Coming to terms with a doom-and-gloom future
I'm back from lunch, a short trip to Lee's Deli, where pastrami sandwiches, garden salads, hamburgers, and hot dogs are served right alongside fried rice, chow fun, sweet-and-sour pork, and mandarin chicken. Let me tell you about my experience.
After eating my fill, I stop at a Tully's Coffee cafe and order a large mocha shake. I walk out the door to suck it down, and I realize that the barrista didn't seal the top properly. My first clue comes when a glob of that cold, brown shit drips on to my white Ralph Lauren dress shirt, leaving a horrid brown blemish on an otherwise pristine garment.
It's four or five minutes before I can get to the bathroom and douse the area with water. I stand there in front of the sink, looking into the mirror as I pat the wet area down with a paper towel. And I can't help but to notice that my tummy is jiggling.
Geez, I tell myself, you're one fat bastard. To top it all off, the stain isn't coming out completely, so I look like a fat, slobby bastard at that.
A number of minutes go by and I'm back at my desk. The water is now pretty much dried. The brown spot is less pronounced, but it's still there and it's taken on more of an orangish color to it.
Shit. It's like I can never win.
Today I go to my Argentine Tango class. Any points I may have racked up on my superbabe teacher's Impress-O-Meter in the last few weeks for quickly picking up the moves are sure to disappear in a few hours: I'll be walking into the studio with something that looks like a come stain on my shirt!
That orangish spot no doubt will paint me as a dork.
But as I'm sitting at my desk surfing the Internet, something that gives me a bit of optimism catches my eye. After a lifetime of living in a world of mind-numbing female ambivalence, a pair of articles in the New York Daily Times today has given me renewed hope that my love life just has to take a turn for the good.
In "Geek Chic," Jacob E. Osterhout writes that Hollywood has "gleefully embraced dorkdom" and "that more and more, ladies love geek chic." And in "Playgirl's Hunks? The Hairy, Chubby and Poor," Rivka Bukowsky writes that 42 percent of women surveyed in a recent Playgirl study said they thought "love handles were sexy" and that only 4 percent of them said the size of the man's wallet mattered.
If I were inclined to believe the stuff I read in the media I guess I would be elated. After all, I'm one of the biggest goofballs around, I'm a fat bastard with a lot of hair, and -- yes! -- I'm poor, too. But my initial optimism quickly becomes tempered as my skeptical mind kicks into gear.
Since when was Hollywood known as purveyor of truth? And because I have no idea what kind of woman reads Playgirl, how am I to know they are the ones I want to be attracted to me, in the first place? I know a lot of dudes who "read" Playboy, and if I were a woman, I certainly wouldn't want them chasing my skirt.
Besides, for every article that leads you to draw one conclusion, there's another that says something completely different. It's then that I remember an article I read just yesterday. Veteran BBC newsreader Michael Buerk lamented in an interview with the Independent Online that economic forces are leading women to find fewer and fewer reasons to have men around.
Buerk noted that the modern workplace, at least in the industrialized nations, is increasingly favoring the traits more associated with women (like people skills and multitasking), while frowning upon the traits that typically characterize men (like muscle power and single-minded doggedness). This has already led, he says, to an imbalance of power, at least in the broadcasting world, where women occupy almost all the top positions of power.
In other words, what typically makes men men is counting less and less in society. Extrapolating the trend, he said, the situation just doesn't look good for the male gender -- hunks, dorks, or otherwise.
"All [men] are is sperm donors, and most women aren't going to want an unemployable sperm donor loafing around and making the house look untidy," Buerk said in the article. "They are choosing not to have a male in the household."
It appears to be a doom-and-gloom scenario. If the women start looking at men for only one purpose, then looks, money, even personality will count for naught.
But loooking down at that stain on my shirt, I can't help but to think that at least something good might come out of the spilled-shake incident. Maybe if that superbabe does mistake the blotch for what it looks like, she might consider asking me to be her donor ... and I don't think I'd put up too big a fuss if she insists I not be around after the deed is done.
After eating my fill, I stop at a Tully's Coffee cafe and order a large mocha shake. I walk out the door to suck it down, and I realize that the barrista didn't seal the top properly. My first clue comes when a glob of that cold, brown shit drips on to my white Ralph Lauren dress shirt, leaving a horrid brown blemish on an otherwise pristine garment.
It's four or five minutes before I can get to the bathroom and douse the area with water. I stand there in front of the sink, looking into the mirror as I pat the wet area down with a paper towel. And I can't help but to notice that my tummy is jiggling.
Geez, I tell myself, you're one fat bastard. To top it all off, the stain isn't coming out completely, so I look like a fat, slobby bastard at that.
A number of minutes go by and I'm back at my desk. The water is now pretty much dried. The brown spot is less pronounced, but it's still there and it's taken on more of an orangish color to it.
Shit. It's like I can never win.
Today I go to my Argentine Tango class. Any points I may have racked up on my superbabe teacher's Impress-O-Meter in the last few weeks for quickly picking up the moves are sure to disappear in a few hours: I'll be walking into the studio with something that looks like a come stain on my shirt!
That orangish spot no doubt will paint me as a dork.
But as I'm sitting at my desk surfing the Internet, something that gives me a bit of optimism catches my eye. After a lifetime of living in a world of mind-numbing female ambivalence, a pair of articles in the New York Daily Times today has given me renewed hope that my love life just has to take a turn for the good.
In "Geek Chic," Jacob E. Osterhout writes that Hollywood has "gleefully embraced dorkdom" and "that more and more, ladies love geek chic." And in "Playgirl's Hunks? The Hairy, Chubby and Poor," Rivka Bukowsky writes that 42 percent of women surveyed in a recent Playgirl study said they thought "love handles were sexy" and that only 4 percent of them said the size of the man's wallet mattered.
If I were inclined to believe the stuff I read in the media I guess I would be elated. After all, I'm one of the biggest goofballs around, I'm a fat bastard with a lot of hair, and -- yes! -- I'm poor, too. But my initial optimism quickly becomes tempered as my skeptical mind kicks into gear.
Since when was Hollywood known as purveyor of truth? And because I have no idea what kind of woman reads Playgirl, how am I to know they are the ones I want to be attracted to me, in the first place? I know a lot of dudes who "read" Playboy, and if I were a woman, I certainly wouldn't want them chasing my skirt.
Besides, for every article that leads you to draw one conclusion, there's another that says something completely different. It's then that I remember an article I read just yesterday. Veteran BBC newsreader Michael Buerk lamented in an interview with the Independent Online that economic forces are leading women to find fewer and fewer reasons to have men around.
Buerk noted that the modern workplace, at least in the industrialized nations, is increasingly favoring the traits more associated with women (like people skills and multitasking), while frowning upon the traits that typically characterize men (like muscle power and single-minded doggedness). This has already led, he says, to an imbalance of power, at least in the broadcasting world, where women occupy almost all the top positions of power.
In other words, what typically makes men men is counting less and less in society. Extrapolating the trend, he said, the situation just doesn't look good for the male gender -- hunks, dorks, or otherwise.
"All [men] are is sperm donors, and most women aren't going to want an unemployable sperm donor loafing around and making the house look untidy," Buerk said in the article. "They are choosing not to have a male in the household."
It appears to be a doom-and-gloom scenario. If the women start looking at men for only one purpose, then looks, money, even personality will count for naught.
But loooking down at that stain on my shirt, I can't help but to think that at least something good might come out of the spilled-shake incident. Maybe if that superbabe does mistake the blotch for what it looks like, she might consider asking me to be her donor ... and I don't think I'd put up too big a fuss if she insists I not be around after the deed is done.
posted by Unknown at 6:00 PM
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