a couple of hot dogs to your finger stumps and finish building that goddamn shelf.
You're sad? What even is sadness? Is that a type of salad dressing? Do you eat it on your tiny baby bunny rabbit salads with a healthy sprinkling of being a little bitch on top? THAT'S WHAT THE HELL I THOUGHT, GO HAMMER SOME STUFF.
There is a lot of pressure put on men to be tough, to be protectors and providers and generally to wall in anything that could be construed as weakness. Men spend their entire lives being conditioned that they are one slightly effeminate display of emotion, overt reaction to pain, or failure to catch an object thrown to them away from being relentlessly mocked, beaten to death or called Susan for the rest of their lives by their peers. It can kind of mess a person up.
I postulate that the one time a man's subconscious tells him it's acceptable to be weak or powerless is when he's sick. If that is the case, the phenomenon of the man cold can be explained as the swinging of the psychological pendulum from one extreme to the other. Where before all weakness was shut out, now there is nothing left but a completely useless husk of a person. It's kind of like the psyche taking a vacation.
For whatever reason, being sick is the only time a man feels like he can admit weakness without being judged for it. It's the only time he feels like he's allowed to say "I feel icky and I don't want to do anything and please take care of me and don't ask me to do things and let me lay here and feel bad for myself."
It's not a conscious decision to be a giant sniveling man-baby whenever he doesn't feel good; It's more like a dam breaking that was holding back a massive torrent of water from washing away a village. Once the barrier holding in a lifetime worth of 'toughing shit out' starts to give, things get out of control pretty fast. The mind is a powerful thing, and could easily be responsible for men experiencing illnesses more intensely than their female counterparts.
Females who, by the way, spend their whole lives being told by society that they are weaker, more fragile and more emotionally delicate than men are. While men are being pressured to be cold, unflappable, meat chewing, punch-a-bear-in-the-goddamn-face badasses, women have their own equally shitty expectations to deal with. They're having emotional over-sensitivity rammed down their face holes from the time they are born; hence, the exact opposite reaction to being sick.
BOOM. Two theories for the price of one. Thus explained irrefutably, why Men devolve into helpless piles of snot and vapor-rub when they get sick while women stuff two kleenex up their nose and go about their business, summoning the strength to function from sheer spite.
I'm sure there is some sort of gripe to be had here where a bunch of words like patriarchy and gender stereotypes would get thrown around, but we're really more about farts and laughing about words like 'dongle' around here so lets leave that part to tumblr.
If you take one thing away from reading this: From one man to the rest of society out there; Maybe lay off your husband or boyfriend next time they're feeling under the weather. Remember, being a dramatic baby is his way of venting like 400,000 times he's hit his elbow and had to play it off like it was fine over the course of his life plus the fact that he was never allowed to cry as a child, even when Shannon D'marcus told him he was an ugly loser that sweat too much in sixth grade gym class and everyone laughed.
He'll get up in the middle of the night and walk around the house with a baseball bat like some sort of underpants vigilante because you 'heard a noise' without complaint because the world trained him that he has to. Even though nobody want's to walk around their dark house at two in the morning wearing boxer shorts and a "Who Farted?" t-shirt with a mustard stain on it to maybe have to fight a man and/or escaped circus bear to death, he'll do it for you. So maybe he gets a pass on staying in bed for a few days with a head cold.
The Sock Revolution
/
It's a sock revolution up in here y'all.
My life feels like it's become a series of annoyances revolving around what should be the simple act of finding two pieces of cloth in which to swaddle my feeties before I stick them into a shoe that a.) match and b.) don't have holes in them so big I could pretty much just pull them up and wear them like a garter belt if I wanted.
I'm taking back control of my life. I'm throwing out every single sock I own and starting over.
Why such a harsh and some might say, completely idiotic, response to a problem?
I'll tell you.
I swear to a talking avocado deity that every time I do laundry I end up in some sort of existential crisis about whether or not I live in an alternate universe where socks share the exact same properties as electrons, thus governed by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle can only be represented as an indistinct cloud rather than individual units as it's only possible to know how fast they are moving or where they are, but not both at the same time.
The fact that I can possibly have so many socks come out of the wash without a match is truly a mystery to which I have no answer. How is it that when I go to fold laundry only a third of the socks have a match and I don't even have the right amount to pair them all up? I'm pretty sure I didn't wear an odd number of socks this week. It's not like I got up in the morning to get dressed at any point and was like "Fuck it, today is one boot and one flip flop day at work". The socks coming out of the laundry should all have a match and there should be an even number of them, but for some reason which eludes all plausible explanation, this is not ever the case.
Not to mention half my socks seem to be generating spontaneous holes each week. What the butts is happening in my dryer that my socks come out missing the entire toe? Did I turn the knob one past permanent press and accidentally activate 'tumble with a fuck bunch of scissors' mode?
And you know what? I'd even take the socks without matches and the holes if it weren't for stranger socks.
On numerous occasions I've come across socks that I am absolutely, without a doubt, one hundred percent positive do not belong to me. Men's socks, women's socks, specialty socks designed for someone with a weird condition where they have hooves for feet, who knows what's coming out of there when I do laundry?
I swear to you on pain of death that I've pulled a children's sock from my laundry before. There are no children that live in my house. There are no children that visit my house. How the actual hell did I end up with a single green and white child size sock in my laundry? Is there somebody out there going around slipping children's socks into people's pocket at the grocery store so they come out in the wash and make them so angry they want to throw a carpet-bag full of bricks down a flight of stairs?
Listen, universe with your weird sock based form of practical jokes. I have enough problems without having four new unmatched socks that are now in my life forever whenever I do laundry. I'm sick of it.
Of course my tactic of 'get fed up every four to six months and go buy more socks' only makes things worse. It helps in the short term, sure, but inevitably the new socks just end up getting sucked into the hell vortex that apparently is my laundry routine, simply adding to it's power.
It's gotten to the point where I've decided to take a page out of old testament God's playbook. It's a page I like to call 'Fuck everything and start over'. Since I don't have the ability to purge the planet with a flood or drop an enormous goddamn rock from orbit on my laundry room, I've settled for a less flashy form of smiting. I went through my entire house and gathered up every sock I own, matched or unmatched and put them in one spot. This is what I came up with:
Now I'm not sure what a normal amount of socks for a single person to own is but I'm fairly certain this counts as too-goddamn-many. I have two feet, enough socks to wear a different pair every day for over a month and somehow still cant ever find two that match at the same time. Do you see now how dealing with this shit on a constant basis is ruining my life? That laundry basket is full. FULL. A basket that is supposed to have the capacity to hold enough clothing for at least a week (or in my case four weeks until I run out of pants I can no longer pass off as clean enough and have to do wash) is filled just with socks.
NO MORE.
I went on amazon and purchased ten pairs of high quality wool socks. They came in today, ten pairs, twenty socks, all the same, all new.
Also apparently made in the USA, which I never noticed before, but explains why they were about twice the price of what a pair of socks should cost. 'Murica.
In an event. These ten pairs of socks are henceforth my only form of foot underwear. I will wear these, and only these ten pairs of socks in a rotation, until they wear out from age, I die, or the inevitable heat death of the universe arrives.
I feel like a man reborn.
Oh, and as for my old socks? I threw those fucks in the trash.
Daft Kronk
/
Sometimes you think of a pun so good you just have to share it with the world.
Other times you mash up Kronk and Yzma from the 2000 hit Disney Movie 'The Emporer's New Groove' with the two guys from Daft Punk because you are literally the worst person.
This is the latter in case that was unclear.
Ho Ho Ho
/
Nothing special here. Just a little Santa. Gracefully tap-dancing on the line between the adults and children at the annual gathering. While The adults are all chatting in one room I'm in the other one with the kids drawing Santas.
Christmas Tree
/With Emily in vet school, we put off getting our Christmas tree until she finished her semester and came home for break; This meant that we didn't get our tree until just about a week before Christmas itself.
We learned the valuable lesson that apparently, when you wait until the week before Christmas to go get a tree you basically have to pick whatever shit they have left over and you don't get to complain about it because 'fuck you, go get your tree earlier next time." Who would have guessed, right?
Every year we go to the same local place to get our tree. It's just sort of a mom and pop type produce store that has a little area in the back where they bring in trees at Christmas time. The reason we go to this place is because they sell all their trees for a flat price of $25 regardless of what size they are. This is a great deal, but it also sort of means the trees can be kind of funny looking even if you don't wait until they only have four left to pick from. Let's be honest though, a slightly shitty Christmas tree never killed anyone and for 25 bucks, who can complain? It's basically the tree equivalent of getting a pair of pant's at Marshals; Sure one leg is like, 3/4 of an inch shorter than the other and the fly is slightly off center for some reason, but goddamn if 12 bucks for a pair of jeans isn't a hell of a deal.
On second thought... technically, shitty Christmas trees are known for catching on fire and burning peoples houses down, while the worst that really happens to you in a pair of Marshal's jeans is they make your butt look weird. So maybe not a perfect analogy? Whatever.
When we got to the place they only had a handful of trees left. They weren't good trees either. They were like:
As I said, when you wait to buy the dregs of the Christmas Tree selection from a tiny produce stand that maybe buys the rejects of a tree farm down stream from a chemical spill in the first place it's not going to be great. Of the sparse choices available to us there was only one tree that didn't completely look like it was brought in from a Chernobyl adjacent tree farm.
On one hand at least it didn't have half the branches missing, a huge chunk out of one side, or a 90 degree bend in the trunk somehow. On the other hand, it was a solidly twelve feet tall and about three times wider than it should have been.
For reference, I'm about an inch shy of 6 feet tall. That tree is at least four feet taller than I am.
I was like, "Well clearly this tree is way to big, guess we'll have to go somewhere else."
Meanwhile Emily's eyeballs turned into two Christmas trees like a cartoon character and I presume she launched into an elaborate fantasy sequence in which she was flying around on a giant Puppy Pegasus (Pupasus?... Pegy?) decorating the world's largest Christmas tree in existence which was somehow magically able to fit into our den.
In a spectacular display of yuletide denial, she insisted the tree would be fine and that she wanted it. I, knowing better than to challenge the alpha's authority shrugged and decided that I could always try to cut it down to size or at worst maybe we'd start a fad where you decorate your Christmas tree while it is fucking laying on it's side in your driveway because it's too big to fit in your goddamn house.
The next twenty five minutes was more or less a three stooges bit where myself and two employees tried to figure out how to get this tree onto my car. It didn't fit through the tree wrapper thing, nor would it really cooperate to being tied and wrapped by hand. After putting it on and taking it off my car about three times we ended up just throwing it up there and tying a metric butt-ton of twine around it.
I didn't take a picture of it unfortunately, but trust me, it looked re-goddamn-diculous. the tree hung off the end of my car on both ends. The only way it could have been stupider is if we literally had tied it to my roof standing straight up and I'd driven home with it upright like a fucking parade float dedicated to shitty Christmas trees.
We made it home without incident, and as predicted, it was several feet too tall to fit in the house. My idea to just lay it on it's side in the front lawn and throw a box of tinsel and ornaments at it was apparently "stupid". So I had to get out the electric saw.
I sawed two feet off the bottom and about a foot off the top until I got it down to somewhere that should have been close to short enough to fit in the house, but turned out still to be about three inches too tall requiring me to cut even more off.
This abomination then turned out to be so heavy it bent our metal tree stand all to shit, and required me to get a bunch of fishing line and anchor it to the wall just to keep it from falling over and killing me to death. All things considered it didn't look all that bad once I got it in place. Huge and a tad bit misshapen, but passable.
That picture was taken before the branches had time to settle and of course, before we decorated it. The final product is this beauty:
What's that you say? The lights and ornaments look kind of sparse with large completely barren and dark areas all over it? Well the tree is about 90 fucking feet around, so yeah, the lights and ornaments we have didn't really cut it. We shoved it in the corner so that we could cheat and not put any lights or ornaments on one entire half of the tree and that's still all we managed to cover.
It also looks like somebody sawed off the top two feet of the tree and then replaced it with two feet of a different, even shittier tree. The top of our tree looks like partly shaved cat that just had surgery at the vet.
Luckily Emily is in complete denial about the abundant craptacularity of our tree and thus is not bothered by it, choosing instead to bask in the festive joy and good feeling of the season. Meanwhile I think having a tree that looks like a bag of wet garbage that got mugged on the way to an ugly sweater party is the best thing that could have happened with our tree short of having the image of baby Jesus having a glitter fight with the ghost of David Bowie miraculously appearing in the needles.
Really this tree is just a win/win for us all if you think about it.
Reverse Beard Jenga
/Today I realized if I stick small objects into my facial hair my beard will hang onto them and I can store stuff in it. Obviously the only logical step from here is to stick a bunch of stuff in there and see how much I can fit before it all starts to fall apart. For science.
Thus a game known as the 'I realized if I stick things into my beard they will get lodged in there and stay put, I wonder how much stuff I could actually hold with my facial hair at one time?' game was born.
Renamed to 'Reverse Beard Jenga' for brevity.
I decided to use nails, because they have a nice weight to them, are a good size and shape for beard insertion.
Let's begin:
For this edition of Reverse Beard Jenga I'll be using these double headed nails that we use at my work in the winter because they are a perfect size, shape and weight. Also, because I had a pocket full of them in my coat when I came home today.
Ten nails in. My wife is standing next to me as I do this, judging me. She clearly has no appreciation for science, but I'll not be dissuaded by naysayers to important progress. That's how we got 100 years of Dark Ages.
20 nails. I'm starting to feel the weight of the nails at this point, but they're still going in there pretty easily.
40 nails. It's getting perilous in here y'all. It's starting to feel like if I move my face at all the structural integrity of the nail matrix I've created will fail and I'll start losing 'em.
Apparently impressed by my ability to hold a lot of stuff in my facial hair, Emily seems to have come around on Reverse Beard Jenga. She's gone from telling me I'm stupid for doing this and that I need to wash my beard when I'm done because putting a bunch of dirty ass nails into it is gross, to asking me how many I'm up to now every eight seconds.
I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I have 40 goddamn nails lodged in my beard and every time I have to answer you I feel like I'm going to shit them out of my face all over the table; so count along or back off lady!
60 Nails. That look of apprehension real people. At this point shit is getting TENSE. Each new nail has to be inserted with surgical precision for fear of knocking existing nails of out place. Each new nail is the equivalent of that part in doctor shows where the super advanced piece of equipment breaks and the nurses are all "You can't remove that man's brain tumor by freehanding that shit!" and the surgeon is all "Bish, watch me." and then sticks a ten inch needle into a dude's brain by ballparking it, gets the tumor out and somehow doesn't erase the guy's entire memory of 1992 and ability to work zippers. That's the level of precise hand/eye/beard coordination we're dealing with here.
74 nails. This was where we stopped. There was minute there where I thought I might actually make it to 100, but once I got to this point a couple of nails would fall out every time I tried to put a new one in. Once this happened a few times I decided the limit was reached.
Important work has been done here today. Questions were answered, science was scienced. Since no self respecting researcher would conclude his experiment without properly collecting the required datas; I put all the nails in a bowl and weighed them:
So there you have it. 74 nails, or nearly a pound can be safely stuck into my facial hair at one time. What a time to be alive.
