White Boy at the Black Sorority Meeting (part two)

Continued from part 1

This is the second installation in a two-part FCeriseN (because that's the only letter that will make a soft "S" sound). To get caught up, go back and read part one or check out the spark note version in the next paragraph. Good choice; I was going to go with the spark notes too.

In part one (you have yet another chance to click the link!), Reginald decided that my social life needed a hormone injection and decided to bring me to the epicenter of ethnic and estrogen pride (the social equivalents of diethylhexyl and polyisobutylene, click here if you're not a nerd. Gotcha! You can actually read the explained joke here, but then again "a joke explained is a joke disdained"). Reginald took me to a local spring of vivacious ethnically secure females: a meeting of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. I had just made contact when the FCN post-size limit was enforced and I had to split my tome into two parts (send complaints here).

Did I mention that Reginald is buff? His chest and arms are sculpted and toned like a Greek god. His work on his body had rendered his torso a piece of work. My physique -- detailed now and again on these illustrative pages -- has the appeal of a slightly masticated worm, albeit with some definition in its pectoralis major. Yes, that is definition. Sometimes definition looks like flab when it gets tired of being defined all the time. No, I do not need any additional articles of clothing to support my pectoralis. Thank you for offering. Neither do I appreciate that your subtle insinuations are slowly eroding my tender body image. Stop it, please. People like you are why I need to spend thousands of dollars on professional psychological therapy. Next to Reginald, I admit, I look like a pre-pubescent youth with post-pubescent pecs; an overgrown schoolboy, who's biceps have yet to catch up with his imagination.

I don't know why I just described myself that way. It's really very unflattering. For me it creates a feeling similar to what Heidi Montag must feel when she opens the National Enquirer: "That's not true; how awful of them to print that." Except in Heidi's case, she has invited the criticism by prancing around the known world in just slightly more clothing than a chimpanzee would wear at the zoo. And in my case, I wrote the unflattering comments about myself. Actually, now that I think about it, the two feelings are completely dissimilar, but I was able to mention Heidi Montag, so perhaps it was worth it. In fact, these last two paragraphs were an entirely unnecessary self-effacement. It's also something I'll have to bring up with my therapist.

So, back at the black sorority meeting, I was struggling to come up with something to talk about. Buff Reginald flitted around with an elusive social grace, twittering with the fairer sex and returning their bavarderie like Roger Federer returns tennis balls, minus the spin and long hair. At first I tried to be still and look innocent, but that never works. Then I tried to be invisible. I imagined I was a character from Tolkien, sliding my finger into a ring and disappearing. Someone asked me if I was okay, so I stopped doing that.

That's when the food arrived. I may not always be the greatest people person, but I'm a great food person. You throw me a plate with a little grub -- nothing fancy, mind you; I intend to survive almost exclusively on microwave victuals if my love life continues at its laggard pace -- and I am occupied like a toddler with an abacus.

Sometime when I was eating, a woman named "Natasha" started talking to me. I happened to know that her name meant "birthday" -- just something I read somewhere when I should have been doing something else -- and the news surprised her! How can you have a name and not know the meaning of it? What if you were named something terrible like "milktoast" or "hebetudinous"? Wouldn't you want to know so you could skedaddle down to the courthouse and get that changed? Other names I turned down after discovering their meanings were "daft," "torpid" and "banana." "Hebetudinous" was on my shortlist for a firstborn until I found out what it meant, now it takes a back burner -- well behind "milktoast."

Natasha makes a lot of sense for a name, since most people are named on their birthday. It's a wonder more people aren't named that. Natasha must have appreciated my insight because she laughed and we started talking.

Long story abbreviated, I met a bunch of Natasha's friends, all AKA members. They all wanted to know what their names meant, so I made some terms up and tried not to offend people. Just when I was nearing the end of my line of jokes (it doesn't take very long), the music came on. It was Lady GaGa's "Just Dance." And so we started dancing.

Just so everyone knows. I am an expert at dancing. It's like I've been dancing -- seriously dancing -- ever since I watched a particular video on YouTube. Not Evolution of Dance, silly. 100 million people have seen that. It's so unoriginal. I saw a 3 minute video that gives a whole bunch of new moves. And less than a million people have seen it, which makes me, you know, one in a million. Now I am sharing it with you. Here it is:




My personal favorite is the "Wii remote," but I've got most of the moves down pat. And let me tell you what, they were a hit at the AKA sorority meeting. I was so popular. I didn't want to leave. Reginald came and said we had to go, but I wanted to try out "The Dictator" again and Natasha asked me to teach her "The Bus Driver."

Reginald is stronger than me (see, the buff paragraph did serve a purpose) and he was able to wrest me away. But I really want to go back next year and show off some more moves. I've been practicing...

Miss-Communication

A long-running joke among men is that it is impossible to understand women. And they are correct. There are times women don’t even understand themselves. Girls over-analyze everything. And I do mean everything. What you think is a friendly wave or smile at one of your girl buddies could easily propel them into a daydream filled with you and your future children. Allow me to demonstrate how females easily misconstrue the intentions of the well-meaning gentlemen in their circle of friends. What a guy says is often not what a girl hears. Females will often read whatever meaning they want into a guy’s innocently simple phrases and gestures.

Guy says: Hey, is this seat taken?
Girl hears: You are so beautiful and mysterious. I want to keep myself in close proximity to you so I can learn more about your inner soul.

Guy says: It’s nice to meet you.
Girl hears: Where have you been all my life?

Guy says: You look nice today.
Girl hears: Hey good lookin… what’s cookin? You’d be a shoo-in for America’s Next Top Model.

Guy says: Do you want to hang out with me and my friends later?
Girl hears: I’m really attracted to you, I’d like you to meet my friends so they can give me a thumbs-up on my taste in girls. Once that’s done with, we can visit my parents next weekend and go ring shopping.

Guy says: It’s good to see you.
Girl hears: You are my heartbeat, I can’t live without you. I wither away to nothingness when we’re apart.

As if that’s not confusing enough, what girls say is often not what they truly mean.

Girl says: Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.
Girl means: I’m falling apart. Come on, you bimbo, ask me to tell the truth.

Girl says: Isn’t that such a cute baby?
Girl means: See what a wonderful mother I’d be? I already have our children named, I hope you like what I’ve picked out.

So, if a guy wants to avoid these common pitfalls, what are his options?
1. Be Spock.
2. Get a lobotomy.
3. Avoid all members of the fairer sex.

Whatever you do, don’t underestimate the female mind. It may be difficult to understand, but it is still quite dangerous. If you don’t believe me, ask someone who would know. Like your dad.

How to Speak Guy

The immutable third law of human conversation is that males do not speak to other males the same way they speak to the fairer gender. To do so would be a denial of your conversation partner's rights as a man and an assault on his very manhood. To emasculate one's speech is tantamount to physical castration, a painfully disturbing and altogether unnecessary visual, at least from my reading of Freud. In order to help you, the Faithful FCN Few, avoid this pitfall of human interaction, we provide this how-to guide. Follow the guidelines herein and you'll be speaking guy in no time.

Use short greetings. No guy in his right mind would put together a greeting longer than two words. "Hey, how are you?" is so long that it threatens the auditory attentiveness of the average male. The question is so long that the feelings of the respondent can actually change from the moment the first syllable is uttered until the voice inflection changes to signal the question mark. The respondent has no way of knowing whether you mean how he is doing at the beginning of the query, at the end or in the extended period in the middle when you asked your darn question. Guys who respond to long greetings will often hesitate before answering and may renege on their first impulse (i.e. "I'm okay, I guess" or "Cool...sorta")If you really care about how a person is feeling, you'll say something like:

"What's up?"
"What's happening?"
"What's popping?"
"What's cracking?"

Shorten short greetings. Even in their abbreviated form, the above greetings may be considered too long for real guys. To use a math concept (dun dun duh!), the word "what" can be factored out of each of the above greetings to create a more economical and appealing "hello." Shorten these phrases to the following:

"S'up?"
"S'happening?"
"S'popping?"
"S'cracking?"

Create your own greeting. The "H" and "Y" sound in the English alphabet are categorized as greeting noises in the Dictionary of Guy. That's Y as in the Spanish "ll," for all you literalist linguists among the faithful few. You place any vowel sound after an "H" or "Y" and create a greeting. Although real guys will use the first vowel that pops to mind (in this context, Y is not a vowel), most utilize the following:

"Hey"
"Hi"
"Yo"
"Yeah"

Speak from below the diaphragm. My singing instructor advised to sing from the diaphragm to get the most pure tones. Guys need more than purity from their tones: they need toughness. In order to man-up their pipes, guys must marshal every ounce of diaphragm strength for their communication purposes. To the untrained ear, the result is a grunt-like sound. But to guys, it is a statement of manhood, sort of like advertising how much you bench press without having to wear a muscle shirt. To practice below the diaphragm speech, push all the air out of your lungs. All of it. There shouldn't even be a dimebag worth of space left. Yes, I just said dime bag. I was referring to Dimebag Darrell, the Damageplan guitarist who...didn't take up much space. What did you think I meant?

It took me so long to extricate myself from that mess that you probably need some more air so go ahead and breathe again. Unless, of course, you're a real man, in which case you probably haven't taken a breath since yesterday after dinner because you are preparing your body for a time when clean air is scarce and it what little consumable oxygen exists needs to be preserved for the women and children. Your altruism is to be praised. Exhale again. Remove all the excess air and then some. Now speak. Speak from the lowest tones possible and say something manly like:

"I never put down the toilet seat."
"Nancy Pelosi is a wuss."

Did you feel it? Did the testosterone pour over you like a water rebounding off a well executed cannon ball? Tonight you will sleep the deep sleep of a man. And tomorrow you will have hair on your chest.

You can go ahead and breath now.

Don't use pronouns. Pronouns are for females and English majors. But I'm being redundant. As proud carriers of a Y chromosome, we graduated from pronoun usage about the same time as the Native Americans. If you don't know what a pronoun is, you are a real man and can skip to the next section. If you do know what a pronoun is, you have been raised by a woman. I was informed by people I trust that a woman was present at my birth. From that moment, for about the next fifteen odd years, I did everything possible to escape women. For the past five years, that gender has become really interesting and rather than avoid contact, I'm finding that I'm actually seeking females out. This trajectory is typical among real guys. The danger, of course, is learning to use pronouns either very early in life or when communicating with females later on.

If you find yourself about to use a pronoun, just stop. Count to ten, light a fire on the kitchen table, do whatever you need to do to not say the word. It is better to be completely socially embarrassed - a state of being for many guys - than to actually utter a pronoun. There are a handful of nefarious exceptions. I've been trying to use that word all day, nefarious. Anyway, they are those wicked contradictions to the general rule that invariably form an impediment keeping the average Joe from becoming a guy. All too often, males go beyond the list of allowable pronouns and get themselves in trouble. What follows is an exhaustive list of acceptable pronouns:

"Man"
"Bro"
"Pilgrim" because that's what The Duke would say.

That's it! No more. You are a guy, not a dictionary. Leave the elaborate English for those who need to compensate for other deficiencies.

Talk slow. Fast talking is a dead giveaway for emasculinity. That's not "masculinity," as in so manly Matthew McConaughey blinks, nor is it "e-masculinity," which is my Facebook profile. Rather it is "emasculinity," as in "emasculated," as in the Reverend Jesse Jackson got a hold of you and decided to teach you a lesson about fatherhood. Spellcheck has a problem with the word "emasculinity," but it also doesn't like the word "spellcheck," so we'll call it even.

John Wayne was a real man. At least he became a real man at one point in his film career. He was actually born with a girl's first name and a half-decent middle name, but his little brother stole his middle name and he generally had a very estrogen intensive childhood. When the cameras started rolling, Marion Michael (or was it Robert) Wayne, jettisoned his feminine side and became a real man. The Duke also had some advice for any guy looking to man-up. He said "talk low, talk slow and don't talk much." Those are words to talk by.

If Wayne decided to read the above paragraph - an unlikely proposition given the number of activities the deceased movie star might settle for instead like roping a heifer and kissing a pretty woman - it would take him at least a minute. He might not even finish it because his voice would trail off into a gruff chuckle that leaves everyone confused but exposed to an awesome display of pure manliness.

There's more, of course. Guys talk from the side of their mouth, never emote and should think twice before issuing any thoughtful compliment beyond "you look nice." But I am reaching the acceptable word limit for my gender and will have to stay silent for the rest of the day just to stay below the quota. I hope you appreciate my sacrifice.

Heart of Gold

You've heard the phrase. When someone is "without malice" with a "loving and caring" nature, they are said to have a heart so pure, it is made of gold. The line is delivered regularly in conversation in a seemingly complimentary way, but is it really a positive statement?

The most common application for "heart of gold," or HOG, is after a critical or deriding remark. The speaker feels that her comments will be perceived as "too harsh" or unnecessarily cutting and amends them with the addendum that "oh, but he has a heart of gold." For example, "Todd is a real Jerk. He lies all the time, never looks me in the eye and always wears that ratty cap with the sweat stains. But he has a heart of gold."

Translation: The subject's faults are not his own, but environmentally induced. He comes off as much worse than he actually is because of exogenous factors that are beyond his control. My dislike for him has nothing to do with the "real" person, but instead targets the things that make him unbearable. If only his golden coronary muscle would shine through the fog of the world, he wouldn't be such a jerk. But he is a jerk. He is an idiotic, poorly raised, fatherless animal with zero class and less style. If his face reflected his attitude it would be covered in warts and he would scratch at the itch with a piece of clay like Job. He deserves to rot in the darkest corner of a third-world country and never eat chocolate. But he has a HOG, for what it's worth.

Psychologically, we don't want to push someone down too far or risk raising the defensive ire of our conversation mates, so we moderate the phrase with an insult so camouflaged it is often embraced as a compliment. We are reticent to pound our nemeses into the ground, so we coat the tip of our barb with glitter that we hope will be strong enough to veil our malevolence.

This post serves to remove the glitter and expose the barb for all it is.

I've presented this theory to a few friends and family members to mixed reviews. A number of respondents have raised plausibility issues with their own use and contested that "I really like xyz [who I said had a HOG]; your theory can't be true."

When HOG is used, the speaker is not necessarily cognizant of his or her feelings toward the subject. In fact, the speaker may insist that her feelings are warm and fuzzy toward the individual and that HOG has "different meanings for different people." Don't be fooled.

HOG can reflect both a deep seated and surface disregard for a person. The feelings of malice that accompany its deployment may be buried deeply and motivate the thoughts behind the words with a dull ache of past pain. Or they may be symptomatic of a passing anger, a transient feeling that passes as quickly as glassless glasses.

Further, HOG is sometimes used when the personal dislike is found only at a subconscious level, where it is too deep to recognize. The speaker may not even be aware of her feelings toward the HOG recipient, but the use of the phrase lets others know what she is feeling.

As we've discussed earlier this week, females tend to put a lot more care into the words they choose than their male counterparts. We guys pick words the same way we choose shirts in the morning: if it's clean we'll use it. Guys will use lines they hear environmentally without regard to the nuances of the phrase or any implied meanings. We don't care if you think you've been insulted as long as you still feed us.

Girls, on the other foot (because hands get so old), put an inordinate amount of thought into the words they choose. In fact, picking a word for a girl is also very similar to picking a shirt.

Ultimately, HOG is a negative remark thinly veiled as a compliment. Guys may use it inadvertently (just as they will insult their girlfriends without knowing or intending to), but the phrase's proper place in the dictionary of popular vernacular is under the "insults" tab.

The next time someone "compliments" you on your HOG, mentally add four words to their sentence: "You have a heart of gold. Cold, hard and yellow." That will give you a more accurate picture of their meaning.