Guyside: How old = not giving a crap anymore?
Portrait of an artist not giving a crap
When I was a kid, I was a shy kid. Not shy enough to be tortured by loneliness. But a bit shy in specific contexts. I was fine playing saxophone in a concert band or in a marching band. I was cool with speaking in public or being part of the debating society. I would speak up in class, even crack a joke from time to time.
But there were things that just hit all my buttons. I first took guitar lessons when I was about 11. But other than an awkward and brief performance to get my one and only Cub Scout badge (before I quit for unrelated reasons), I went through YEARS where I only played in my room. And I NEVER sang.
That years was actually decades. And then, things changed. Why? Well… the summer I turned 40 I got diagnosed with bladder cancer. That was not a good summer. And one of the things that I decided to do to follow my heart a little more, to stop putting off ’til someday, was to start hosting house concerts. Those are gatherings in which you invite a professional musician to perform a show in your house, then invite friends, neighbours and colleagues to come and pay the performer for his or her or their work.
Once we decided to do that, we set a date in February, my partner’s birth month. And then I decided to open the show with a couple of songs. Which I had never done before. Not an open-mike night, not a house party, not a campfire.
It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. I stood in front of my partner, some of her and our friends, her colleagues, with a guitar and an amp and a microphone in front of my mouth and tried to get through two songs. It was petrifying.
I still struggle with stage fright. But I’ve done a fair amount of playing in front of other people since then. A few years after that, we were on our way to a friend’s cottage for a long weekend. “Bring a guitar,” he said. “We’ve never had a guitar at our cottage!”
One afternoon that weekend, I found myself on the dock, sitting in a Muskoka chair, noodling around and singing, my eyes closed against the sun’s rays. When I stopped and looked around, our host’s two teenage daughters and their friends were clustered around me. I then realized why smarter teenage boys than me played guitar in PUBLIC, and not in their rooms.
So what’s the point of all this? Well, for the last few weeks, I’ve been raising money for a two-day cycle trip that raises money for cancer research. As part of my fundraiser, I’ve been thanking people who donate more than $100 by finding a song with their name in it, learning it, and recording a Youtube video of it for them on ukulele. That’s led to a story in the local paper, and now to me being asked to do a 15-minute set at a local club as part of another fundraising concert. At a club that calls itself legendary. Yerk.
I still get stage butterflies, and probably always will. But I mostly don’t give a crap. I acknowledge the feelings of anxiety and the fear that I’m going to screw up onstage so badly that I’ll make an ass of myself as simply that — feelings and fears. And it’s happened, for sure. I just give much less of a crap about that possibility.
I have had some help learning those lessons, because the fear of screwing up catastrophically has run through other aspects of my life and led to some bad mistakes. But part of it has just been getting older and realizing that in a lot of cases… it doesn’t matter if you screw up. If I get the chord changes wrong or forget a line at Acoustics for Cancer Awareness, is someone going to ask for their money back? Will they think I’m a horrible person? Probably not. And if they do, imagine what a jerk that makes them!
And the greatest irony of giving less of a crap? Usually, the performance is better. I don’t mean to say we should not strive for excellence, or that we shouldn’t care about performance. But sometimes you just gotta do it and — at least beforehand — stop caring about the end result. Since we’re all getting a bit older, why don’t you join me in giving a crap about fewer and fewer things? It’ll do you good.
Read MoreGuyside: An honorable man
If I needed proof I was getting older, it came when I started into a level of crankiness that gradually built to the point where all I needed was a pair of reading glasses on the end of my nose and a walking stick to shake while inveighing against “those kids.”
Whether it’s bad luck, the randomness of the universe, or some sign of an actual trend, I’ve been seeing a lot of things lately about sexual assault in online or “geek” culture recently, and it’s getting me angry. There seems a predictable pattern to it: first, a woman writes or says something about … well, it could be almost anything. One example is Janelle Asselin’s critique of a comic book called Teen Titans. Then, a dense cloud of misogyny and ad feminem attacks follows like a cloud of gnats around a hiker. In this case, here’s an essay about what happened to Asselin after she wrote the critique.What happens after that? Usually, we all (we being neither the woman it’s happening to, nor her friends, nor the misogynists who are being misogynist) forget about it.
This hasn’t come out of nowhere. I remember when one of my favorite bloggers went underground after truly horrifying threats and comments were rained down upon her. But as the years go by, I’m finding it more and more difficult to forget about this stuff, to “get past it.” The words and threats that pop up online exist in the “real world.” There’s no shortage of men who seem to hate and fear women. But when you combine these attitudes with the anonymity that can be offered up by the online world, it can be utterly heinous.
So what is to be done? A few things, I think. The first is to not propagate these attitudes. To think about the way in which you as a man interact with women, how you agree, how you disagree, and how you debate. I disagree with women all the time, and I have a remarkable range of ways I can do that without reducing them to their genitalia or threatening them with sexual assault.
The second thing you can do is support women in your life who are subjected to this behavior. At the very least, those of us who are not trolls need to be there for our friends when they are being threatened and harassed.
The third step is the one that seems more difficult for many people: speak out. When you see this happening, tell the person that what they’re doing is wrong. If a woman is being threatened with rape for having the temerity to voice an opinion — that’s wrong. Say so. Publicly.
There are lots of attitudes that I would prefer didn’t exist at all in this world. But that can’t happen with the snap of a finger. If our society is going to become more egalitarian, laws won’t do it; changing minds will. One step in that is telling the trolls that we see them and we won’t tolerate their behavior. Edmund Burke wrote “When bad men combine, the good must associate.”
When I was a younger man, I suspect I was a bit more reticent about my views. But now? I give much less of a shit. I plan on being as vocal as I can when I see women being silenced by threats of rape and violence. I hope you will too.
Read MoreAging parents, aging us
Do different generations stay different? Do we replicate the patterns of our parents, or do we make different choices?
Like many people my age, I have aging parents. In my case, that’s a mom approaching her 90s with some medical challenges and the difficult adjustment of living alone for the first time in her adult life. It’s a struggle, and I think it has forced her and her two sons to face up to some uncomfortable truths over the last few years, particularly since my dad died in the summer of 2012.
One of those: how I will confront the inevitabilities of old age (if I am fortunate enough to get there). For my parents’ generation, it was common for parents to be taken care of by one or more of their children, either in the family home or by moving into a child’s home. There was (is?) a stigma about nursing homes and retirement homes. My mother has chosen to stick it out as long as is possible in her home, the home she was born in. But unlike her parents, she doesn’t have a child who will “take care of her.” I live a 90-minute flight away, my brother is six hours away by car. Thanks to my father’s service in the Second World War, she receives a number of services that have allowed her to stay in her house — the house her grandfather bought and had moved onto the property before the Great Depression — despite the encroachments of age on her body.
For people in my generation, the rules are a bit different. I have no children to rely on. I expect that any support that my partner or I will need as we age won’t be provided by family members, but by paying people from our retirement savings and investments. While I love our house, I think that when the time comes for us to retire I’ll be able to sell it and leave with no great emotional wrench; including our house, I’ve lived in about seven different places in my adult life, and I think I’ll be able to move again.
But things have been different for my generation for a while. Here I am, typing this in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt with a graphic representation of Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series. I never saw my dad with a pair jeans (what he would call dungarees) on or a t-shirt in my lifetime. My partner doesn’t wear housecoats like my mom does, or consider the maintenance of an immaculate home a key goal, as her mom and mine do. She works outside the home, while my mom gave up her job as a nurse in ’53, when she married, and never collected another paycheque.
We are — or at least I think we seem — “younger” than our parents at the same age. We go to concerts by loud bands, we dress differently, we participate in different recreational and sporting activities, we expect that our lives will be characterized by being and acting young for a long, long time. Thinking of Shakespeare’s seven ages, we’re unwilling to enter the fifth age, of justice and solemnity. We want to be lovers and soldiers forever.
So when we age, will we really be different from our parents? Will our expectations be different; will we make different choices? Or am I flattering myself by thinking that I’ll make other choices, better choices?
It’s easy to tell yourself that you know better than the “old folks.” But those better decisions and more logical choices are much easier to make in the world of the distant future than in the world of the cold present.
It seems to me that the real challenge for us all is to strike the constantly shifting balance between independence and dependence, between insulating our elders from danger and allowing them to live as they choose, between being determined and being bullheaded, between giving in and denying reality, between taking responsibility for our health and accepting support when offered. There’s no magic formula, no easy answer.
(photo: cc-licenced by Flickr user Lars Ploughmann)
Read MoreCosmetic surgery for guys?!
Last week, I talked about how men’s self-perception changes over time, as they age. After the column, I was amused and touched to have one friend contact me and ask if I was okay. The answer, for the record, was and is yes.
I’m pretty comfortable with my physical self. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t ecstatic to be on my bike last Sunday for my first outside ride of the season, or looking forward to dropping a few pounds from around the waist as I ride more and more frequently.
I am in not even in the ballpark where I might consider getting a surgical procedure done to enhance my looks. But apparently, more and more of my counterparts are in that ballpark. According to a Business Insider article, men are the new growth area for cosmetic surgery. The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reported that cosmetic procedures carried out on men more than doubled between 1997 and 2012.
According to this New York cosmetic surgeon, there are four types of guys who get cosmetic surgery: the “male model”, the “bodybuilder”, the “CEO”, and the “athletic dad.” I don’t fit any of those, so perhaps that’s why cosmetic surgery is not on my radar. He also associates certain types of procedures with each of those types.
So what do guys get done? The top five procedures (in the US at least) are: liposuction, rhinoplasty, eyelid surgery, breast reduction to treat enlarged male breast, and ear shaping. While you might associate cosmetic surgery with hair replacement, that procedure on its own is almost as big as all cosmetic surgery in terms of numbers of procedures.
I don’t want to judge. If someone wants to get one or more of these procedures, that’s up to them. For me, I think of it like spending megabucks on hotsy-totsy carbon wheels for my bike. Yes, I might save up to a pound. But of course, if I ate better and exercised more, I could probably lose way MORE than a pound.
Like most choices we face, cosmetic surgery has benefits, risks, costs and opportunities attached to it. For me, I can’t make the calculation work out in favour. But where do you draw the line? Are contacts a cosmetic procedure? What about manscaping? What about men who wear cosmetics?
What decisions have you made? How far are you willing to go to keep or enhance your looks? Tell me about it in the comments.
Read MoreMirror, mirror, on Guyside’s wall…
I recently came upon a photo of me that was about 10 years old or so. I didn’t think much of it, but then I took a closer look to see if I could spot the telltale signs of aging in it. It was hard. I’m a little heavier now than I was then (about 192 compared to about 185); there are more than a few gray hairs in my facial hair, but not much on top; I couldn’t see the advance of wrinkles.
Trust me. I am not Dorian Gray. But I think that guys are able to see exactly what they want to see in mirrors or photographs. A classic Canadian folk song called “Lies” is about a woman confronting her face in the mirror, with one couplet: “She shakes off the bitter web she wove / Gently puts the mirror face down by the stove.” From the outside, at least, I think women look at themselves and see flaws, while men look at themselves and see an idealized version of themselves.
I don’t think I have to argue that for many women, body image is a big problem. But I want to argue that the male tendency to ignore reality isn’t an asset. If we “can’t see” the toll that time and our choices take on our body, then men could be opening ourselves up to health issues.
I was recently part of an online discussion where a mother was talking about how quickly her daughter would look at herself and wonder if she was too fat (this in elementary school!), while the girl’s quite-average-shaped younger brother would come to his mother and demand she demonstrate awe at his huge biceps and muscles! While I suspect that everyone in adolescence is hypersensitive to body issues (why don’t my boobs look like hers, why can’t I get rid of these pimples, why am I 6’1″ and weigh under 140 — that last one was me, by the way), it’s disconcerting to think that even in early childhood, there are already seeds of dissatisfaction with who we are, and the willingness to rely on our fantasy vision of ourselves rather than to simply acknowledge reality.
Since the 1980s, when I was thin enough, as my dad used to say, “to have to run around in the shower to get wet,” I’ve put on about 55 pounds. I needed some of that. But maybe not all of that. Even my idealized eyes can see that. I’ll never be a bodybuilder, never be “musclebound.” Given the raw material, I would have to either become an utter gym rat, or I’d end up using dangerous methods like steroids to achieve some level of muscularity. And I’m not willing to risk my health for an image. I like feeling fit, I like feeling toned. But for me, the “Men’s Health” six-pack or the arms of a pro wrestler aren’t worth it.
But the question then becomes: if you recognize the need for change, then how to make that change. Next week, I’ll be talking about cosmetic surgery for men.
(photo CC-licenced by Flickr user Michele di Trani)
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