"Language" people! Listen to yourselves.

Where did language come from?  I have some theories from people I respect and some of my own.  Read anything by Steven Pinker, it will make you smarter.

One good way to get attention is to clear your throat.  This is partly because a blocked airway means you are in trouble, and people who like you will want to help you.  Others may want to get out of the way if you are going to spew anything infectious.  Many animals feed their young by gorging near the kill and when they get to where the young are they hork.  If this is not the trend in your neighborhood, hey don't knock it until you've tried it.  Nutrients are where you find them.  [car seat crevice / extra crispy french fry post is for another day]  So anyway, this distinctive sound just cannot be ignored.

A young and therefore small mammal has a smaller ribcage / vocal tract.  The sounds it makes are necessarily higher in pitch than when it is older / larger.  A bigger animal sounds more threatening in general.  Why?  I'll tell you why.  From experience or instinct, our little minds just know that a bigger animal is stronger and can cause more damage.

Watch [ok listen to] people who know dogs.  When you want a dog to sit, the command is given in a low loud tone.  If you want him to come in the kitchen for dinner you speak in a high happy tone.  

Most mammals, maybe most vertebrates do this.  "I am gonna kick your ass."  Is delivered in as low a voice as possible and in a descending pitch.  "Are you gonna feed me?" is asked in a high voice with a rising inflection.  [as are most questions]  This one way we can tell if an utterance is an order or a request. 

These are some of the roots of language I think.  Along with a brain that can learn and reproduce patterns and create new ones.  Special shapes of tongue teeth and lips are needed, but hey evolution and gravity just work, ok? 

Now we can also fake this.  If you want to sound butch or harmless, you lower or raise your pitch.  This is why I cannot take keanu reeves seriously.  He always sounds to me like he is trying too hard to lower his voice and pretend he is his dad.

SPEAKING OF DAD:

Let's just say you are about seven years old.  You and your family just got home from a camping trip.  It was a new uncomfortable environment and you are really tired and vulnerable but you are home now.  You turn back the sheets of your bed getting ready for serious comfort and safety, but wait!  You see a spider in your bed!  You are startled and you screech because you are a small mammal.  Perhaps your step father has not read any Steven Pinker or this post.  [ok it was written 35 years after these events, wha-ever]  It is of course a very high pitched screech.  Now maybe YOUR dad would understand and work around it.  You are a kid who should not be bullied or insulted by adults.  But my dad... well I don't even remember clearly what he said or did but I was made to feel worse about screeching.  Because it sounded girly.  

OK...  the science part of this blog post again.  Girls are smaller than boys.  Generally.  Less upper body strength, smaller rib cage, higher voices.  Look at anime.  I don't speak Japanese, but call a random phone in china or japan ten times.  Receptionists and waitresses there speak in extremely high pitch.  Tradition.  It is just good customer service.  [disclaimer: I have never been anywhere Asian.  guys talk, you hear things.]  

OK I think I kept the whining to a minimum.  Are you smarter now?  

So here I am.

the GETTING TO KNOW YOU post

I tend to whine.  This blog will be a place I will air out some crap from my childhood I did not like.  But I am doing so with the intent of clearing it out and healing from it so that makes it ok.  Right?

I am 45 and a half.  I am fed up with watching guys abuse girls.  Well really I am fed up with people being mean to each other.  That is what prompted me to start this blog with Tony.  He and I had had some similar issues.  It happened to me it happened to him, let us just do what we can to keep it from happening.

I'd like to think I am somewhat worldly.  I have been in the air force stationed in alabama and germany.  Got to travel to london and paris and venice.  Just as a tourist though.  Maybe I am still a townie.  Wife and I bought the house I grew up in.  Got a good deal from my mom.  House is not haunted but my head is.  I have baggage.  

 

the Monkey and the Green Garden Hose... of Eden

HI!  This is from Bob.  Visualize Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller.  That is who I wanna grow up to be.

I like the following illustrative thought experiment.  I hope it never really happened.  I know this has been blogged a dozen times before and I don't care where it originated.  It goes like this:

You have a big cage with 10 monkeys.  You have a green garden hose.  You hang a bunch of bananas high in the cage and throw in a ladder.  Why would you do these things?  Just go with it...

The monkeys figure it out quickly enough and prop up the ladder and go for the fruit.  However, when the first monkey reaches the bananas, you spray the other 9 monkeys with freezing cold water.  You bastard.  Keep doing it in the interest of Science.  After a while, any monkey that reaches out for the bananas gets whacked by the other 9.   Sometimes somebody gets some bananas but they quit trying after a while.  You feed them, but not bananas.  [see there? you are not totally evil.] 

After this behavior is established, you take out a conditioned monkey and put a new one in.  Of course, the new monkey tries for the bananas, and the others do their best to dissuade him.  They might like to explain courteously about the water, but there is likely to be violence.  You don't have to spray them as often now and can go back to twisting your mustache with an evil chuckle.

Give it another week.  Take out another conditioned monkey and put a new one in.  Again, the new ambitious monkey gets whacked by 9 of the monkeys.  Maybe even the new guy whacks him.  Each week, swap out a new monkey.

OK so after about 7 or 8 monkeys, stop with the water.  Keep swapping monkeys 4 more weeks or so.  [This has been blogged with 5 monkeys but I heard it first from a guy with no shortage of imagination.]

Soon the cage holds 10 conditioned monkeys.  They are conditioning each other now, and you are saving on the water bill and on bananas.  Now have we learned anything Scientific or are you just a bitter old monkey squirter?

Well, the most recent monkey has a valid reason for not grabbing the fruit.  He gets his ass kicked.  He has no idea about the water of course.  He is just being pragmatic.

Here is the part that bugs me.  A lot.

The veteran monkeys who know How Things Are, are keeping the new guys down.  They also have no idea about the water.  But nobody gets no banana no how.  Why?  Why does this behavior persist?  {here it comes… I hate this next phrase.  I don’t hate much, but when I do, it is this next phrase.}

     Because that’s the way we have always done it.

If you don't hate that phrase, you are not a right thinking person and you are not like me.  Go away.  

There are social conventions that do work.  Sleep over here, poop over there, eat in the other place.  Drive on the right side of the road.  Why?  Because you don't get your license if you are too creative with lane position.  There is maybe something in history about horse carriages or swords and right handed people if you google the heck out of it.  But that is one I took for granted for a long time without fussing.  

OK so those stay.  But on everything else, think for yourself!

Have you tried cream cheese and jelly on a bagel?  You might get a squint from the waitress but try it.

From my pubescence or around then, I had the official Guy brainwashing about what was attractive in women.  Barbie doll, cheerleader, playboy bunny, not necessarily in that order.  But around 25, I started having my own preferences.  I like bigger women.

They advertise beer and trucks during football games.  The ads on saturday morning are for toys and cereal.  This has been happening all my life but I had not really thought about it until lately.  You are being brainwashed and not just by ads.  The govt art council or somebody got in trouble a while back for subsidizing sitcoms that had anti-drug messages in their plots.  They would not subsidize your show if it had drug content that was not negative.  It was not a written policy, very smooth.  [No I am not going to cite this or support my claims with research.  If you remember this, just nod and smile.  If not, let's move on.] 

"In a civilised society, it is the duty of all citizens to obey just laws. 
But at the same time it is the duty of all citizens to disobey unjust laws." 
- Martin Luther King Jr.

Take the monkey experiment to work with you in your head.  [Just in your head.(but if you can get ten monkeys into your cubicle farm, I wanna work there too.)]  You will start seeing chimps everywhere like in that ad a while back.  There will be something that jumps out at you as "that's the way we've always done it."  Choose your battles.  If the conventional way works, fine.  Don't change things just to stick out.  But if you see a stupid convention based on outdated issues, challenge it.

A little about me...

I figured a good way to start my entries would be to tell the condensed version of my life story. So here goes...

I was born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1983. For the most part I had a fairly happy childhood. By that I mean that I was raised in a middle class suburban family and nobody beat me up or molested me. My parents divorced when I was eight or nine years old. I had a strained relationship with my father from that point on and it never really recovered. More on that later.

When I was seventeen and a junior in high school I enlisted in the New Hampshire Army National Guard. This was probably one of the best decisions I ever made. The army taught me strength, self discipline, attention to detail, and provided something I had been sorely lacking for a long time: good male role models. I learned a lot about myself and about being a man in the five years that I served, but by 2005 I had begun to resent the level of control the Army had over my life. I transferred to the air force side of the National Guard (which is technically still the military, but only just barely) and served another three years giving me a grand total of eight years time in service when I was honorably discharged in November of 2008.

While I was in the process of transferring I did something naive young soldiers often do: I married the wrong person for all the wrong reasons. More on this later. The one positive thing to come out of my marriage was my wonderful son, who now lives with me full-time and visits his mother on the weekends.

When my son came to live with me I quickly realized that at my current level of education it would be impossible to make ends meet. I went through four or five different jobs in the space of a few months and every single one ended one of two ways: either I couldn't make enough money to survive, or I couldn't schedule my work around childcare arrangements. It was at this point that I made the decision to go to college. I am currently enrolled full-time in a teacher-preparation program and hope to someday teach high school social studies. In my spare time I play guitar (badly), read like it's my job, and I've recently discovered my love for renaissance faires.

Well that's all for now. Some of the issues above will be explored in their own separate posts at a later date simply because this is my first entry and I prefer to keep it short and sweet.

Is this thing on?

We're here to explore men's issues.  But what does that mean?  Quite simply it means any and all topics important to men.  What qualifies us to soapbox about men's issues?  Absolutely nothing.  We mean it.  Nada.  Zero.  Zilch.  We're not doctors, or psychologists, or behavioral scientists.  We are just a couple of dudes with some ideas and an Internet connection.

About our ideas:  you may not agree with everything we have to say.  For that matter you may not agree with ANYTHING we have to say.  That's fine.  One of the cornerstones of our philosophy is that every man should be free to think for himself and make up his own mind on every issue.  Dissent is okay with us.  Hell, we'll even go so far as to encourage it.  If you think we're way out of line on something, call us on it.  We'll hear you out.  You may even change our minds.  Or maybe we'll change yours.  That's what this blog is all about:  a community of men helping each other to be better people.  Sometimes that means serious discussion of major philosophical issues.  Other times it may mean somethings silly, like "why are farts funny?".  But whether serious or silly these are the issues that are important to us, and on some level, to all men.

So that's our first rant.  Hopefully it's the first of many.  Thanks for reading.