Making It Up As I Go Along #240

MONDAY…
--- Downtown with mom and dad. We do the canal and have a snack at a patio in the Market. After that it’s around the house with Melissa and her folks visiting in the evening.

TUESDAY…
--- End of the six day weekend and it felt like only a couple of days. Bought new glasses with mom and dad’s input… should get them by the weekend.
--- Drop mom and dad off at the airport in the early afternoon. It was a nice visit with them here.

WEDNESDAY…
--- Busy day at the office. And a typical day shift day with me having a nap after work.

THURSDAY…
--- Little sleep and a busy day moving CNI back to the first floor. It all makes for a bit of a tricky day.
--- After work nap and squash… and I stink at squash tonight. A few good moments but I beat nobody and seem to run out of gas or something.

FRIDAY…
--- Sort of busy day at work. Some wet snow through the morning and evening and I have to scrape the car for the first time this season.
--- An easy going night with some groceries and e-mail writing and baseball on TV.

SATURDAY…
--- Quiet day. But I should feel a little unwanted. The business world has been known to hustle for your business but, in the last week, I’ve been ignored by Toyota when it comes to getting my replacement driver’s side mirror… and now the same goes with my glasses. A call saying they were ready for yesterday… I go in to see only sunglasses ready. They say both pairs will be ready by 4:00 Saturday and that they’ll call me then… the call never comes. Businesses, as reliable as… well… as… umm… well they aren’t very reliable at all. Anyway, I call them… go get the new specs… and now I realize that my eyes were getting a fair bit worse… good change.
--- Little Stevey Harper was at it again this week. I’ll call him Little Stevey cause he’s saying very adolescent things. When a Liberal candidate claims an individual Israeli attack on a Lebanese town was a war crime, that doesn’t give the Prime Minister free reign to claim the entire Liberal party is anti-Israeli. And anyway, claiming an act was a war crime has nothing to do with overall support. Support for an ally doesn’t include blindly supporting everything that ally does. Little Stevey would be a dangerous player on the world stage if Canada had any real say in world events. This is one time I’m glad Canada has a small voice cause Stevey is an embarrassment with his generalizations.


Grandpa Simpson Said it Best
I find image a fascinating thing. Everybody has some level of concern regarding their image. Even those that claim they don’t care about image are portraying a particular image. The fact is, no matter what you do in this world, there will be an image of you that others will pick up on. Sometimes it’s the image you wish to give off, and other times it’s not. And acceptance of different images are always changing.

An example of the change of image acceptance is found in the world of rap and hip hop music. Back when I was in high school, this was seen as a purely black form of music. The thought of white rappers was on par with the black country singer.

Still, some in our school wanted to be seen as a rapper. They didn’t rap though… they just liked the image of it. So you’d see white Newfoundlanders trying to dress and talk like black men from the ghettos of American cities.

To the credit of most, we saw this as people trying to be something they aren’t. They were being fake and caught up in an image rather than reality and, like any respectful high school student would, we put them in their place.

Ridicule, shunning, physical abuse all acted as deterrents to the black wannabes. They were made to reform or their lives would be hell.

Today, the wannabes have won the war. It’s now okay to be a white hip hop or rap performer. To be from suburban, white Canada and to try to live like the downtown, black American has now been seen as a form of acceptable expression.

Does this make us better for being tolerant or accepting of other styles and beliefs? Or does it make us more superficial and searching for our identity through the mainstream media? Probably it’s a bit of both.

Changes in images go beyond music. Sports have also seen a shift in style.

Once upon a time, an athlete was expected to show class, sportsmanship, and manliness. Today, we see trash talking at an all time high with the sports journalists, by in large, supporting the practice. And we see a change in what makes a man… well… a man.

Maurice Richard was thrown in the box for two minutes for “looking so good.” This was during his time selling a hair product that covered grey hair. Even then, Richard took some heat for it… real men didn’t put products in their hair. If they went grey, they went grey and others would support their manhood.

Today, hair products have been overtaken by sexual enhancement drugs. Last night, I watched the home opener for the Montreal Canadiens (Ironically enough, Maurice Richard’s team). At the boards, to the right of centre… for the entire TV world to see… was a banner for Viagra. Twenty years ago, an athlete talking about needing sexual help in the form of a pill would be thrown in the corner and beaten for his weakness. This would fall under the same cloud as homosexuality in the sporting world. After all, athletes are virile men.

Have we become more tolerant when it comes to the athlete? I guess we have to a degree. But again, it falls under what’s acceptable. In the same way that we now accept trash talk and classless behaviour, we accept the fact that an athlete will endorse a product (any product) to make an extra buck. Selling Viagra is now seen as being no different than selling a Ford truck. So maybe we’ll see Wayne Gretzky jump from the automobile world to that of the bedroom… and then we’ll be in for a real treat.

Some images flat out lie. Body building is supposed to show strength and health. But the reality of it is that of supreme superficiality. Tanning beds, drugs and nutritional supplements are as key to that way of life as training. Men all strive to be black in the same way that Michael Jackson has become white and many women are expected to get their boobs done so that they can still be seen as feminine. Neither image comes off as very healthy to me.

And when you think of it, body builders once held the image of being among the most manly of all men… but some of their main concerns now are enough tanning time at the salon, shaving their bodies, and putting blonde highlights in their hair.

Talking about shaving male bodies (a topic I never thought I’d write about… and I feel slightly disturbed having written the phrase “talking about shaving male bodies”) what’s with the increased desire to shave anyway? Most men on TV have hairless chests now. Come to think of it, they have hairless legs too. Will we start seeing evening television with a heterosexual man running a razor down his leg in a bubble bath?

How is it that men who behave more and more feminine are becoming more and more desired by women? Twenty years ago, if you shaved your chest you were seen as a pansy and too worried about the superficial. Today, you’ll get the girl. It’s all quite confusing for those of us trying to “keep it real”.

It all reminds me of a Simpson’s quote. And it pretty well speaks for how I view this entire image makeover that we’re seeing in society. Grandpa Simpson put it so eloquently when he said…

“I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was… now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’… and what’s ‘it’ is weird and scary to me.”

Bless the Simpson’s.