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.

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. 

Disclaimer

While the people who’ve read the first post of this blog have enjoyed laughing with me at Courtney, I feel the need to post an important disclaimer.

Courtney not only has given me complete and total permission to write about and publish what she does, she has requested that certain stories be told and retold in this space.  In fact, she named the blog.  At first she suggested, “Really, Courtney?”* as this is also a phrase she hears frequently, and not just from me.  My immediate concern with the title is that it would automatically limit the blog to being entirely about her.  While I imagine that 90% of my posts will feature her as a subject, I also know that our daughter, our close friends, and the dear author of the blog are not above ridiculously funny things that other people might laugh at, too.  

I also have another fear.  Courtney, by nature, is theatrical.  To be described as “theatrical” involves two pieces for me.  1.  Big motion, words, movement, etc.  2.  Using that performance to get an audience.  Courtney definitely likes an audience.  But being the performer she is, if something gets a laugh, she tends to repeat the experience to continue getting the laugh.  She and our two year old share that in common, and when our two year old is a teenager, I will be spending a lot of time in rooms where they aren’t.

The problem is, Courtney is funnier when she doesn’t mean to be.  As soon as it starts to become performance or a line, it loses the edge.  Well, not always.  Here’s a case in point.

A few years ago, our dear friend Hanna lived with us.  Hanna has an amazing stereo system, and we have a lot of music on the computer.  During cleaning days, we’d plug the computer into the stereo in her room and set the volume to “neighbors will complain.”  It made all of us happier to do chores we’d rather not.  

On one of those days, Courtney was vacuuming the living room.  The opening riff of AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” blasted out of the speakers in Hanna’s room, and we all started nodding our heads as the song requires.  As the singing began, I heard from the bedroom where I was sorting laundry, “She was a sex machine!”  Hanna, who was across the hall from me in her room, and I instantly made eye contact and doubled over laughing.  We stumbled into the hallway, clutching our guts and wiping away tears, to find Courtney dancing with the vacuum cleaner like it’s a mic stand on stage.  This time the giggles took us to the floor.

Now knowing she had an audience, Courtney continued.  The dance movements became more exaggerated.  We continued to laugh.  She thought it was the dance moves, so she continued.  She was wrong.

When Courtney doesn’t know all the lyrics to a song, which is often, she will repeat the lyrics she does know to the tune.  Mostly this is just annoying.  But because the only lyrics to the song that she could actually “remember” were “sex machine,” she continued to scream it into the vacuum cleaner over and over.  Imagine it, if you will.  Get the tune in your head.  Now just scream “sex machine” to the rhythm until you burst into bladder-control-losing laughter.

After Hanna and I could stand up and breathe again without concern for peeing ourselves, Courtney turned off the vacuum cleaner.  “Why did you guys start laughing at me in the first place?”  she asked.  “I was just singing.”  

“Ummm, it’s, ‘She was a fast machine,’ C,”  I said.  I can’t speak for Hanna or Courtney on this one, but I know anytime I hear the song, I instantly crack up.

While sometimes the exaggerated performance is equally funny, the true gems are the unintentional ones.  Even in this story, what had me laughing was the accidental humor; what kept me laughing was more accidental humor.  My worry, however, is that the comments and gestures will become more intentional.  After anything I laugh at, she’s already asking, “Is that going on the blog?”  Which is why it can’t always be about her (sorry, C).  I don’t want her to lose that panache for spontaneous hilarity.

Then again, last night, in just being herself, she sat down, stretched her legs, and nearly knocked an entire bottle of wine and four glasses to the floor.  Regardless of the title, we’ll be laughing, scratching our heads, and asking, “Seriously?” as we ponder how an intelligent adult could do and say such things.

*Seriously? was Courtney’s follow up suggestion, so if you’re still concerned about her being on board, I think your fears can be assuaged.  

Why this? Why now?

For seven years, I’ve stared in wonder as I watch my partner Courtney get through the day without major injury.  She may be the only person I know who’s burned her torso taking cookies out of the oven (on the oven rack, not the baking pan).  I swear she’s the poster child of functional adult ADHD.  She jumps from thought to thought, activity to activity, and most of the time I can follow her, something I can only credit to spending a lot of time together.  We laugh often and hard in all that time, usually at Courtney’s expense.  I wish I could say that I’m above the easy joke, but I’m not.  Courtney opens a lot of doors; all I have to do is walk in.

The best part of the things she says and does is how unintentional they are.  Many will make the comments she makes to get the laugh or commentary.  Courtney, however, only realizes what she’s said in the seconds after the words are out of her mouth.  Likewise, her actions spring from instant impulse.  She’s a teacher, so she does have a filter, but even then the filter leaks.

Earlier this month on a family road trip to nearby Kansas City, MO, Courtney sparked the idea for this blog.  I’d already been thinking a lot about blogging--perhaps about our new adventures in parenting, perhaps about the ups and downs of being a part of the foster care system, maybe about teaching, maybe about writing.  The problem was I didn’t know what the focus of my blog should be. 

Both being teachers, we talk frequently of classes, lessons, approaches we take with the subjects we teach--Spanish and Math (Courtney) and Writing (me).  Courtney tends to talk a lot more.  I mostly listen.  As she recounted the successes of teaching the subtraction of negative integers with something she called “The Fart Principle,” I commented that we should create DVD mini lessons of her teaching and sell them online, as entertaining little clips for teachers to use in introducing or reviewing concepts.  She was very excited about the idea.  “Ohhh,” she said, “like that science one.  What’s his name?”  Before I could reply with Bill Nye the Science Guy’s name, she continued, “Weird Al the Science Gal?”  There was a half second of silence before Carrie, her sister who was traveling with us, and I exploded in laughter.  Instantly I pictured a man with dark, thick curly hair and a bushy mustache, wearing a red sequined gown and tiara.  “What?  That’s not his name?”  she asked.  She was laughing with us, but the question was completely serious.

A few minutes later, as we continued talking and cruising steadily down I-35, the car suddenly lurched out of cruise began to slow down.  I’m used to this, actually.  Often times Courtney, who has little control of her gangly arms, knocks the car into neutral or second gear.  But this felt different.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Courtney flail towards the gear shifter between us.  Instinctively I asked, “What did you do now?” as I glanced at the panel in front of me.  I noticed the overdrive light glowed neon orange at me.

“I didn’t think it would do anything,” Courtney responded sheepishly.  “I just wanted to push the button,” she said.  

“Seriously?  You nearly killed us because you wanted to push a button?”  I laughed, bringing the car back into cruise and glancing in the mirrors to make sure we weren’t in danger of being pulled over.  I’m already working on explaining that one to the officer who pulls us over one of these days.  “I’m sorry, sir.  She had an ‘oohhh, shiny’ moment.”  Or, “It wasn’t me, officer.  She has no control over her limbs.”

Within minutes of the car settling back down, Courtney began her car yoga.  On longer car trips, she will do a series of bends and twists in the passenger seat (and occasionally when’s she driving, too) to release the tension of not being able to move as much as she needs to.  Not-so-secretly, I’m completely jealous of her flexibility; I can’t touch my toes with my knees bent.  But what I don’t understand is how someone who can contort her body in all the ways she can, sometimes literally folding herself in half, can also manage to be so completely without grace.  Which brings me back to the car.  She leaned forward in the car rendition of a seated forward bend and sat in the pose for a number of minutes to stretch her lower back.  She glided gracefully down into the pose, her head tucked close to her ankles, seat belt still firmly attached.  Then in a sudden spasm, she jerked her head up and straight into the underside of the glove compartment.  She hit her head so hard, it popped the bendy clip holding her bangs in her ponytail open.  The car erupted into laughter again.  

Just as the car settled down, I noticed the radio station turning to static.  I had announced earlier that I had a surprise CD, an accidental find from the library, to listen to when we were done with the radio.  I pushed the button on the console to switch from radio to disc, and one of our favorite Jack Johnson songs from a Pandora station blasted from the speakers.  I expected an excited grin, a question like, “Hey, how did you get this song?”  Instead, Courtney picked up the CD holder, opened it up, and upon finding the CD missing, asked, “Where’s the CD?”

“Seriously?”  

Carrie and I laughed again.  About ten seconds later, Courtney caught on and laughed, too.  I’ll give her that.  One of her best personality traits is the ability to laugh at herself.

How our daughter managed to sleep through this stretch of the car ride can only be attributed to the fact that these antics happen daily.  And that’s when it hit me; I have the perfect subject for my blog.