Category: minutiae

In our society, it is not enough for men to be men just in the biological sense. Men need to also “act” like men and exude masculinity. And yet still, this is not quite enough. In addition, men need to also pay specific attention to avoid anything that even remotely connotes femininity. They need to avoid at all costs, such things as: the displaying of emotions, betraying a smile at the purchase of new shoes, or to take more than a passing interest in one’s own reflection from a mirror. In short, for men to be men, they need to adhere to the Male Image—lest be deemed anything but.

However, in a most ironic twist, and contradictory exception, some men that many would consider the apotheosis of masculinity are the most egregious offenders of the circumscribed male body-image rules. This group consists of: the male body-builders, the lifters, the aesthetic athletes, the hormone-gulping protein-shaking buttocks-injecting many; they abound, and they betray the fact that masculinity and femininity are not as diametrically opposed as we’d like to believe.

While females are known to have a more ostensible interest in their outward appearance, males as well, that are part of this group, have an almost obsessive regard for their body. Muscle building to this degree far exceeds any health benefits gained; in fact, it comes to a point where it is almost all aesthetics. This degree of male image obsession flagrantly contradicts one of the major precepts of those implied rules of masculinity: that males should hold indifference to their looks.

We then move on to product. It is accepted that most women spend a great deal of money purchasing beauty-products that highlight, conceal, or augment, their own natural features, such as eyeliner, makeup, breast implants, et al. However, such product purchasing, as well as cost, is comparable in the male domain. Herbal/supplement stores like GNC, or MetRX, boating huge profits, sell supplements—with dubious efficacy— that are bought in enormous quantities by men interested in “bulking” up with the hopes of increasing gains beyond exercise and weight lifting. A perusal through the MetRX website will quickly indicate to anyone that these products are not exactly cheap either, although some like the best adaptogen supplement is quite affordable. However, most of these supplemental products require a long duration of use before even the promise of noticeable results. Here we see another instance of the overlapping between the masculine and the feminine “image”—making it harder to differentiate the two.

The male muscle building culture seems to ignore the rules of masculine body image. In fact, not only are the rules ignored per se, they are defiantly broken. And yet, within the male community, an overly muscled body, with chiseled abs is becoming more and more desired. What if every male obsessed over their bodies in such a fashion; what if it consumed all their time, dictated their diet, and costed them an exorbitant amount in product. Are we still talking about men?

What is up with Abercrombie and Fitch? When you walk in that store, you feel like you’ve fell into the bowels of someone’s in-ear ipod headphones with the volume painfully set to the highest setting. You’re then forced to listen to some crappy teenage music to the tune of LFO, or some obscure alternative happy-go-lucky garage band full of amateur guitarists and ex-high-school quarterbacks.

In-store models, walk around, shrouded with a cloud of privileged lethargy, folding intentionally wrinkled shirts at a steady pace of 3-shirts-per-hour. The air is so saturated with their branded cologne, ironically called “Fierce”; all articles of clothing in the store are caked with this fragrance, and even a brief 5 minute visit to the store—in and out— is enough for the “Fierce Air” to suffuse your own fabrics with Shock-and-Awe-like bravado.

Clothing is of course, priced at a moderate 3x the reasonable cost. T-Shirts, categorically described in their website as “humor tees”, are replete with sexual innuendoes, all of the derogatory frat-boy kind, all suggestive, and all in promotion of everything schools have educational campaigns against.

Then we turn to their unique advertising campaign: images of men, similar to Men’s Health Magazine covers but containing a slight pedophilia taint. There is monotony in the images. It is a tired repetition of half-naked men, all alike, with chiseled looks, and defined abs, and with the occasional Affirmative Action Model bereft of any real discernable uniqueness. Gauging from advertisement alone, and perhaps in-store larger-than-life semi-nude male model photographs, one would wonder if Abercrombie and Fitch sold shirts at all. They do, apparently.

And the empire keeps growing. AF has begun to expand their reign to the UK. They have opened up a new brand named Hollister—the poor man’s Abercrombie. I admit, at a time, I too was an AF shopper. I bought into it. In fact, my wardrobe still contains trace remnants of their influence: an old polo shirt here, a t-shirt there, a pair of shorts.

Well,  the AF lifestyle isn’t for everyone. We can’t all blithely stroll through life, one beer-funnel at a time.  Some of us prefer mugs and glasses.

A high school History teacher once told me that he found the metaphor “Melting Pot”, which is commonly used to describe the ethnic diversity in the United States, as dated and imprecise. Of course he was right to say it is “dated”, in truth, seriously, where can you buy a Melting Pot? And as such, to new-fledged history students, is it really a good metaphor when you have to explain at it at both ends: starting from “what is a Melting Pot?”, and from then to “so, what is this supposed to represent?”. Instead, and in keeping with the gustatory theme, this same teacher came up with his own metaphor (he ‘claims’ authorship), “the salad” . A salad, unlike a Melting Pot, is a single entity composed of various vegetables that maintain their own individual identity. As a whole, there is unity, yet still the essence of each vegetable and their unique taste, as well as their respective identities are not homogenized into one completely new substance.

But as we are all well aware, metaphors of salads, or pots that are melting, look great in theory, but in practice things are not always so “peachy”. In fact, with a salad, nothing is ever “peachy” (and purists will adamantly avouch that fruits have really no place in salads). A salad doesn’t accurately portray the tense and complex soci-economic class contentions taking place in reality. Alright then, no Melting Pot, no Salad. What then is a better metaphor, or is there one? … Taco Salad?

During this brief bout of “vacation” (still working) I’ve been reading this great book I happened to pick up called Typee by Herman Melville. To date, I have never read a book so well-written (albeit, the content is dry at times). And I know, I have this awful habit of setting superlatives after every book I read, and I’m sure it’s not really helping my street cred as a reviewer (when’s the last time classical literature and “street cred” were in the same sentence?)

Enough about books. Lately, I’ve been a dvd-watching fiend, all thanks to Netflix, which is like the best service ever! (urgh, another superlative.) And then, because I thought I was losing my hair (my sister says I’m not and that I’m full of it), and the thought of being [gulp] bald scared me to that Googling-self-diagnosing “bad-place”; I discovered on there that the only preventable cause of hair-loss (just in case my sister is full of it) is if its onset is stress-related.

So, I did the only rational thing. I went out and bought a bunch of video games. The rationale: if I can first-person-shooter myself into a dumber catatonic state after a rough day in the office, perhaps—perhaps—my neurons will be too comatose to notice when I’m stressed.

Google. Who needs doctors?

I woke up this morning earlier than what I had set my alarm clock (I hate when that happens). Today is July 3rd; it also happens to be a Monday; and it also happens to be a working day for me– but just for me. Turns out–and I was warned beforehand–the entire State has pretty much taken today off. But not me. I’m working.

As I was saying, I woke up before the alarm. The bright “eye of summer” snuck through the chinks between the shades and took possession of the room. Yet, that’s not what woke me. The comforter on my bed is heavy and warm–too warm–yet not having a comforter over me feels wrong. The early morning sweat on my brow, the heavy dehydrated breaths, was still not what woke me. The sound of a bird perched outside my window, chants a melodious chirp, repeatedly, and in perfect spacing of pause. The bird would stop, and start again, after a precise 4 beats. And I heard this chirp repeatedly, until I started to chirp this same tune mutely in my own head. And it kept chirping, and I kept chirping, and I couldn’t sleep. It felt like this bird was boring a hole through my skull. And I couldn’t sleep. I was losing it. You never realize how thinly-stitched your mental faculties are, until you hear a bird outside your window, nefariously gnawing through your skin.

Eventually, I hastily threw up the comforter, and bickered to myself with incoherent grunts, and followed myself into the shower… to go to work.

Nothing worse then when you can sleep more, but can’t sleep more- and it’s a Monday, and you have to work. And we “wonder” why the NRA can be so recalcitrant.

Other than my roomate [laboss], I didn’t really bore anyone else with the details of my last semsester of classes.

You know what; let me back up a little and mention what led me to even write this post. It all started with Google Personal Homepage. What? You never heard of that? …Well, it’s only just THE COOLEST THING EVER. Okay, maybe not. But the thing I like about it is that it displays random things on there, which always diverts me into welcome distractions that I would never have explored otherwise. For instance, one section on my homepage is called “The How-To of the Day” and today’s how-to (it’s misleading, but they give three at a time)..

1. How to Run up a Wall and Flip
2. How to Make a Soda Bottle Volcano
3. How to Begin Woodcarving With a Utility Knife

Then.. there is the “Quote of the Day”, my Favorite. Today’s quote is:

After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say “I want to see the manager.”
– William S. Burroughs

But it was yesterday’s quote that struck me so pointedly, and moved me to write this post. So, in keeping with the spirit of an old Episode of South Park that I watched the other night, entitled “Cartman’s mom is a _______ ” ( in which the identity of Cartman’s Dad was to be determined through a DNA test), I will continue this post later in an “All new blog entry to follow in just 4 weeks!”

I (LaBoss) have taken the internet by force and purchaced LaBoss.net. I almost bought LaBoss.CA and invaded the Canadian portion of the World Wide Web, but decided that not everyone would get the joke (and it cost more then double then my .Net). So, If you a interested in the coolest site ever, then click on over to WWW.LaBoss.Net

Now isn’t she pweetty!

It’s spring (I’m sure you noticed), so I’ve been cleaning out a few things like: my cube [my cell], my room, my bathroom, the desktop icons on my computer–and my desktop was quite the disaster.In the end i decided to hire a person to help me and it turned out as a bad ideea.Please make sure you always use a certified carpet cleaning company.

I have a tendancy to throw everything on my desktop. When I find something neat online, or some quote or word, or anything textual that I’d like to not forget, I’ll create a quick “text” file on there and type it out. Ironically, as soon as I do that, the next day, the next month, the next few months, I forget it’s even there–true avouch to the notion that if you want to really hide something, put it right in front of you.
Anyway, here are somethings I dug up today from my desktop:

This is a dilbert cartoon I saved.

A Walt Whitman Poem I really liked:

Walt Whitman
When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Quote from Orwell I read somewhere:

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. – – George Orwell

A word I never heard before, but liked:

mendacious: given to or characterized by deception or falsehood or divergence from absolute truth

…and the rest of the stuff is SQL code, batch scripts.. random .css files. All being cleanly recycled 🙂

Hi,

It’s Derick here this time.

I know, I know, It’s been quite the hiatus, and after reviewing my roommate’s last two posts I’ve consequently rescinded his authorship privileges on account of one (1) libelous remark regarding “sex and the city”.

Any case, I’m starting to get the reins back on my life, meaning: I’ve been in a complete lazy-rut for about 4 months now. Actually, lazy is too harsh; I have been taking classes (showing up for most of them) and working pretty much around 50-60 or so hours a week. But then again, those are excuses, and I know you don’t care either about the excuses or the minutiae that is my life– fair enough, I’d feel the same way on the other end too.

For Mardigan, Laboss, and Mills, who actually still read my website, I assure you, I’m going to start posting things on my blog a little more frequently. We need to get Laboss his own blog. And eventually resurrect Mardigan.net from…somewhere. Remember Mardian.net, in it’s heyday, with the oh-so slick animated construction worker, with the banner reading “under construction”. It kind-of reminded me of Boston. But then again, Boston was eventually finished.

As for my website in a whole, I’m still a little behind on maintenance:

• I need to update to the latest WordPress.
• Hopefully figure out a way to thwart these spam-bots from commenting up my website.
• I got a new hosting provider, which i need to eventually switch to. Benefits? Asp.Net / Sql Server –means nothing i know to everyone (aside from Mills). But with my new host, I’ll be able to actually publish my own .Net web-apps to something aside from my local network–again another empty sentence (to everyone aside from mills)

I’ve been doing a lot programming-for-fun lately (it’s kind of sad). I actually bought my own copy of Visual Studio .NET and hung the posters up on my bedroom wall. And as soon as the last one went up, I said to myself–no joke–in a breathy sigh, “wow [sigh,] this isn’t going to help me pick up chicks”.