Group Behavior

Fall Commencements this year were simple, and slow, and the greatest challenge was staying awake, mostly because I got two long days, four straight shifts, of easy, sit-down, out-of-the-way positions.

But what struck me this year, this round, as it often does while ushering football games and other events, is that people in groups are odd, by which I mean, "mildly amusing and completely understandable." If there is a line, they will stand in it, even if there is an open door with no line in clear sight and only a couple of feet away. They will also, like other herd animals, stay if everyone else is staying and leave if everyone else is leaving.

Oh yeah, and I also was reminded that, much like in "My Finest Hour," much can be accomplished with the decisive action that other more experienced supervisors are unwilling to take.

So, you know, the bottom line is, it was chilly, windy, rainy, and other -y words, and at the end of the last of five University Commencements over two days, the crowd was reluctant to leave the building, though the building staff were more than willing to put a cork on this series of events and head home to their families. I was not working in a supervisory capacity, and I felt that I should defer to those who were, but I realized that those who were really had no intention to do very much. So I moved through the masses crowding the concourse, and shouted (in the voice that I've discovered can be so much louder than so many others'), "Folks, I don't mean to push you out into the cold, but we're trying to clear the building, so if y'all can start winding up conversations, and taking last pictures, we'd very much appreciate it. Thank you!"

I wandered through about 2/3 of the concourse, repeating this message, stopping to play photographer for various family groups so that no one would be left out of the shot, and thanking people for coming. After just a few minutes, the concourse was virtually clear.

No, there's not much point to this story, but I do want it acknowledged that I saved the University, possibly, $200 or $300 in payroll expenses by my bold and valiant actions this evening. That is all.

Summon

333 words for the Trifecta Writing Challenge, with apologies because I've been reading The War Against Boys and The Decline of Males and thinking about my maleness.

The sun rises; the cool, humid air surrounds us. 24,000 of us shuffle restlessly together at the starting line. We are a gathering marked with a distinctive, festival atmosphere, a nervous, anticipatory energy. The emcee bawls cheerfully into the microphone; his rich, basso voice is familiar from a half-dozen other similar events, his cheerfulness and affability carefully cultivated and laid out upon the script that rests before him. He acknowledges sponsors. He calls shout-outs to regulars on the running circuit. People stretch; people chat. Music thumps.

The balance between hydration and urination is a carefully orchestrated affair. Bottles of water, bottles of sports drinks, carefully mixed concoctions of powders, liquids, and gels, are quaffed. Lines form at the port-o-pots; the slamming of plastic doors punctuates the hum of conversation. The nervous move directly from the port-o-pots to the end of the lines again until at last the emcee calls us all to the starting line.

And now, not too close to the front or to the back, I anxiously adjust my hat, my headphones, and I think, “I should stretch.” I lift one leg, then the other. I shuffle from foot to foot. I bounce a few times, showing off, perhaps, or maybe relieving a little tension.

“I’m not a runner,” I tell myself at these moments. “Why am I doing this?”

“Yes, I am,” I answer back. “What is a runner but someone who runs?”

“No,” I say. “I’m a fat man, an asthmatic. This is silly.”

“And yet,” I reply, “here I am. Again.”

The emcee begins the countdown to the starting gun, and I think back to the million years of evolution that has produced me, this man, this body, this collection of tissues and chemicals. I try to imagine myself, the Neanderthal, the warrior of a thousand ancient tribes, the hunter chasing down his prey, spear in hand. I summon the strength and speed and desire of the caveman from whom I am barely an eye-blink removed.

I run.

Hallowed Evening

I'm supposed to be working, but my VPN access is in limbo while I wait for a new part-time job (mostly a title change) to come through. So here I am, sticking my toes back in Velvet Verbosity's "100 Words" pond:

The neighborhood is dark now, and quiet, conspicuously lacking in Halloween ghosts, ghouls, and other assorted monsters. There is nothing out there to mark this as a special night, as anything more than just another Friday. The house is quiet, too. In the silence, though, I still hear the doorbell ringing, the cries of “Trick or Treat!” the noise, the electric atmosphere that used to put the cats on edge. The boy is grown now, and the neighborhood has grown, too, aging quietly, waiting for a new round of kids to come and bring this magical night back to life.

On Being a Hardass in a Management Position

As I may have mentioned, I supervise a gate at the big football stadium. Some days, I struggle to remember that the cantankerous few are greatly outnumbered by the cheerful, polite, and sometimes even grateful many. I was called "my guardian angel" by a woman who had traveled 600 miles with her two kids to attend the game. They arrived during halftime, and the "visiting team will call" window had already closed, leaving them unable to pick up their tickets. I let the three of them in anyway, and later, when they were leaving, I told them where they could find their team's bus. Earlier in the day, helping someone find their wheelchair-accessible seating, I was told, "thank you so much; last game no one could tell us how to get to our seats and it took us almost 2 hours to find them."

But, then again, I was also called an "asshole."

One man, who was told by the bag checkers that he could not bring in an item that's clearly listed on the "prohibited items" sign, called me over, harangued me for over 5 minutes, and berated me for "coming up with ridiculous and arbitrary rules," for "failing miserably to inform the public about those rules," and for being "in a management position and not willing to make an exception" for him.

Then he asked me for a favor.

I chuckled about the "in a management position" comment. I make a whopping $2/hour more for being the guy who gets yelled at, so for yesterday, I earned about $15 more than the usher who simply calls me over whenever the going gets tough. I was polite; I was apologetic; I stood firm on the prohibited item. And then I did him the favor, finding him a clean, empty plastic bag that he could use. He snatched it out of my hand. He definitely did not say, "thank you."

Not 10 minutes later, an usher waved me over because he didn't know what the "Invalid Date" message on his ticket scanner meant. I pointed out that the ticket he had scanned was for next week's game. The following conversation took place, not with the student who had brought the wrong ticket, but with her drunk, belligerent friend:

"This is ridiculous! She has all the tickets! Why can't you just let her in?"

"Because she didn't bring the ticket for this game."

"But she bought the whole season! You're being a hardass!"

"If you went to the Taylor Swift concert and tried to get in with a ticket for the WWE show, you wouldn't be able to get in, either."

"What the hell is a WWE?"

"I'm just saying for any event, you need the right ticket to get in. She can go to that student box office right over there and have them reprint her ticket for a $10 fee, or she can go to the library and print it herself for free. Or she can stand here with you while you continue to argue with me about it, but that's still not going to get her into the game."

"You're an asshole!"

"Thank you very much. My supervisors are right over there in that office; you're welcome to go tell them all about me."

"I will!"

It's amazing to me how many people think that insulting me and calling me names is going to convince me to bend the rules for them. Being nice is almost always a more effective strategy.

I love this job.

Being a Boy and Being a Man

I grabbed a book to read while Thumper bounced his ass off at Extreme Fun this morning, and because it's been on my shelf for 10 or more years, and I've never read it, I picked Christina Hoff Sommers' The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.

Now, before you get worked up over the term "Misguided Feminism," I think the essence of the book, that perhaps the author didn't choose to represent in the title because provocative turns of phrase are just plain good marketing, is that improving the academic standing of girls does not necessarily have to come at the expense of boys, and vice versa.

I bought this book years ago, when I was still thinking about the novel that I started to write but never finished as part of my Honors Program Creative Writing directed study in 1996 or thereabouts, a project I was still thinking about finishing in 2000 or so when I bought the book. The idea occurred to me, through the fervor of political correctness that permeated the University atmosphere throughout the '90's, that men in general, and white men in particular, were the villains of the historic and cultural tale that we were told, and how that indoctrination into our own villainy would affect us in the long term. It was supposed to be a novel about the marginalization of men, the irrelevance of men in family and cultural life.

So, anyway, here I am, 11 or 12 years later, a man in a non-traditional gender role, happily married to a woman who is happy with the value of the contributions that I make to our family, trying to teach my son how to be a good man, (despite the accusations of chauvinism that may now and again be raised against me), and I picked up this book. Having finished only 50 or 60 pages, I'm not in a position to say anything meaningful about the book itself, but it's certainly timely as I try to navigate the rough waters of playground etiquette and aggression.

A couple of weeks ago, Thumper ended a thoroughly pleasant play date by punching his best friend in the face. Most play dates or other excursions to playgrounds, bounce houses, and other places where children gather, involve some discussion, sooner or later, about not hitting, about being nice, about not taking toys from other kids. This, according to the book, is exactly the kind of aggressive behavior inherent in boys that the "shortchanged girls in public school" movement believes must be actively "re-socialized" if women are to make significant progress in this society. Sommers seems to assert that that progress has already been made, and then some, but that's not really the point.

Ultimately, though, I don't think raising a boy is so different from raising a girl, as far as trying to teach them to fit into the social order. Do we not all try to teach our kids to be nice to each other? Maybe for boys it's teaching your son not to punch his friend in the face while for girls it's teaching your daughter not to ostracize, or ridicule, or manipulate, or I don't know, whatever the little girl version of not being nice is. I don't believe in the pathology of masculinity, the idea that without intervention, the average man will likely become a predator of women. I believe in the value of teaching my son to be proud of strength and speed and skill, to work to improve these things in himself, to want to play games where scores are kept and winners declared. And I believe that these things can be taught while also teaching him not to punch his best friend in the face, to remind him that he does not want to be hit, or have toys taken away from him, and so he should not hit, or take toys away from, others.

I do not accept that masculinity is defined as a thirst for power and dominion, and that if it is not quelled early, it will develop into a destructive force.

I also hope that he can get through school without feeling marginalized, undervalued, despised, feared, or ignored.

Pride, Hopefully Without the Fall

Thumper has grown so much this year, that the bike that was a perfect fit for him a little over a year ago:



is now too tiny for him. The other bike that he spent so much time on last summer:



is also too tiny for him. We worked a deal with the neighbors across the street, who have 3 boys, 2 of whom are younger than Thumper, trading our 12" bike that's too small for Thumper for their 16" bike that's too big for their 2 youngest. Perfect! Except that the front inner tube keeps exploding. At first, I thought it was the unbelievable heat that builds up in the garage when it's 108 degrees outside, but why would it apply only to that one tire on that one bike? Then I thought maybe it was a rough edge inside the rim, but I ran my fingers all the way around inside the rim and inside the tire and felt nothing. About a week and a half ago, we shortened the lives of a handful of moms at the sand pit when the front tire of the bike he rode from the parking lot suddenly, dramatically, exploded. Two of them hit the deck like battle-weary veterans, scanning the horizon for the sniper in the grass. After carrying a huge, exhausted 4-year-old, a flat-tired bike, and a bag full of sand toys back to the car, I was absolutely done with that bike, returning it to the owners the same day and heading to the local Goodwill to find Thumper a 16" bike of his own.

So after replacing dramatically blown tubes on that bike 4 times, plus one of his tricycle's tubes, plus one of his balance bike's tubes so that we can pass it down to a friend, plus both the front tire and inner tube on his new bike, I'm done with bicycle tire repair. I've spent more on tires and inner tubes in the last 6 weeks than I have on all of his bikes combined.

But it was all worth it today.

Yesterday, I replaced 2 inner tubes and one tire on his various wheeled conveyances, leaving just 15 or 20 minutes to ride bikes before dinner. He loved his new bike so much that he declared he wanted to ride bikes every day, a desire he hasn't expressed since last summer. This afternoon, we left a little more time for bike riding in the afternoon, enjoying the fact that it's only 95 at the day's peak instead of 108. After riding around for a bit in the dead-end, I asked him if he wanted to ride to the local park, about a mile-and-a-half away. He thought it was a fabulous idea. I warned him it was kind of a long way; he had no doubts. So off we pedaled.

And instead of the inner tube, it was me that burst. With pride. Repeatedly. He pedaled and pedaled. He talked and talked. He reminded me so much of that kid in the triathlon right before Thumper was born that I almost teared up. He looked for cars at each of the street crossings and checked with me to make sure it was OK to cross. He kept right on going all the way, without getting bored or tired. He lit up with pride each time I told him how impressed I was that he was riding so far.

"You didn't know I could ride so far, did you Dad?"

No, my son, I didn't.

By the time we got there, he'd ridden 2.16 miles. Under his own power, without stopping or complaining. After we played for almost an hour, he was even willing to pedal home again, but (of course!) my front tire was flat, so Aerie picked us up on our walk home.

I am stunned by the power of my love and pride for this boy, and how it contrasts daily with my annoyance and guilt.

An Odd Way to Treat Your Beloved Mascot

Did you know that The University of Texas at Austin cooked and ate its first mascot, Bevo, in 1920, serving part of it to its chief rival, A&M College of Texas, who had stolen and branded its hide with the score of the 1915 rivalry game?

You can't make this stuff up. It will be sad to see the Aggies move out of the Big 12. With them gone, who will we make fun of? Baylor?

"How do you get a one-armed Baylor Bear out of a tree?"

"Wave."

Sigh. No, it's just not going to be the same.


http://www.texassports.com/trads/bevo.html