One of the biggest complaints I get from women is that they’re significant other is that it drives them nuts when her man won’t admit he’s wrong. It’s certainly not a new thing, men have been in charge (a self-imposed rule, mind you) for thousands of years. After that long, many of us think, or want you to think, that whatever we say is the truth and should not be questioned. It’s an archaic and demeaning stance to take, but unfortunately, it’s one of those stereotypes that is based off of real observations. So, what do you do? How do you deal with this? I’ll explain the two main reasons why most men are so stubborn and then hopefully give you good tips on dealing with, and perhaps breaking, this annoying habit.
Men, by nature, like to be right. In fact, there are some of us out there who are so devoted to trying to be right all the time, that they will blatantly ignore the fact that they’re wrong and continue to state their case steadfastly. No matter what happens in the conversation, they will not say they are wrong and they will not apologize. Why do men do this? Well, it can happen for one of two reasons, either A) The guy really, truly believes he’s right, or B) He’s come to grips with the fact that he’s not right, but physically cannot bring himself to admit it.
The mind is a wonderful and dangerous machine that not even the most well-trained machinist can truly control. For example, sometimes men are so blinded by their commitment to their infallibility that they can’t even see when they’re wrong. For example, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey with a friend a few weeks ago. I’m not going to lie, dude’s not the brightest bulb. I know that, I’ve accepted that as part of his personality. We’re about 20 minutes into the movie when it gets to the part where they’re suddenly living in outer space. My friend, we shall call him Hicktown Harry, says to me, “Wow, we’re already in 2009 and we still don’t have people living in outer space. Kinda makes you wonder if it’ll ever happen.” I sat there trying to form words, but I couldn’t, I was too stunned. After a minute Harry looks over and says to me, “What?” Trying to have tact, I asked, “Harry, you know there are people living in outer space right now, right?” He shot me a confused and offended look, (taking offense is often the response when a man is challenged intellectually, but that’s for another entry) “No there aren’t. Don’t you think I would have heard about that?” “Yes, I do think you would have heard about it after about 30 years, but apparently you haven’t.” The conversation degenerated from there. Harry arguing over and over that the media would be covering this amazing feat on a daily basis if there were people living in space. Me arguing that they did when they first went up there in the 1970s, but it’s 2009 and it’s kind of old news now. These days, you can prove a point pretty quickly using the internet, so I go look up NASA’s website and show him the live feed coming from the International Space Station. To this new, rather irrefutable evidence, Harry exclaimed, “You made that up! You made that up! There’s no way this is real! The media would be covering it daily!” Harry truly believed that I was playing one huge prank on him. In Harry’s head, apparently, I had created an entire website devoted to the International Space Station, made up a well documented history of man’s excursions into space, and somehow created a live, streaming video feed showing, my only guess is someone in my closet floating around tinkering with equipment. To this day Harry still has not admitted that he is wrong, or that there are people living in space. I’m not sure if he still thinks I’m playing a prank on him, or if he’s actually looked into it and realized that the International Space Station is inhabited by humans and just refuses to admit his error.
Which brings me to the second kind of men: the kind who have come to grips with the fact that they’re not always right, but can’t bear the thought of admitting it to anyone but themself. These are the men that you can at least talk to and have a real conversation with about things because they have the cognitive capacity to see beyond their own beliefs and understand other people’s points. That doesn’t mean they’re willing to admit it when they see they’re wrong. My friend Manly Mick is one of these guys. He’s a good guy. Extremely loyal, smart enough to know when to back out of a no win situation, but not quite smart enough to know that admitting a mistake and apologizing is the best way to win people’s favor. He and I have talked about this subject and he’s told me, flat-out, “There are times when I know I was wrong, that I did or said something I shouldn’t have, but I never apologize. Never.” When pressed on why, “Because I don’t apologize. I just don’t.” Manly Mick is clearly a good guy, just a little too proud to admit his mistakes. He’s aware that he should, but he won’t do it on principle.
So, what do you do when your man is being stubborn and stupid? I’ve heard some women say that you just have to massage the oh so fragile male ego and give in. I personally don’t buy into it because I hate giving in just to save people the psychic pain, but it’s an option. I’ve heard other women who say stand your ground until the very end, you’re just as good and smart as he is, take his own tactics and throw them right back at him. I’m more inclined to agree with this stance, but this tact also invites an endless circle of fighting that will likely destroy a relationship. To me, how you handle these situations depends on the kind of man you’re dealing with.
If you’re talking to Hicktown Harry, I’d say you’re probably SOL. In every reasonable person’s life, there are times when you just know you can’t win no matter what happens. Harry’s the kind of guy that rule doesn’t apply to. So that then leaves you two options: A) Learn to live with Harry’s stubborn abidance to his believe in his own way of thinking, or B) Leave the moron. Which one you decide depends on your priorities and Harry’s other attributes. How important is it to you to have your opinions and arguments validated? If it’s up pretty high on the list, you have to really think about what Harry’s other attributes are and whether he’s worth the frustration and fights. If you decide to stay with Harry, that’s fine, probably a good choice. In fact, once you accept those flaws as a part of who that person is, it makes them a lot easier to deal with. Just be true to yourself, if Harry’s constant inability to admit he’s in the wrong bothers you a lot, do something about it.
As for Manly Mick, he’s a guy you might actually be able to show the light…Well, you’ll probably at least be able to talk to him about it. Unlike Harry, Mick’s the type of guy you can probably have a meta-conversation with, you know, talk about what you’re really talking about. I can be a bit of a brash guy, so in the middle of a fight or argument where I think Mick is just blatantly wrong and is being stupidly stubborn, I like to call gun him on it. You say, “Mick, you know you’re being really dumb and stubborn right now?” That at least opens the conversation up so that you can talk about your communication patterns, which might eventually lead to Mick realizing that it’s okay to be wrong sometimes, and that admitting it is the kindest and most reasonable thing to do.
The real thing I hope you take out of this is that if you have a man who can admit when he’s in the wrong and has made a mistake, cherish it. Embrace that for what it is, a true miracle. Most importantly, encourage the behavior to continue. When a man does admit that you were right, give him a huge and a kiss and tell him how much you appreciate his honesty. Maybe even give him a piece of his favorite candy.
Ladies, are there times when you can’t figure out what your boyfriend, husband, or even just your male friend is thinking? You’re not alone, but I’m sure you already know that. Every woman seems to have a hundred stories about their stupid boyfriend, husband, friend, whoever, saying or doing something that was so incredibly stupid that she just cannot wrap her head around it. Well fear no more, I’ll give you the low down on what’s going on inside the male psyche. This will not be a one blog thing, it’s too wide a subject for it to possibly be. It’s going to be an ongoing commentary and analysis of men and the way they think. This will not apply to all men either. As with everything, there are exceptions to every rule, afterall, not all women think the exact same way, right? Speaking of which, I will also have to make some minor assumptions about the female pysche to make some of my points. Obviously I am no expert in any sense of the imagine, but I believe I have a little bit of insight on the matter. But please, if anything I say is so off-base or offense that you’re outraged by it, please tell me. With those disclaimers out of the way, we begin.
Men and women are different. Obviously this is not new development. Nor is the fact that they communicate differently. In fact there have been dozens, perhaps even hundreds of books written and studies done trying to figure out why this is. Deborah Tannen, in her book, You Just Don’t Understand believes men communicate to create and/or emphasize the power structure at work, while women communication to creat and maintain strong interpersonal relationships. Perhaps the most famous example being John Gray’s, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, where he argues that the opposite intimacy cycles of men and women are what make communication difficult between the sexes. Both of these, and most other scholarly arguments for why and how men and women communicate different have merit. But they’re all scholarly and burdened by official research and “facts.” In the coming months and maybe even years, I’ll give you my take via real life examples and stories to illustrate the inner-workings, or in some cases the lack-there-of, of the male brain.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with my life and I’ve come to one conclusion: I want to help people. I not completely sure why, but it’s always something I’ve always wanted to do. Maybe it’s the pride I have knowing that I’ve done something good for other people. That sounds pretty selfish though. I mean, really? I’m helping people because I like the way I feel? Does it get more selfish than that? Maybe it’s some paternal instinct I have for people that makes me want to make sure everyone’s okay. Seems pretty logical I guess, but it’s not really a satisfying answer. It’s not really a good answer because there’s no real source. It’s like the Big Bang, it’s not really an answer because, if that’s where the universe came from, where did the giant mass of matter come from? It’s an answer, but not a solution.
Maybe I’ll never know why I like to help people, but I know when I first realized I enjoyed it. It was when my grandfather, we call him Papa, asked me if I wanted to be a counselor at a camp he worked at called Camp Caring Love. I had no idea what it was other than Papa told me I would be taking care of mentally handicapped adults. At the time, I had no idea what to think of that, so I said sure.
It was a huge shock at first. I was literally taking care of seven campers, most of whom couldn’t speak and literally needed me to help them with a lot of their daily activities like shaving and bathing and eating. I remember the first morning I woke up at camp, I woke up to one of the camper banging on our bedroom door at 5:30 a.m. (I was in a cabin with Papa). The guy couldn’t speak, but he could moan, very loudly. I was terrified, at first because the guy scared me banging on the door, then because I had no idea what he wanted, and there was seemingly no way to figure it out. The guy couldn’t tell me, how was I going to figure it out? Plus I was essentially still in shell shock from all the new information and new experiences coming at me so fast the night before. So I laid there. I pretended I was still asleep. I figured Papa could get it, he’s been here before. Papa told me later that he wets the bed every night, and somewhere between 5:00-6:00 he comes banging on our door wanting someone to change his sheets. Needless to say, I played opossum every morning that week.
But having to take care of the guys wasn’t what actually shocked me. It was the fact that I didn’t mind doing all of it. It never seemed odd or annoying or cumbersome. It actually felt good. I enjoyed doing it. Every year after that, until the group was disbanded after 2006’s camp due to an unfortunate and unforeseeable series of events, I looked forward to camp. It became the most exciting part of my summers because I looked forward to working with the people and helping them.
As I rode the Metro back from Washington D.C. last night I watched a kid, probably about 4th, maybe 5th grade at most, jumping and hanging from the hand rails that are attached to the roof of the train. The train was completely packed, everyone was completely miserable standing there, squished in like sardines, but this kid was having a blast. This scene makes me realize that we, as adults, don’t make fun like kids do. Now I am certainly not the first person to have this realization, I’m pretty sure every adult has realized this at some point. But why? That’s the age old question: why are kids so much better at creating fun and enjoy than adults? Immediately the answers everyone’s heard before jump to mind:
“Adults have so much else on their mind we don’t have enough time to use our imagination enough to be able to create like that.”
“Adults are too stressed out to use our imaginations like kids do.”
“Adults have had their imagination quelled by an education system that asks us to do only what we’re told, when we’re told, and discouraged from doing any more.”
Those are all very valid points and all have some merit to them. But I think there’s another reason we don’t create fun like kids do: if we did, we’d be considered insane.
Think about it. We’ve all be bored out of our mind at work before, right? So, what if one day you’re at work, walking down the hall and you look into your friend’s office and you see your friend talking to no one. The first thing you would probably do is assume they have their Blue Tooth in and keep walking. But let’s say you didn’t notice a clunky thing attached to their ear like a giant toomer, making them look like a huge tool, and were surprised.
“Hey Bob,” you say, “you on the phone?”
“Nope, just talking to my friend Jeffery.”
You’re a bit lost…Does Bob have telepathy? You wonder. Cause that would be awesome if he did! “Where’s Jeffery?” you ask.
“He’s right here, standing next to my desk,” Bob says.
There’s definitely no one there…
“I guess you guys have never met,” Bob continues, “I just met Jeffery the other day. Jeffery this is Bob, Bob this is Jeffery…Jeffery says it’s nice to meet you.” Bob then leans across the desk and says, “Jeffery’s a little shy. Takes him a while to warm up to people.”
You know as soon as you left that office, you were going straight to your computer to look up the mental health authorities and have them come take Bob away.
But what if Bob was just really bored and decided to kick it old-school and create an imaginary friend to entertain him? Kids do it all the time and they’re not considered crazy, why should adults?
I’m not saying we should all act like kids all the time (although that would be pretty cool for a couple days.) I’ve watched enough afterschool programs to know that if everyone acted like a kid all the time, society would go into chaos – although the shows are only ever 30 minutes long, so who know, maybe society would have just evened itself out eventually, maybe by the 60 minute mark. What I’m saying is be a little more like kids, sometimes. On those days in the office that there’s nothing to do try creating an imaginary friend. He/She could give you hours of entertainment, and allow you to work on those interpersonal skills your boss has been on you to improve (you scream at one waiter at one corporate lunch and all the sudden your interpersonal skills need improvement. It’s complete BS, I know.) Or maybe organize an office-wide game of hide-and-seek. That’s a game you can play all day and it never gets old, the only reason you stop as a kid is for dinner. Better yet, organize a scavenger hunt! Those things are the shit! Just grab a whole bunch of things: your stapler, a box of push pins, that picture on your wall, your laptop…okay, maybe not your laptop, but still. Grab a bunch of things and hide them around the office, then go tell your co-workers to find them, whoever finds the last thing gets to hide them again.
I think you’ll be surprised how awesome it would make your day.
Filed under: Life
I must first make a confession, I do technically have a job…I cook crabs at a local restaurant. I’ve worked at this restaurant for three summers now, and it’s fine, as a summer job. I was making about $200 a week most of this summer working 4 days a week. Not too shabby. But as of Monday, I only work there two days a week. That’s alright, I think when I get the call, the owners there love my work ethic and had been raving about wanting to get me hours as a bar back. Or at least they had been…I go into the restaurant to see when I’m going to be bar backing and I don’t see my name on the schedule anywhere. I’m going through every day going, “Where am I? Where am I?” And I get to the final day of the month, Halloween, “There I am…awesome…”
The story behind that begins in late August. I was working a job that was just tearing me apart.I was working overnights four times a week, and with working at the restuarant four evenings a week meant that if I wasn’t working I was sleeping, or trying to sleep (I am apparently nearly incapable of sleeping during the day.) During that time all the kids I knew were going back to college, and I desperately wanted to go back there too. So I made a decision. I was moving back to Syracuse and finding a job there. That was my plan, and I was sticking to it. I changed my mind within a few days, realizing that I just wanted to be back in college, but not before my dad found a way to mention to one of the owners that if he wanted to get me hours as a bar back, he would need to do it soon, while I was still here. There are two ways the owner could have taken this: 1) He takes my dad’s advice and gets me the hours while I’m still around (which was my father’s loving intent), or 2) Take offense at the fact that I hadn’t told him yet and stop acknowledging my existence, and give me no hours…Guess which route he seems to have decided to take? So now not only am I only working two days a week cooking crabs, but I’m not getting any hours as a bar back, which I had been counting on to pay my car loan.
Monday was a rough day…
Tuesday couldn’t have been worse than Monday. But it was arguably as bad. I spend all afternoon going around to as many restaurants as I could find that I might want to work at (read: places where a lot of people go) collecting applications to work as a waiter. I could rake as a waiter, but it’s not exactly what I pictured myself doing when I graduated in June, so that’s a little depressing. During the excursion, a cop pulls me over. I literally said out loud, “What did I do? Can you get a ticket for shifting like an asshole?” The cop gets out and comes toward me immediately, which is weird considering how cops like to sit in their car and make you wait what seems like an eternity before they get out and tell you what you did. He tells me my tags had expired. I think to myself, I just got this car, how is that possible? There were no new tags when the new registration showed up. (Apparently the tags had come in two months ago, while I was working overnights, and somehow got lost. My dad said he gave them to me and I understood, I have no recollection of this event) The cop looks at my updated registration and say, “Alright, well this is up to date. Just go to the MVA on your way home and get new stickers.” Great, so not only am I basically out of a job, but now I have to waste my time sitting in the fuckin DMV for two hours to get one lousy sticker. Is there a place that makes people more miserable than standing in line at the DMV? Then I get home and have to fill out eight applications to be a waiter at a restaurant. Not exactly the most uplifting day for someone who just graduated from Syracuse University.
Wednesday. Wednesday has to be better, right? It was, but only because my inability to get a job has reach the level of hilarity. There’s this point when things get so bad that they become comical. It’s the point where hope seems so bleak and fleeting that you suddenly get this perspective and realize that what just happened is so demoralizing, it’s kind of amusing. I reached that point when I went in to hand in an application at Buffalo Wild Wings and the manager interviewed me on the spot. We talked for a few minutes and he says to me, “Well, looking over your application, I can see that you’re a hard worker, but you just don’t have enough experience. To save both of us some time and piece of mind, I’m gonna tell you that we’re going to have to pass on you.” I was told that I don’t have enough experience to wait tables…How absurd is that?
So why am I wasting my time blogging about the hilarious depths my life has sunk to? Shouldn’t I be doing everything I can to get a job? Well, yesterday was apparently the last day of my free trial of Microsoft Word 07. So now I can’t copy and paste my resume into an application because Word won’t let me do anything to my documents. Which also means I can’t write a cover letter for the jobs I want to apply for. I can see the cover letters and resumes I’ve made, but I can’t do anything to them. And if you don’t know what it costs to buy and upload Microsoft Word, it’s $149…My life’s awesome right now…
Filed under: Sports
Congratulations to the Minnesota Twins on making the playoffs with another epic win. That was honestly one of the best baseball games I’ve seen played in a very long time.
And congratulations to the Tigers on blowing a seemingly insurmountable lead with only a month to go. I didn’t think you had it in you, but you never stop amazing me. You guys put everything you had into blowing this one. Well done.
Filed under: Life
So this whole getting a job thing is a real adventure right now. I finally know what I want to do and, of course, I’m not certified to do it, and to get certified is going to take another two years and at least $20,000 from what I can tell.
I want to teach. I want to help kids better themselves, help them learn something about themselves and the world. I mean, I could be a Life Mentor, but who are we kidding, those things are a joke. I went to a “Life Coach” website to see what it takes to be a Life Coach, and here are the steps it told me to take to become a Life Coach: 1) Hire a Life Coach; yea, they told me to hire a life coach myself. In what other industry do they tell you, “To become part of this business, hire us first.”? 2) Get excellent Training; that’s helpful…3) Practice your Coaching Skills and 4) Get Exposure to Prospective Coaching Clients.
Somehow, that seems like a bigger waste of time and money than it would be to actually go back to school to get a Master’s Degree in education so that I can then go and pay hundreds of dollars to take the Praxis exams, which I could pass now if I took them, even without the teaching degree.
I have a plan, though. It’s called Teach for America and their goal is to eliminate the educational inequity across the country by hiring the brightest and most driven students graduating from college and placing them in areas where they need teachers. Now I know I what you’re thinking if you’ve met me, “Neil, you’re not exactly the brightest graduate this year’s class has to offer.” Can’t really disagree there to be honest. But I am the most driven. This is what I want to do. I want to be where there’s a need. Pretty much every job I’ve been in recently I’ve said to my bosses, “Put me where you need me, I can do anything.” And they did.
All I want to do is make a positive difference in kids lives. Why does it have to be so hard?
This blog is basically here for me to rant to anyone and everyone who decide my thoughts are interesting enough. Plus, it’s a pretty good way for an unemployed college graduate to do some shameless self-promotion. I’m going to use this space to talk about whatever I feel like talking about on a given day, but be warned, I have no idea what’s going to be talked about. Some days it’ll be sports, some days it’ll be politics, some days it’ll be quantum mechanics, it all depends on what I’ve been looking at that day. For example, my first rant (and yes, it’s going to be a rant) is going to be on the ridiculousness of M-Theory. And here…we…go:
I’ve become interested in the theories on pretty much everything having to do with theories of the universe, especially theories that try to explain how the universe works and/or began. Needless to say, then, I watch a lot of The Science Channel and Nat Geo and History Channel and there’s this theory that people are focusing on as the new closest thing to a Theory of Everything (which is, of course, the Holy Grail of physics.) The theory is called M-Theory (sort for Membrane Theory, but that’s something for another blog) and the problem it, and hundreds of other theories, have been trying to solve is the question of why is gravity such a weak force compared to the other forces? The other three forces (electromagnetism, atomic forces, and radioactive forces) are all about even in strength, but gravity, for some reason seems to be the quadruplet that didn’t get enough oxygen on its way out of the celestial womb. Why is that? No one’s been able to figure it out. It’s plagued Stephen Hawking for decades now. M-Theory, which is an off-shoot of String Theory, predicts that gravity is so weak because it is the one force that is shared across, wait for it, the 11 dimensions there are (allegedly) in the universe. That’s right, all of you people who were living under the assumption that there are but three dimensions, you are apparently living in the stone-age.
If this theory sounds more like something you might find in a super hero comic book, you are not alone, I’m right there with you. If I have this straight, (I’ve watched numerous shows numerous times trying to make sure I do) the most plausible explanation to unifying Einstein’s theory of relativity (which explains how large objects act in the universe) and quantum mechanics (which tries to explain how the tiniest particles act in the universe) is by adding extra dimensions? That’s a freaking cop-out! You can’t just add new dimensions just because your math doesn’t work! That’s not how science works!
I can just imagine how M-Theory came about, a physicist is sitting at his desk at home, looking at all of his equations and wondering why none of the math ever works out. His son comes into the room and starts telling his dad all about the cartoon he just watched where Superman was sucked into another dimension where he had to fight Bizarro, but he didn’t have his super powers in that dimension because it was the complete opposite of Superman’s dimension. All the sudden the physicist has a eureka moment: “That’s it!” he says, “Other dimensions! What if there were other dimensions beyond the ones we can see? Then they could be sapping gravity from this dimension which would then cause gravity to be weaker here!”
(By the way, how pissed must science fiction writers be? “We’ve been writing about alternate dimensions for years! But did anyone take us seriously? Nooooo. This is some bull$@*^!”)
Does that seem absurd to you? Because it does to me. The problem I have with the theory of alternate dimensions is that we can never prove their existence. M-Theory already states that these dimensions are beyond our grasp of perception. We are basically fish inside a fish tank, unable to realize that there is more outside out three dimensional box of perception. As cool as that sounds, and as realistic as that may be, we can never prove it.
The beauty of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Stephen Hawking’s research on black holes, which he then extended to explain the origins of the universe, is their simplicity. Neither theory rests on any sort of “if…then…” statements to prove their validity. There’s no leap of scientific faith, they are theories that stand up on their own. We’ll never know if M-Theory is right because there’s no way to prove it. So please, all of you physicists who are calling is Science, stop. It’s science fiction. At best.
