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Cough Sneeze Rant

I feel compelled to update, although there is not much to report, unless you all are interested in a detailed and necessarily gross passage on the progression of this nasty cold. You probably are not, so suffice to say that I am really ready to not be sick any more. It has been a week and a half, yo, more if you count the comparatively little cold I had at the beginning of November, which sort of dwindled into ongoing low-level tiredness and crankiness as this new supervirus prepared to take its terrible hold.

There are things I like about being very sick in a sort of twisted way, like how it makes you just stop and say whoa, now, okay then, there’s no way I can fulfill my obligations in this condition, it’s time to call in sick, get taken care of, go limp and respond to the demands of the body. It’s kind of pleasant to get back to basics, and the Puritan in me is soothed by the reassuring thought that I just simply can’t function, it’s not slacking off.* However, this minor source of enjoyment wears thin after a couple of days, and I get impatient with the fact that I can’t do stuff, that work is piling up and I can’t concentrate well enough to get it done.

While I eagerly await the time when my head does not feel as if it is stuffed with cotton, let me take this opportunity to give a shout-out to Josh for taking on more than his share of grocery shopping, dish-doing, cat-wrangling, blanket-getting, and foods-in-the-form-of-a-liquid preparing. He is my heeero. Beep beep hooray!

And on that tip… I don’t know if it is due to some sort of unholy confluence of advertising events, or the fact that I’ve been watching an unusually large quantity of daytime TV, or if I’m just noticing it more right now for some reason, but it seems like there are an awful lot of particularly annoying gender-role commercials floating around out there lately. For example: those dead stupid “Guys like Philly cheese steak – guys like pizza” ads featuring Guys doing Guy Things (video games, hardware store) and responding to the sound of a doorbell with Pavlovian, drooling idiocy. Or the flu-season ads where Mom is sick and Dad cannot dress himself, dress the kids, or make a meal that does not involve a microwave oven, color coding, and pictorial instructions. Or those “Guys’ Night Out” commercials featuring all the fun things you can do when you are with the guys, and not those pesky, always-dieting, how-you-dress-criticizing, makeup-constantly-applying women. Gah.

I know it is nothing new – this sort of thing has been around forever. But why why why do they still make these ads? Do people respond to them? Do men see ads telling them that they are dumb, gross, dirty, and loud and say “Hey, that makes me feel like ordering a pizza?” Do moms see their husbands as helpless bumbling morons and think, “Oh, heavens to Betsy, I had better drug myself up so as to release my man from the unfair burden of knowing anything about his kids or how to use a single household appliance, the better to be a thin-lipped martyr to the cause of Womanhood?” What?

If men see women as their smarter, prettier, better-smelling, but fun-killing, humor-lacking, disapproving counterparts; if women see men as hapless jerks not much better than overgrown children in need of care, well, I guess we are screwed. But what would I know - I guess that since I enjoy burping and farting, like fried food, and don’t wear makeup, I am also a Guy. I mean am I naïve in believing that this gender war bullshit is mostly a sick little problem of our own making?

*The purity of this thought is sullied a bit by the existence of people who go to work on the brink of death, sporting influenza and ebola and all sorts of nasty things, and manage to get all their shit done with a smile. “Oh, I just took a Sudafed, gotta keep on trucking, you know.” I hate you people. Must you both infect the weak (i.e. me) and make us look bad?

Posted by hilatron at November 24, 2003 10:26 AM | TrackBack