Take it Like a Man

"Cowboys are just like a pile of rocks- everything happens to them.  They get climbed on, kicked, rained and snowed on, scuffed up by the wind.  Their job is 'just to take it'."
                                                                                                              -Gretel Ehrlich, About Men

As a male, my role in society has been made very clear to me: I am meant to stay steady as rock, bottling up all of my emotions and letting the women in my life do the crying. Any emotion that I feel should not be expressed, but instead locked up in the deep dark cavern that exists where my heart should be. When men hang out in groups they are supposed to relax and play manly games like pool or ping pong.  For the typical group of women, a conversation is more of an emotional ping pong, where feelings are traded back and forth endlessly in a game that no one loses. Women are often seen having deep and intellectual conversations over tea as they nibble on crumpets and address each other as "Your Majesty." The last deep conversation a group of men ever had ended in them drunkenly deciding to get misspelled "Ghandi" quotes tattooed their forearms.

This is the way society says it has to be; however, I think it's only fair to question why it has to be this way. Some may argue that the media is to blame for way that men have to be so emotionally guarded.  Others might argue that traditional gender roles and family values are to blame. Though the list of reasons for these stereotypes may be as vast and endless as outer space, it seems more important to focus on ignoring them, and focus on a creating a world where both men and women can feel it is acceptable to express themselves in whatever way they choose.

In Defense of Vegas Weddings

In "Marrying Absurd," Joan Didion criticizes Las Vegas Weddings for their tackiness and insincerity. She admittedly does an excellent job of painting a vivid picture of the brides in "orange minidress[es]" and the "stained-glass paper windows" that represent how truly cheap and meaningless these marriages can be. However, she fails to consider the positive sides to the Vegas Wedding, of which I think there are many, depending on the circumstances.

First off, I must clarify that those who spontaneously decide to get married after a night of drinking really are not the ones I'm defending.  While these marriages may sometimes end up working out, I must admit that these are almost never a good idea and under these specific circumstances, I would have to mostly agree with Didion.

However, there are other situations where the Vegas Quickie Wedding may be the perfect choice.  For a couple that is sure that they want to spend the rest of their lives together, but don't have the money for a big wedding, the Las Vegas Wedding is a cheap and easy way to make it official without breaking the bank.  For a couple that is madly in love and feels that the love they have is special enough without having to deal with all of the extra wedding hoopla, Vegas is the perfect place to have a nice, private wedding and then go enjoy some quality vacation time with the one you love. And lastly, for a couple that is entering their Golden Years and maybe is on their 2nd or 3rd marriage, they would want nothing more than to just hop in their car and hit the drive thru marriage stand on their way home so they could just get the formality over with and get on to spending all the years they have left with the one they truly love. 

The Want of Money

In the very first line of his essay, "On the Want of Money," William Hazlitt makes the bold statement that "Literally and truly, one cannot get on well in the world without money." As soon as I read this line I was taken aback.  It was hard for me to focus on the rest of the essay because I couldn't help but let my mind wander thinking about that very first line.

What impacted me most about this statement was how it summarized everything that life could possibly ever be about: the need for money.  Although it's kind of a sad realization, the truth is that no one could possibly ever be happy without money.  Even if someone were to say that they don't need a fancy house or a nice car to be happy, they still need at least some money in order to just stay alive. Someone who showers the with themselves with material things most likely does it because they feel empty inside but, on the other side of the coin, being starving, broke, and homeless is an even worse way to live out your life.

When I think I about the future, I constantly worry about how I'm going to balance going to a good college, starting a family, and having a career I actually care about while still making enough money to survive. I would love more than anything to become a professional musician and tour around the world but I know that even if that dream did somehow come true I wouldn't have the time to start a family and I probably wouldn't even make that much money.  The harsh reality of becoming a musician is that I will probably never make enough money to be happy if do nothing else but that. The only way to make a sufficient amount of money is to compromise in some way, most likely by getting a job I don't really like just stay afloat and support my family. In reality, money doesn't create happiness, but rather the need for money limits it.

Consider the Sausage

While reading the article "Consider the Lobster," I was reminded of a movie I saw recently: Seth Rogan's Sausage Party. Sausage Party tells the story of a hot dog named Frank who has been told all of his life that his purpose in life is to leave the grocery store he lives in and enter "The Great Beyond," where food can go to live out the rest of their lives in happiness.  However, he eventually discovers the truth of what happens in "The Great Beyond" as he hears accounts of the brutal mutilation of some of his friends. Like the lobster piece, Sausage Party tackles the idea of how grotesque the cooking and preparation of food can be. Even though this movie mainly deals with the "lives" of processed and non-living foods, the message of both is the same: that there are many moral considerations when it comes to consuming living things. 

Similar to the graphic images in Sausage Party (seen above), David Foster Wallace uses rather haunting descriptions of how a lobster reacts when it is being boiled.  He describes how they "sometimes try to cling to the container's sides... like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof," and how "you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off."  Both of these accounts left me mortified and got me to see the idea of cooking and eating animals in a whole new light. While I don't think I could give up eating meat all together, I know I'll never be able to cook a lobster without Wallace's haunting words running through my mind.