Guyside: A brief self-congratulatory pause
I don’t set out to make Guyside the “what’s happening with Bob” column. Because really, how many people would care. But today, I want to talk about me a little.
In the winter, I was looking forward to cycling season, and I happened upon a brochure for the Ontario Ride to Conquer Cancer. I usually use a long ride as a training goal for me to keep on my bike, so this appealed to me for a number of reasons. My usual goal ride is the Rideau Lakes Cycle Tour, a two-day, 220-mile ride from my home town of Ottawa to Kingston and back. But I’ve done that ride probably 10 times, and had a couple of bad experiences — one with heatstroke, one with the opposite, when single-digit temperatures and rain took their toll.
So I took the Ride to Conquer Cancer brochure home. The ride was a reasonable length — two days, about 125 miles total. It was in an area of my province I’d never ridden in — starting in Toronto, ending in Niagara Falls. The support was more than I was used to; organized rest stops?! But there was one new wrinkle. This was a fundraising ride. They expected each rider to raise at least $2500. That seemed like a lot. But I could direct the funds I raised to urogenital cancer research. That appealed to me as someone with bladder cancer, and as the son of a man who had bladder, prostate, and kidney cancers.
So I thought about it for a while, then I signed up.
I felt like I needed some mechanism to get people to donate, to get their attention. So I decided that if someone gave $100 or more, I’d find a song with their name in it (if Barbara donated, I’d grab Barbara-Ann), learn it, and record myself playing it for them on ukulele (uke has gotten to be an obsession, and no, I’m not a hipster.) So…
To make a long story short, I’ve raised over $5,000, which is amazing; I’ve put up 16 Youtube videos and have a lot more to do, and the ride is this weekend. I’m proud of myself for getting to my goal and looking forward to a new ride. I’ve even lost a little winter flab and gotten myself into better shape.
It’s made me feel really good to do this. And there’s an important point there – not for me, but for you. There’s a value in setting yourself a goal and working to achieve it. Not a work goal. A project for you, that has meaning for you and does something for others. A way to make something a little better and improve yourself in the bargain. Find it. Do it.
Read MoreGuyside: when we go wrong
Like most of North America, I was horrified to hear of the shooting / stabbing murders of six people in California. Those murders were followed by the suicide of the young man who carried out the mass attack, Eric Elliott Rodger. There’s been a million words said and written already about him, and I’m going to try not to rehash those.
Rodger left behind reams of video and writing about himself. He felt he was unable to “get women,” apparently. He hated women for their rejections, and hated the men who were able to “get” women for their “prowess.” He haunted “Pick-up Artist” and bodybuilding forums online, and seemed to boil with anger at those whose actions left him alone and miserable.
When I was a kid, there were people I went to school with who I quite easily could have seen carrying out an attack like this. Angry, obsessive about guns and violence, mercurial, bitter about women in the extreme. Seething underneath, their rage only surfacing when liberated by alcohol or drugs, even their jokes full of meanness.
None of the people I went to school with ended up doing anything. At least that spectacularly horrible. They drifted out of my orbit a long time ago, becoming the sort of people you only think about when something like this attack happens.
It’s difficult for me to make sweeping prescriptions about what would stop these attacks from happening, what might have stopped this most recent attack. I’m Canadian, and it’s easy — and dishonest — to be superior. We had our own misogynist tragedy in Montreal in 1989. That one left 14 women dead at the hands of someone who blamed “feminists” for his own failures. More recently, five young people were stabbed to death at a house party in Calgary, Alberta. The person charged is the young son of a senior Calgary police officer.
I’m not a parent, so I can’t claim I’m having meaningful chats with my sons about these issues, or caring for their mental health.
A Wikimedia image of the memorial to the 14 engineering students who were murdered in the “Montreal Massacre.”
So I guess all I can say is this: there are people out there who are broken. It might be they’re wired wrong; it might be that circumstances have conspired against them; it might be they’ve authored their own misfortunes. But they’re broken. Most of the time, these broken folk are more harmful to themselves than anyone else. But sometimes, and I don’t think any of us know how to tell when, they decide to take up arms against others.
So what can I, as a man, do about this? A few things, none of which make me feel particularly fulfilled. If there are younger men in your life — sons, nephews, friends — show them a positive model. If you’re concerned about attitudes or behavior that you see, SAY so. Reach out to them. If you see the corrosive attitudes which lay under Rodger, and seem to lie under so many of the perpetrators of this violence, say something about it; do something about it. Advocate for social changes you’d like to see with your political representatives. If I were in the US, I’d be talking about restrictions on firearms ownership and getting in trouble EVERY DAY. Here in Canada, we aren’t plagued by gun violence as our southern neighbours are, so I don’t feel that urgency.
We’ll never live in a world free of hatred, or of the violence that hatred can cause. But doing something to improve the situation is better than doing nothing.
Read MoreGuyside: In the Garden
Even a modest garden like ours can be a source of great relaxation and exercise (photo: Bob LeDrew)
In my part of the world, spring has finally given us some warm sunny days. It seems as if the plants in my back yard were impatiently waiting to get on with the business of blooming.
And that meant that my partner and I spent some hours over Canada’s Victoria Day weekend tending our little piece of the planet.
When it comes to gardens, I am more inclined to be a passive appreciator. I don’t know much about flowers, but I do like to look at them and smell them. And for the next six months or so, I am lucky enough to be able to take my notebook out to the garden and work in the middle of what we jokingly call “the cottage.”
But I lack the strategic sense when it comes to our garden. Cathy sees what could be, what needs to move, what needs to split. I don’t. And to be honest, digging and weeding and hoisting stuff isn’t of less interest to me. So when it comes to gardening, I’m the brute force and the cheap labour, doing what I’m told by the person with brains.
But even if you’re like me, there are a lot of benefits to be derived by working in the garden. Even some moderate gardening can have similar effects to other forms of exercise, according to Weight Watchers. One implication of that: prepare for gardening the same way as you would for other forms of exercise. Do a little warmup, stretch, and the like. Most important for me is to vary my tasks. Don’t rake for three hour stretches (not that I could rake for that long in my plot anyway); don’t be bent over weeding for hours. Take breaks and change up the task to keep your muscles limber.
There are also psychological and spiritual benefits of working in the garden. The University of Nebraska College of Public Health published a great two-part article outlining the benefits of gardening. Their focus was not only on your own garden space, but on community gardening. If you live near a community garden, you may not only be able to put food on your own table, but to help others who need it to have the freshest, healthiest food that can be imagined. We grow tomatoes every year, and there’s nothing like a fresh tomato plucked right off the vine, or a pasta sauce made with tomatoes and herbs you grew yourself and harvested that very day.
Maybe it just comes down to some very simple truths: it feels good to take responsibility for even a little part of what we eat. It feels good to be in the sun, to watch the rain come down and help your plants grow, to enjoy the harvest. For a white-collar dude like me, it feels good to get your hands dirty from time to time. It’s nice to be the cheap labour and not have to make decisions once in a while!
Spending time in the garden — whether working or enjoying — gives us windows of time when we can simply let go of the other stuff in our lives and just be in the moment. And damn, it’s nice to be lying in the hammock with a beer in reach, and a book open on your chest, idly looking around at your own patch of green.
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Guyside: what the Michael Sam backlash teaches us about us
If it hadn’t been for two men kissing, I doubt I would have taken any notice at all of the NFL draft last week. While there are lots of people in Canada who are big NFL fans, I’m not; frankly, if I’m watching football, I’m watching the Canadian game, with its bigger field, fewer downs, and more freewheeling style. But I’m not here to talk about our superior game.
The big story out of this year’s NFL draft was the selection of Texan Michael Sam by the St. Louis Rams. Or, more precisely, the big story was the video of Sam sharing a celebratory kiss and hug with his boyfriend Vito Cammisano (who, Wikipedia tells me, is also an accomplished athlete.)
Miami Dolphins safety Don Jones tweeted the word “horrible.” Others criticized ESPN for broadcasting the display of affection, saying “kids are watching.” A former Ole Miss basketball player tweeted that he was boycotting ESPN because his 7 and 11-year-old brothers were exposed to the video clip, then after being subject to a large backlash, said that his tweets had been part of a friend’s psychology project.
Suffice it to say that there was a lot of shock and horror that this athlete would engage in a display of same-sex affection on camera, and that it would be broadcast.
My friend Joe wrote about how he talked with his daughter about this, and it got me thinking about us heterosexual guys and our complicated relationship with gayness. When I was a kid, the worst thing that you could call another guy was one of the pejorative terms for “gay:” fruit, faggot, fairy. And certainly in my world of popular culture in the 1970s and 1980s, there were very few examples of gay men. It was known that Elton John was gay. There were rumours about David Bowie. But certainly there were no out gay men in my world, and I never met someone who was out until I went to university in 1983.
Things have changed since then. I now count many GLBT people as both casual and deep friends, and I’m part of one of city’s major events for the GLBTQ community. So what have I learned? First off, none of that has led me towards changing my sexual orientation. I’m as straight as I was in my teens, or even back further than that (if you can have a sexual orientation at that age.)
Second, I can’t imagine a set of circumstances that would turn me from a guy who likes women to a guy who likes other guys. And that lack of imagination has led me to believe that it’s unlikely circumstances exist that would change a woman who loves other women to a woman who loves men, etc. So I can’t get behind the idea that someone (child or adult) seeing two men kiss on television is going to be “twisted,” “scarred,” etc. I also don’t see how it’s difficult to explain that behaviour to a kid — “Those guys? They love each other, so they’re kissing. Some guys love other guys.” Apparently, I’m not the only one.
Third, objecting to something does not mean you get to be insulated from that’s thing’s existence. Nobody has the right to tell you that your opinion on gay men is wrong. But you don’t have a right to never see or be exposed to gay men in your life, and it would be a lot easier for everyone if you can say to yourself and others “The Bible tells me that homosexuality is wrong.”
Finally, we straight guys have to get past the double standard that seems to exist around gay men. I don’t think I need to tell you that there’s a lot of attention paid to women kissing women — and men watching them. But when it comes to men kissing men, there’s what many would say is a visceral reaction of revulsion. I believe that reaction is learned and reinforced by society. (And to be clear, I have no evidence to support that beyond that of my own life.) We are taught to be revolted by it. We then write scripts to justify it, that often involve either direct damage (based on the broadly-debunked belief that homosexuality and pedophilia are related) or psychological damage or scarring (based on the broadly-debunked belief that gayness can be “taught.”)
We need to accept people and things and behaviour at face value. Two guys kiss? Yup, they kissed. No more than that. A guy likes guys? Yup. As men, let’s get past the taunts and the immaturity that we grew up with around this stuff.
Read MoreGuyside. It’s spring! (It’s spring?!) Take advantage.
These t’ai chi practitioners in Beijing have the right idea about spring – get outside and let it buoy you up.
I am not a giant fan of winter. So even a spring as tentative and tantalizing as 2014’s is a welcome thing. You can feel the sun’s warmth on your face, and maybe even on your bare arms. Things begin to bud out in the gardens, early flowers show themselves, and everything seems new again. It’s wonderful.
If you feel the way I do, why not take this opportunity to make a fresh start on some personal care? Here are some ideas:
- I have a fairly substantial bike ride coming up, so that means that I am getting out on the road more and more to get the legs in shape. In my city of Ottawa, there are lots of 12-month cyclists, but I’m not one of them. I ride inside, but that’s never quite the same as being out on the road.
- I also find myself walking to places that a month or two ago I would have driven, because it’s not boneshatteringly cold out and it’s pleasant. Are there types of exercise that winter makes more difficult that you can start doing (or restart?)
- We’re lucky enough to have a garden and a patio, so don’t discount the raking, hauling, sowing, weeding, gopher-chasing, and other outdoor things that you have to do to get your garden started. If you’re reading this where things are far beyond our early garden phase: I hate you.
- If you’ve been relying on comfort foods and root vegetables (or worse, sports on TV and chicken wings!) to get you through the winter, start thinking about finding leafier greens to eat, from the closer the better. Farmer’s markets start opening up this time of year, offering us fresher produce and the opportunity to revisit our diets.
- Relax. Whether it’s on my own patio or whether I’m at a coffeeshop or pub, patio season is a wonderful thing. Take opportunities to sit, unplug from the devices, be with yourself. Or be with other human beings, enjoying the time of year. Make the most of the season as an excuse to resume social life.
The businessman Sir John Templeton was once asked when the best time to invest was. His answer was “when you have money.” The best time to invest time and energy in yourself is when you have time and energy. Let the changing season fill you up with some of that energy, and make the time. You’ll be thankful.
Photo: creative-commons licenced by Flickr user Faungg’s Photo
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