Wednesday Pay the Bills Day has rolled around again somehow, and here we are. I woke up from a very deep sleep around three thirty this morning, and napped/dozed until the shattering shriek of the alarm pierced through the darkness, impacting my ear drums with such a brutal assault that I had no choice but to hit snooze…followed by turning the alarm off and getting up before that horrendous noise erupted again. I feel pretty good this morning. I wasn’t terribly tired when I got home after work and errands; I sat with His Majesty sleeping in my lap for a while as I caught up on the news (that UN Speech–so aspirational and inspirational. Cut to media: “He’s finally sounding presidential.1” Eye roll to infinity) before getting up to clean up the kitchen. I unloaded the dishwasher and ran another load overnight, and cleaned off the counters, took out the trash and recycling, too. If I can keep up with the dishes and stuff all week, I don’t have to do that on the weekend and thus can get more of this long overdue deep clean of the house done. There are some awesome games this weekend, too, capped off with Texas A&M coming to Death Valley for a night game.
The Saints play at home this Sunday in the afternoon, as well, so I can get things done in the morning and early afternoon and then settle into my chair for the game. And while I have some work to do on work-at-home Friday as well, it’s just paperwork.
I feel pretty good this morning, and like I have finally managed to adjust to getting up at six. I am so not a morning person, and for most of my life succeeded in not having a 9-to-5 job–I’d rather sleep and get up when I am done sleeping and work in the afternoons and evenings. Then again, whenever I had an early morning job in the past, it would eventually get to the point where I’d look ahead and just see this kind of nightmare existence stretching on and on forever. Maybe I don’t do that anymore because an end is in sight? Granted, that’s dependent on being able to retire…which, by how things are going in this country, may not be possible.
I realized yesterday, when I saw that the “Clavicular” creature (Braden Peters, because of course his name is Braden) was arrested for allegedly drugging and raping a minor, that my essay series (which I am way behind on) for the newsletter about my not being a “typical male” and my personal struggles with the straitjacket of heterosexual values was primarily because I can’t really write about masculinity and my outsider’s view of it without defining those qualities that defined it when I was growing up–but reading this arrest news reminded me that I am not the only man who’s wrestled with masculinity tropes. Headlines have been screaming at us for years now about the “crisis” for straight men who are bewildered at how to be a man in this modern age…and wind up turning to idiots in the “manosphere”, or people like this idiot (or the Tate brothers) selling them a bundle of lies and bullshit about what “women really want” and so on, making men the victim in a society that continues to center them. (If only we could all be as oppressed as the straight white man in the US, amirite?) And there it was–how interesting that the issues a gay guy had with masculine tropes is now a straight man’s problem.
Years ago, Paul and I watched a horrible gay dating reality show called Boy Meets Boy, and something I noticed in that show–which had a terrible surprise twist that makes me think I should somehow rewatch and write about it again. Anyway, something I noticed about James–which I was noticing on other matchmaking shows as well–was he always talked about who the perfect man for him would be. That’s fine–we all have that kind of image in our heads when we’re single, don’t we–but…the premise is “I’m perfect and this is who he needs to be”, when the entire time I’m listening to him and watching and thinking, what do YOU have to offer? (My dream was a husband who liked to laugh, read, and was smart. My dream came true.) I mean, being chosen by him was how you won the show, but at the same time it was an awful lot of I and not a lot of we, which made me think he’d never find someone.
But this reminds me very much of the male loneliness epidemic and all these “crises” people are monetizing by telling young men how to be men…rather than doing the actual work they need to do in order to be attractive to a woman as a life mate. Women don’t care about muscles all that much; the truth is, the bar is set so low for most men that it staggers the mind that they can’t meet it, you know? Flowers on special dates, the occasional candy, and just listening to them and treating them like an actual living, breathing human being actually goes a very long fucking way.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely day, and I will see you again tomorrow morning bright and early. See ya then!
- I am being facetious here, but how many times have we heard some stupid pundit say something like this in the past? ↩︎
