My 24 year old beard-growing, fashionably-anxious, pretensions-bookreader of a coworker asks me as we are stacking baby clothes. I know he wants me to say something classical to balance out the paperback modernity of our less pretensions colleague. Or even better; The Infinite Jest.
"I don't have time to read. It's taken me 2 weeks so far to get half way through 'A social history of outrageous fashion'."
I'll live up to expectation another day. For now I quite like that he imagines my life to be a fast pace opium den full of men playing guitars. But fiction never drew me in as much as facts...
"..copycat female undergraduates has taken up smoking and so mimicking the superior sex. If the fashion for women wearing trousers ever extended to the college, men, in order to preserve the difference between the sexes, will be driven to wearing kilts!"
- master of Trinity college Cambridge,1936
It strikes me sometimes that being a man is mainly defined by not being a woman. Not wearing the same clothes. Not talking or behaving the same. Sometimes I wonder if that is the reason why so many of our generation resort to silence. Women can do so many things now that being "a man" is becoming being nothing? I have known literally 3 men in my life that didn't clam up in silence as a defence mechanism in the face of emotions or difficulty. 3 men in my whole life. Is disconnecting in silence really the last thing that's reserved for men now that we've got aggression AND trousers? I can safely assume one of the reasons I find silence so incomprehensible is that one of the 3 is my father. But I also remember how his need to speak made him weak in other peoples eyes. Silence leads to disconnect, to thoughts of being alone and to wishing for a fucking cabin in the woods. No one likes the strong silent man because he isn't strong, he is a half formed person in a fragile exoskeleton of masculinity and strength is no where near as loveable as warmth.
In the 'social history of outrageous fashion' is 50% dudes telling women how to be more attractive, more loveable. I think we should flip that one around because I am so sick of the silence and the exoskeletons. It's impossible to truly care for someone who constantly tries to disconnect or be different or think opposites attract (such a blatantly patriarchal saying btw) instead of finding common ground but somehow it's still expected. It is not in my nature. It's just a fucking disappointment.
All I can do is tell my son every day that he is loved and his feelings are important and that more words are better than less and that listening and talking go together like a dance. And much like "no glove no love" I'll just have to hope it makes more sense in the future.
"No time to read?! See, this is why I'll never have children, I'm just a selfish bastard that way"
Leaves with a teasing smile.
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