Posts tagged with "social commentary"

Stereotyping The Male

Know what I hate? No, fuck­ing hate.

I fuck­ing hate it when a girl reduces me, or any guy, for that mat­ter, to a sex. When some PETTY-MINDED FUCK gen­er­al­izes some­one as belong­ing to the group of “males” because of a few char­ac­ter­is­tics shared with the stereo­type. Or brush­es off any traits she sees as unpleas­ant as sim­ply being the fault of hav­ing both an X and a Y chro­mo­some.

What the fuck. I don’t place the blame on ‘being female’ when a girl hap­pens to be late get­ting ready to go out. Or when a girl ends up in the mid­dle of a geek talk, I don’t con­de­scend to her and say, “You would­n’t be inter­est­ed cause you’re a girl”. I under­stand that girls can be geeky, or pruri­ent, or cere­bral, the same way that guys can be inter­est­ed in ball­room danc­ing, or chaste, or emo­tion­al.

I don’t do guys nights or any shit like that cause I choose not to judge. I don’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly assume that a girl would­n’t under­stand what hap­pens when the guys are togeth­er. I’ve had girls at my LAN par­ties, I know girls who go to strip clubs. And I choose not to act or do any­thing dif­fer­ent­ly if my girl­friend isn’t around, cause I have noth­ing to hide. I don’t want to be fake with either her or my friends.

Not every male is a slave to some­one with breasts. Beer com­mer­cials are not an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the entire male pop­u­la­tion.

FUCK. God.

In Return

It’s only the dri­vers who yield to pedes­tri­ans who deserve a quick­ened step across the lane. I take my time, some­times even walk slow­er, for the dri­vers who have no regard for the pedes­tri­ans.

Only patient peo­ple deserve patience in return.

You Don't Know Me

On a day-to-day basis at work I have to deal with a mul­ti­tude of con­tacts from all sorts of busi­ness­es, such as print­ing com­pa­nies, media com­pa­nies, survey/research com­pa­nies, phone/internet providers, mag­a­zines, tech sup­port depart­ments, mar­ket­ing com­pa­nies, and tons of oth­er ran­dom oper­a­tions either try­ing to get my busi­ness or required by me for a product/service. At the begin­ning of every phone call, every sin­gle per­son I deal with asks me how I’m doing. It’s become a chal­lenge not to shout into the receiv­er, “YOU DON’T KNOW ME. DO YOU REALLY CARE? I’M A LITTLE WORRIED CAUSE IT BURNS WHEN I PEE! DID YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW THAT?!!”, every time I hear the cook­ie-cut­ter ques­tion. The worst is when I have to call some­one sev­er­al times in a day to fol­low up on some­thing, and I’m greet­ed with the same ques­tion every time, as if my com­pa­ny might have been built on a fault line that some­how sep­a­rat­ed between 10:00 and 10:15.

I know that ask­ing is a polite thing to do, and it’s polite of me to ask in return, but it’s extreme­ly dif­fi­cult for me to say things that I don’t real­ly mean. I gen­er­al­ly only ask my friends how they’re doing, and I cer­tain­ly only tell my friends how I’m actu­al­ly doing.

I sup­pose it’s all just a haz­ard of the job. One day, for one of the less friend­ly, more aggres­sive, rude­ly patron­iz­ing, dread­ful­ly unim­por­tant calls (such as one I got the oth­er day from a com­pa­ny sell­ing solu­tions for high search engine rank­ings), I’ll go on about some make-believe prob­lem I’m hav­ing. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how long they can stay on the line, how much the busi­ness worth to them.

No Stupid Questions

Sometimes I ask ques­tions that oth­ers con­sid­er to be stu­pid. That’s usu­al­ly because I don’t make any assump­tions, and the last thing that I want to do is offend or annoy some­one. For exam­ple, I may ask to use the bath­room if I’m a guest at some­one’s house. Some peo­ple give me a look as if I’ve just asked them to take a dump on my chest, then they give me a slow, exag­ger­at­ed “yeeeees” in a tone that makes the answer seem like it should be an extreme­ly obvi­ous thing. To them, the point is obvi­ous; I’m a friend, and of course I can use the facil­i­ties. It’s some­thing that they feel I should­n’t have to ask. But I have no idea whether or not some­one is uncom­fort­able about me using a cer­tain bath­room cause it’s dirty (which has hap­pened in the past), or whether one of the bath­rooms is out of order (some­thing I’d rather avoid before I find out too late), or even if they’re try­ing to cross-breed bankeys by con­fin­ing bats and mon­keys in an ensuite and hop­ing they mate (which I assume will nev­er hap­pen). Usually, just going for the bath­room is not a chance I’m will­ing to take, as with many oth­er things. I’d rather ask first, because there’s the chance that I may make a step out of place (and in cas­es like these, it’s bet­ter to not step than to back­track). But when peo­ple start treat­ing me like I’m stu­pid for ask­ing these ques­tions, some­times I feel like just say­ing, “fuck it”, and not wor­ry­ing about the con­se­quences.

The Political Olympics

I don’t enjoy watch­ing the Olympics. The cov­er­age we get (exclu­sive­ly from the CBC), is shod­dy. There’s no pre-planned time sched­ule for match­es or events, so I nev­er know what’s going to be on when I have time to watch. There was also absolute­ly no cov­er­age of table ten­nis, which has already end­ed, most of the medals going to China. Why is this? I sus­pect because Canada basi­cal­ly had no chance of plac­ing in the top three, so why would the CBC want to show them? Well, more like­ly not even in the top five. Even Google gave table ten­nis props with one of their dai­ly ban­ners, and with 28 Olympic sports but only 16 days, 12 of those sports aren’t going to have ban­ners.

There are also so many pol­i­tics involved, with dis­qual­i­fi­ca­tions, dop­ing, judg­ing, etc., that every­thing just seems taint­ed. There’s also all the frus­trat­ing media cov­er­age in the mix, such as Perdita Felicien’s hur­dle dis­s­a­point­ment splat­tered on the front page of most papers while Ann Muenzer’s gold­en achieve­ment gets a sports sec­tion blurb. And with sports that don’t need to be in the Olympics (why have syn­chro­nized div­ing AND div­ing AND syn­chro­nized swim­ming?), there’s not much to keep my inter­est.