Wednesday, February 16, 2011

The Manhood Challenge of 2011

What is it about the coldest day of the winter season that draws out the stupid in the otherwise average-to-intelligent male?
We have had several snow storms this season that have dropped just short of a billion inches (an exact amount) total on South Central Kansas in just a few weeks.  In each of the major storms, I have either seen pictures of or witnessed with my own eyes the stupidity.  
The first storm, which produced the least amount of snow, resulted in only one example.  A Facebook friend posted a picture of a man on his cell phone after his car slid into the ditch outside of my friend’s house.  As the man called for help, I can only imagine that he felt like a jack ass--a cold jack ass--as he stood there in several inches of accumulated snow wearing nothing but a hoodie, shorts, and flip flops.  
In the next storm, which dumped considerably more snow, the examples of stupidity increased exponentially.  At the grocery store, as I, bundled in several layers, a coat, scarf, gloves, and snow boots, shivered up and down the aisles, in each aisle there was at least one man clothed in athletic shorts and a pathetic excuse for a coat in the form of a hoodie.  I’ll give the guys at the grocery store this--they did at least have on shoes and socks.  Ankle socks, but socks nonetheless.
But the last snowstorm takes the cake.  As nine of the nineteen inches of “Snowpocalypse” fell to the ground during the school day, I stood at the exit watching my students leave.  Not one, not two, not three, but fifteen of the boys exited the building wearing shorts, no coat, and a feeble hoodie against the gathering cold.  These aren’t the dumb kids either, nor were they kids who truly had no pants to wear because they couldn’t afford them.  It was purely choice.
Later that night, as I again trudged out in the snow to take out the dog, another man walked by in shorts and hoodie.  Seriously?
I reported my sightings to Courtney, who confirmed her dismay, noting the same issues with several coaches, students, and other men she’d seen in the community around her school.
Perhaps I’m missing the parts to understand, but I really don’t get it.  Does dressing like a dumb ass truly make you that much more of a man?  Certainly not.  The morning after the last snow fall, as I shoveled my drive way and sidewalks clear (which I believe earns me the man merit badge in the Girl Scouts), I saw a lady at the corner of my street stuck in a drift.  Appropriately clothed in hat, scarf, coat, gloves, and snow boots, she was on the phone with help on the way.  The help, in the form of two men who live down the street, came dressed in Carhart coveralls, hats, gloves, and work boots.  With just one shove, they had her back in the clear and driving more cautiously down the road.  Certainly this is a bigger display of masculinity than wearing too little clothing.
So why the sudden surge of improperly clothed men?  What exactly does it prove to wear as little as possible when the wind chill is negative thousand degrees?  I’m pretty sure frostbite can affect all inappropriately protected appendages.  Then what would these guys have to prove?
But this week, as it’s warmed up considerably, it hit me.  When it’s 115 degrees in the shade with a heat index high enough to bake bread on the sidewalk, I don’t see these same guys working very hard to prove how tough they are.  And so is born the challenge.  I want to see these real men in August wearing all of the snow gear they’ve seemed to forget in their closets this winter.  When hell would be cooler than Kansas, I want to see the guy down the street wearing ski pants, a down coat, snow boots, fleece hat, and protective gloves while he mows the lawn.  In the middle of the afternoon.
The wool lined glove has been tossed.  And I triple dog dare you.

Monday, February 7, 2011

Trip of the Tongue

The stacked up snow outside has lead to several bad weather days for our family.  This has been great for me because it means more time with Courtney, and more opportunities for material.

She has not failed me.  
Really, I’ve failed myself more than anything.  I absolutely must buy a pocket notebook to write this stuff down immediately after it happens.
Here’s what I remember of the situation.  It was a meal time, lunch I’m pretty sure.  Courtney was getting up to help our two year old clear the food off her face, hands, belly, and table (more food on those parts than what actually landed in her mouth, I might add), when she said something in complete innocence to our child that was more than completely inappropriate when taken out of context.  While I can’t for the life of me remember what she said (and I don’t even bother searching Courtney’s brain because short term memory is not a strength, therefore there’s no way it’s in her long term memory), I do remember what my facial expression must have looked like to her--eyes gleaming, mouth upturned slightly at the corners, trying to contain full out laughter while still expressing to Courtney that something was amiss in her comment.  She stared at me; she knew something was up.  “What?” she asked.  I intensified the look with a slight head nod to the side, as if saying, “wait for it....wait for it.”  
The waiting paid off.  Courtney’s eyes lit up with recognition as she realized what she said.  She doubled over the top of the chair she was standing behind and laughed.  This, of course, set our daughter off in a fit of giggles.
I’m not too worried about the lost statement.  It’s one of many that I’ve forgotten in the past, and one of many that I’ll make sure to write down in the future when I get that blasted notebook.
As long as we have children, I’m sure most of Courtney’s misspoken words will be directed at them, which makes what she says even funnier.  Telling a two year old, innocently while giving her a finger full of frosting or cake batter, to “suck it off” is just a lot funnier than when you say the same thing to an adult.  Like the middle schoolers I teach, I giggle every time she says it.
Like “suck it off,” there are a number of her slips of the tongue that I hope will be eradicated by the time our daughter is a teenager.  A few nights ago, we discovered that our dog had nibbled on and ripped the ear of one of Sprout’s (our daughter’s nickname that I must use until adoption is final) beloved bears, Rick.  (A side note, unless there is a significant change in her choices for naming animals, Sprout will never get full reign in the naming department for future pets.  With choices like Rick, Al another bear, Rainey a baby doll, and Obaba a handcarved wooden doll, I think Courtney and I will be making those decisions.)  Sprout was very upset by this, and somewhere in her two year old brain saw Rick’s injury as an opportunity to keep herself awake a little longer.  Before I could tell her to give Rick a hug, Courtney took it a step further.  “Sleep with Rick,” she told our daughter as she handed her the bear, “it’ll make him feel better.”  Yep, that’s the advice every mother should give to her daughter.  In a flash, I imagined a conversation with a teenage Sprout with boyfriend troubles.  I think I’ll handle the advice in those situations.
In Courtney’s defense, she almost immediately realized what was wrong with that statement.  “Wait a minute.  That’s not right.”
If I had a dollar for every time I heard Courtney say those words, with her head cocked to one side, eyebrows furrowed in confusion, one eye squinted a little more than the other trying to see the right words in her mind--well, let’s just say that we would be completely debt free.  Idioms are her worst.  It’s surprising, considering she teaches Spanish and therefore has to teach idioms with it.  
Often the problem starts when she can’t decide if she should use an idiom or the more general word or phrase which has the same meaning as the idiom.  This is how phrases like, “Calm as a cucumber,” are born.  Other times, she blends idioms that have the same meaning, which I consider to be a fortunate part of the hilarious mistakes. One afternoon after school in our second years teaching in Texas, as we walked laps around the parking lot of my apartment complex, she relayed a story about a kid who fell out of his chair while enthusiastically raising his hand to answer a question. (Can we say, “Courtney when she was younger?”  No wonder she had a love-hate relationship with this kid.)  She was trying very hard to say, “He bit it,” meaning he hit the floor.  But instead, it came out like this:   “And then, he bit the farm.  No, kicked the dust.  No, bought the bucket.  No, wait.  That’s not right.  Bought the dust.  Why did you stop?”  She already knew the reason why I could no longer walk (it’s difficult when you can’t breathe or see straight from laughing so hard), as she had to cross her own legs to keep from wetting herself.  
When I could breathe again, I corrected each of her idioms, to which she responded, “Well, bit the farm and bit the dust are kind of the same.  There’s dust on a farm.”  This lead to an argument of reason over the most illogical of topics, during which I had to point out that a farm had a lot more than just dust and the idea of biting the barn, cattle, or fields made as little sense as buying dust.  As we laughed ourselves back into tears, I said, “Well, at least you didn’t kick the farm.  That would hurt.”
I never had the heart to tell her the idiom didn’t work in her story in the first place.
Courtney has a tendency to be gullible and realizes it just enough to question whether or not someone is intentionally trying to trick her.  In one of these moments she asked me, “Are you pulling the fleece over my eyes?”  Of course, all conversation ended immediately as fits of giggles started in.  Feeling a little defensive, instead of asking, she insisted, “No, that’s right.  It’s fleece.  I thought of wool, but that doesn’t make sense.”  Therein lies part of Courtney’s trouble with idioms; she wants them to make sense.  “Well,” she said, still a little huffy even though she had conceded to her mistake, “at least fleece and wool come from the same thing.”  She made a good point.  At least I didn’t pull the whole sheep over her eyes.
The best of what I now call her “misidioms” I was sadly not around to hear first hand.  Fortunately for me, Courtney is quite the talker and usually a good story teller.  During our first year in Kansas, Courtney worked at a Catholic school in Wichita.  It was her third year teaching, but her first year with middle school aged children.  One of her co-workers was brand new to teaching and relied on Courtney quite a bit for advice.  Once, when she had given him advice and he told her how he wanted to handle a situation in his classroom in a different manner, she responded, “Well, there’s more than one way to kill a cow.”  Even though she had her back to her co-worker at the time, she could feel the air in the room change.  She turned to look at him, to find him staring at her, mouth agape.  “Wait, that’s not right.”
“No, it’s not,” he said.  He didn’t even offer an answer.  In Courtney’s defense, he lacked a sense of humor.
When she asked me later on for the correct idiom, she said, “But that doesn’t make sense.”  Again, the fatal flaw of logic in idiomatic expressions.  I said, “While I’m sure it’s true that there’s more than one way to kill a cow, the idiom is about skinning cats.”
I realized early in our relationship that her trouble with words isn’t entirely her fault.  We were talking one day, again in my apartment when we lived in Texas, and she told me how she was, “Faunchin’ at the bit.”
“You’re what?” I said.
“Faunchin’ at the bit.  You know,”  she said, looking at me as if I were clueless, “excited.”
“It’s ‘chompin’ at the bit,’” I replied.   
We argued.  It started to get ugly and seemed like an extraordinarily dumb reason to fight.  We agreed to take the argument to my roommate and our close friend Steve, a Harvard graduate and soon to be medical student.  His credentials should speak for themselves.
“Steve,” I started, “fill in the blank.  Blanking at the bit.”
“Chomping,” Steve responded without looking up from grading his math papers.
“I told you,” I said to Courtney, way too smugly for such a ridiculous conversation.
“But I swear my grandma says, ‘Faunching at the bit,’” Courtney insisted.
“I’m sure she does, but ‘faunching at the bit’ isn’t an expression,” I insisted right back.
Thems was fightin’ words.  “Yes. It. Is,” she continued.  
“Fine, let’s look it up.”  By this point, Steve was invested in the conversation, completely on my side.  He gladly raced to his room to get his dictionary, while I went to the bookcase in the living room to get mine.  We both turned the pages in the “F” section, looking up every possible spelling of the “word” faunching.  Courtney then insisted on looking up the word online, even looking up the phrase in web based idiom dictionaries.  Much to her chagrin.
Incidentally, her grandma does use the expression, “Faunchin’ at the bit.”*  I’ve heard it with my own two ears.  When her grandma said it, Courtney immediately glared at me from across the room.  “I told you so,” her eyes told me.  In my defense, I never denied her grandma said it.
And so it goes back to the nature and nurture of Courtney.  And that’s no “load of crock.”
Wait a minute.  That’s not right.
*To check for accuracy, I looked up the phrase, “faunching at the bit,” to be sure.  Courtney truly did the initial online search.  Since 2005, it’s apparently now an accepted idiom.  Even Courtney is amazed.  I’m not sure what the world is coming to anymore.