Tag Archives: gender

Character

Character: (n) mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual

There are four stop-offs in life.

Each one is available; each one is real. The type of character we derive is determined by whether we allow ourselves to linger or progress.

First, we’re born.

It comes with a whole package of possibilities, and also genetic guidelines. There are those who go no further. They take what they receive
 from their DNA, listen to all training provided, and go through a brief period of rebellion, only to end up greatly resembling those who procreated them.

There’s a second opportunity. It’s called being born again.

Although the term has been limited to a Christian religious experience, it is available to all souls who are weary of the confinement of their childhood.

Some people stop at being born again. They end up with their homespun philosophy and a few extra ideas they add onto their train of thought.

But character does not form from being born or born again. Character begins to take shape when we’re born through pain.

Pain is that status that surrounds us whenever pleasure decides to go away. It reminds us of our weaknesses, it taunts us with our failures, and it takes all of our chromosomal lacking and brings it to the forefront. It is here that we decide to be something instead of letting the circumstances determine what we’re going to be.

Noble souls reach this point and begin to forge a personal definition all their own. They become valuable to the human tribe because they are contributors instead of detractors.

But the final stage is to be born universal.

This is when all name tags, cultures, prejudices and limitations of gender are set aside in favor of the simplicity of enjoying the next person we meet.

This station in life is not only color-blind, but also turns a blind eye to any vision that insists on hurting others or painting a dark picture of the life we’ve been given.

Four stations.

Where will we stop off?

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Bye

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Bye: (n) the transfer of a competitor directly to the next round of a competition in the absence of an assigned opponent

I’m going to take a bye on some things:

  • False praise
  • Political arrogance
  • Religious inflexibility
  • Self-pity
  • Pseudo-intellectualism
  • Pop atheism
  • Self-satisfaction
  • Culture pursuit
  • Racial pride
  • Nationalism
  • Stinginess
  • Gender bashing
  • Nosiness
  • Conservative
  • Liberal
  • Fantasy
  • Destiny
  • Self-gratification
  • Critique
  • Meditation
  • Maturity
  • Selfishness
  • Selfies
  • Self-righteousness
  • Self-almost-anything

I’m taking a bye.

Good-bye.

 

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Bundle

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Bundle: (n) a collection of things, or a quantity of material, tied or wrapped up together.

I only lasted one day on the job. I got confused on what to do, so ended up quitting.

It was a lumber company.

Since I was the newbie, the manager asked me to go out back and find pieces of scrap wood which were about the same length, and bundle them together, tie them off and place them in a pile near the wood shop.

I understood the assignment–at least, I thought I did. But when he returned and I was ready for praise, he immediately began to un-bundle my pieces of wood, explaining that I had put pine in with oak and press board with walnut.

I bungled my bundling.

He had another rule–one which he understood and I didn’t, because after all, it was my first day. He was a little disgusted that I couldn’t tell the difference by texture and color. I thought the only distinction was supposed to be length.

I was wrong.

Truthfully, I run across the same problem every day as I am instructed by society to bundle up people into groups. At first, I thought the only way I was supposed to set them apart was, “These are the nice ones that can be treated nicely and respond well, and these are the meaner ones which require being treated even nicer.”

But they keep changing the rules.

They’ve introduced culture, color, sexual preference, gender, age, political persuasion and religion.

So there’s never really any way to get things bundled. There are too many considerations to adequately discern what should go together and what should be separated.

Bundling is the way we try to put things that are similar into one unit.

But of course, if we don’t accept the fact that similarity is possible, we will just end up being scattered wood.

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Boy

j-r-practix-with-border-2Boy: (n) a male child or young man.

The ultrasound.

It’s when the doctor or nurse tells the parents whether they’re going to have a boy or a girl.

How is it determined?

The boy has a penis, the girl doesn’t.

It is an effective way of confirming sexuality before birth.Dictionary B

Yet it is a terrible way of illuminating humanity after birth.

For you see, we begin to do additional ultrasounds on our children throughout their upbringing.

  • Are they playing with the right toys?
  • Are the young men rough and tumble and the girls feminine and meek?
  • Are they crossing lines which connote there may be some ambiguity?

We silently push all of our children toward sexual stereotypes instead of trying to allow them to become human beings.

It is my contention that the penis and the vagina will find each other without us turning it into a cultural mandate.

What we should be doing is teaching our children how to be human.

We should be sharing the beauty of cooperation and the power of respect.

We should stop being afraid of blurring the lines between the male and female, and realize that the wall we’ve built betwixt them is the atrocity.

I was born a boy.

I struggled with my manhood, and now, by the grace of God… I am discovering my humanity.

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Bond

Bond: (v) to be joined securely to something else

Putting my shoes on.Dictionary B

It’s a confirmation that I’m heading somewhere–usually out the door.

So footwear has a special significance to me. It tells me I’m ready. It tells me I’m going to be moving from my place of personal sanctuary into the coliseum of fellow-gladiators.

At that point, I need to understand one immutable reality: I must bond.

  • I must find a reason to get along with others.
  • I must be looking for commonality.
  • I must carry a pocketful of logic to pay the toll on a highway of misunderstanding.
  • I must realize that even though the humans around me may put on ugly masks or disguise themselves behind clown noses, beneath all that fakery is another soul not so different from me.
  • I must penetrate color.
  • I must be able to incorporate another gender.

I must find the bond … or stop being surprised that the whole damn world seems unglued.

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Bitch

Bitch: (n) a female dog, wolf, fox, or otter.

Dictionary B

Her name was Mrs. Calvert.

She was my seventh grade science teacher.

The reason I remember her name so well is that she was constantly telling people how to pronounce it, even though it was not particularly difficult to speak.

She also had another annoying practice. She decided, since I was a fat boy, that I had limited ability. So when she took the class to the science museum, she explained to me–in front of everyone else–that there was an elevator available if I didn’t feel I could climb all the stairs.

I was not only humiliated, but was targeted by my classmates for further ridicule.

It was devastating. She was a fat bigot.

But if you had asked her, she would have merely shared her concern for my well-being.

It is exactly the same way I think America handles gender.

We “Calvert” it.

Yes, just like Mrs. Calvert, we have privately decided what men and women can do, and if anyone tries to step out of their compartment and suggest otherwise, we have names for them.

If a man selects to be more sensitive and open to the female perspective, we view him as “pre-gay.” In other words, maybe not a part of the club, but sympathetic to the rules.

If a woman chooses to compete and be more aggressive, she is deemed to be a bitch.

Let me explain the full range of the use of the word bitch:

It can be “any woman who disagrees with a man” all the way through “any woman who insists on having equal rights.”

You can always tell when you’re in the presence of stupidity.

It is a group of people who find a nasty word to describe a whole bunch of folks so they don’t have to deal with the real issues.

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Bimbo

Bimbo:(n) an attractive but empty-headed young woman, especially one perceived as a willing sex object

Dictionary B

The vernacular of vitriol.

Yes–I’m talking about those words and phrases which are tossed off to quickly communicate our disdain, dislike or disapproval of some group of people.

It does not take long to get the pulse of the heartbeat of prejudice.

For instance, when it comes to referring to fat people, we have:

  • Fatso
  • Fat butt
  • Fat ass
  • Fat head

Now, consider the vernacular of vitriol when it comes to skinny. Not as many choices, huh?

So you see, society has decided who should be targeted and how they should be attacked. Never is this any more evident than in a discussion about the genders.

Insults given to men often are received as compliments:

  • Macho
  • Big thug
  • Lunk
  • Muscle-brain

As you can see, each one might be considered a negative–except in the ears of he who actually possesses the attributes.

But when it comes to women, it’s much more pointed:

  • Nag
  • Bitch
  • Air-head
  • And of course, bimbo

So we take a human soul who may be a bit more innocent, less traveled or even purposefully refusing to be jaded, and we target her as good for nothing but sexual pleasure.

It is a dangerous practice which is pursued daily in our country with discrimination and bigotry.

After all, no one ever refers to a white bastard. We prefer black bastard.

We will never uproot prejudice in our country until we gently and intelligently take a microscope to the twisted language of meanness.

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Anglo

dictionary with letter A

Anglo: (n) a white, English-speaking American as distinct from a Hispanic American.

What if there is no such thing as distinct?

I contend that we live in a self-defeating society. In the pursuit of honoring two separate concepts, which are contrary to one another, we end up with human beings who are contrary to one another.

The two concepts are:

  1. We are all individuals and unique unto ourselves
  2. We need to get along or we’re going to destroy each other.

Everyone knows that to get along, it is important to discover similarities. So if we’re constantly separating ourselves off with names, doctrines, political parties, gender, sexuality, color, age and taste in food, we are basically proclaiming that finding common ground is a futile task.

So what’s it gonna be? Are we going to revel in our little clump of individuality or are we going to discover a way to keep from destroying our world?

I personally think it would be more fiscally responsible to avoid annihilation. That’s just me. But to do so, we have to get away from identifying ourselves as Anglo, Hispanic, African-American, female, male, Coke or Pepsi.

Nothing truly significant is determined by stating that you’re any one of those compartments. For after all, there are:

  • Bad women and there are good women.
  • Excellent men and real losers.
  • Dynamic Hispanics and fairly worthless ones.
  • African-Americans which contribute to the success of life, and those who don’t.
  • Anglos who find a reason to get along with others and those who segregate.

I could go on and on. The criterion for human quality has to be something that is not visual, but rather, spiritual.

If we can establish that–that each one of us was granted a living soul–we can not only find similarities, but we can also begin to ignore our foolish differences.

So I don’t like words like “Anglo.” I don’t like to be identified as white, bald, fat, male, Republican or Democrat.

If you would ignore everything but the human eyes and peer into them, you would realize … that we all look the same.

 

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Aerosol

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter AAerosol: (n) a substance enclosed under pressure and able to be released as a fine spray, typically by means of a propellant gas.

It was called Right Guard. It was a man’s deodorant.

So many of my buddies who played football with me sprayed the stuff in the locker room that I felt I could just walk through, flap my arms and meet my deodorant need–because even though you aimed it directly at your pit area, it sprayed in a three-foot circumference, creating a great “cloud of witness” and confirmation of your sweet odor.

Another nice thing is that because it was in a spray can–aerosol–you could aim it at nooks and crannies on your body which shall remain nameless for the sake of propriety.

At the tail end of my showering experience with members of my own gender, it was suddenly discovered that these aerosol cans were polluting the environment, and were perhaps even dangerous for us to inhale repeatedly, threatening lethal conclusions.

So another great pleasure of Americana was ripped away by researchers who think a white coat is stylish.

We started using roll-ons. Speed stick.

It may have been at that point that some of the backbone that is supposed to be fused into the male of our species was removed–because once you start putting on girly deodorant instead of walking around in a purple haze of Right Guard, you begin to deteriorate in your confidence to be a stud.

Of course, this is just a theory.

  • Maybe Richard Nixon wouldn’t have wimped out and lied about Watergate if he was still spraying his underarms.
  • Or maybe our football team would have actually had a winning season if we weren’t putting creamy stuff in our pit hair.
  • Maybe men would be able to communicate better with women if they felt that all their hidden parts  were being “Right Guard-ed.”
  • Maybe women wouldn’t be so dissatisfied with their lives with men if the bathroom had TWO deodorants instead of the couple sharing an “ice-blue Secret.”

I know it’s ridiculous–but it’s also absolutely frivolous and stupid to think that everything on earth does not have SOME mission to kill us, if misused.

For instance, give me a bathroom spray that explodes with a gas of beautiful odor instead of trickling out after I get done using the pot. I want the whole room to smell like flowers, so no one will exactly know what I did in there.

(I also like Right Guard because it’s the position I played on the team.)

Adler, Alfred

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Adler, Alfred (1870 – 1937): Austrian psychologist and psychiatrist who disagreed with Freud’s idea that mental illness was caused by sexual conflicts in infancy, arguing that society and culture are significant factors. Adler introduced the concept of the inferiority complex.

Adler just wasn’t sexy.

You see, that’s the problem with humanity. It’s not that I’m a prude and object to sexualizing. Anything as vastly accepted, recognized and universally shared as sex is undoubtedly has across-the-board appeal.

But if you mention Sigmund Freud in front of the psychiatric community thinking that you are being wise and inventive, you might need to be prepared to be ridiculed for your lack of information. Making everything in life about sex is like insisting that pornography is a rite of passage for discovering how to interact with members of the opposite gender.

Adler had two major problems: he took away the sexiness AND he inserted the need to question ourselves on whether we felt inferior.

That last one’s a killer. That’s why people aren’t making movies about Adler, but every once in a while Freud gets stuck in because he gave us license to explore our strangeness and foibles by blaming our mother and father for a lack of warmth which caused us to become perverted.

That’s the difference. Freud gave us somebody to blame. Adler made people take personal responsibility for their own actions, their own culture, their own environment and their own feelings of insecurity.

Honestly, which one would YOU choose?

But somewhere along the line, in order for a society to grow out of being stuck in adolescence, people have to admit that they might just be their own worst problem. Yes, maybe our parents were not very good. After all the position comes with neither a manual nor any natural inclinations, contrary to popular opinion.

What we do at age thirty-five needs to cease to have anything to do with what happened to us at age four. Otherwise, we pass on the impression that everyone in the world is really sick, waiting for a diagnosis to come along and rationalize erratic behavior.

Adler may have had a whole lot more on the ball because he asked people to trace ALL the factors of their lives, and also to consider that taking a back seat to others is a personal decision rather than a permanent position.

Freud, on the other hand, made everything about erogenous zones and how we feel deprived, which caused us to act out as little children.

So we have to STOP being “children in the marketplace”–grow up, forgive the failures of our families, and start allowing ourselves to inhabit a persona which is ours alone and not at the mercy of the indiscretions of others.

Yes, if our society does not grow out of its “teenager phase, ” we will continue to throw tantrums, lie and never get our homework done.

And when the homework is not done, the national need will never be met.