Wednesday, 16 November 2016
Sunday, 23 October 2016
Saturday, 22 October 2016
50 Things a man should be able to do
Every man does not need to know how to tie a bow tie. Let’s get that clear up front. I don’t know why it is on every “Things a Man Should Know How to Do” list but it’s simply not true. If you have a reason to wear a bow tie (e.g., you’re going to prom, your name is George Will) then you can ask someone or you can look it up. That’s why Google and preppie college Republicans exist.
But there are some things that every man should be able to do. Here are fifty. Not necessarily the fifty most important (though some are)—just fifty things a man should be able to do if he wants to live a good life.
1. Forgive your parents—they did the best they could . . . or they didn’t. Either way, you’re a man now so it’s time to move on.
2. Ask your parents to forgive you—you know what you did. They do too.
3. Change a diaper so that the baby is cleaner and you are no dirtier than when you started.
4. Perform CPR and the Heimlich maneuver.
5. Use a soldering iron to fix a loose connection.
6. Comfort a child—if you want to judge the character of a man, observe how he treats a child. He may not have any himself—he may not even like kids—but if he can provide them comfort when they are scared or hurting then he can’t be all bad.
7. Cook one signature dish.
8. Calculate square footage—width x length.
9. Innocently flirt with a woman at least twice your age—without causing offense or being disrespectful, of course.
10. Write three coherent, connected, and grammatically correct paragraphs—if it’s really necessary, you should be able to repeat the process well enough to add three more. Unless you have a job that requires extensive writing, that’s probably all you’ll ever need to get by.
11. Navigate your way around an unfamiliar city without getting completely and utterly lost.
12. Differentiate between various types of mortgages and insurances and know which one is best for your situation.
13. Get a prostate exam without crying.
14. Know what a prostate is.
15. Make and follow a budget so that you can get out of—and stay out of—debt.
16. Tell a spellbinding (though not necessarily true) story.
17. Survive in water for at least a few minutes without drowning—71 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by water. You’re bound to fall into it sometime.
18. Know the four lifesaving steps—stop the bleeding, start the breathing, protect the wound, treat for shock.
19. Give a great compliment—tip: Be specific, be sincere.
20. Tell a joke that is (a) clean, and (b) funny.
21. Make a brief, informative speech in public without having an anxiety attack and/or using PowerPoint.
22. Type with more than two fingers.
23. Know how to use the mass transit system in any city within 100 miles of his home.
24. Use reference materials to find out any information that you’ll ever need to know.
25. Recite the Ten Commandments from memory—if you remember them, it’s easier to follow them; if you follow them you’ll avoid about 90 percent of the self-inflicted damage that will screw up your life.
26. Carry on a conversation with someone who bores you to tears.
27. Recognize when you are boring someone to tears with your inane banter.
28. Make a plan for the first 24 hours after a zombie apocalypse—sounds silly but you’d be surprised how much you can learn about yourself by thinking through unlikely scenarios.
30. Push-start a car with a manual transmission—by the way, as I learned in the summer of 1988, you can’t push start a car with an automatic transmission. (I still don’t know why I was stomping on the brake as if it were a clutch.)
31. Tell the difference between snark and wit.
32. Properly maintain your basic form of transportation, whether it be a car, bike, horse, feet, etc.
33. Grow food—even if you never owned a vegetable garden, you need to understand the basic theory of how to grow food. When the zombie apocalypse happens, you’re going to be hungry.
34. Make it through the rest of your life without saying the thirty-seventh dumbest sentence in the English language: “I have to learn for myself.”
35. Endure an insult with grace.
36. Wash a load of white clothes without turning everything pink.
37. Load, shoot, and clean a firearm.
38. Admit being wrong in a situation that will cost you dearly.
39. Physically protect your loved ones and be willing to risk life and limb if necessary to keep them safe.
40. Lead your family in prayer.
41. Cogently explain and defend your most fundamental beliefs, preferably without raising your voice.
42. Hug another man.
43. Take harsh criticism without being defensive.
44. Differentiate between love and lust—and avoid the latter.
45. Recognize wisdom and know how to get it.
46. Help someone who is vomiting (without throwing up yourself).
47. Write a letter of recommendation.
48. Write a love letter.
49. Avoid the Three A’s That Ruin Your Life: Anger, Adultery, Apathy.
50. Be able to list at least 50 more things a man should be able to do.
https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/07/50-things-a-man-should-be-able-to-do
Tuesday, 19 August 2014
The Manly Guide to Being Manly: 25 Manly Things to Do
“What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.” Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
Men fight. It’s what we do. We drink, fight, fart and laugh. We laugh at the drinking, the fighting and especially the farting. We’re simple creatures. Hunting, fishing, and fucking… these are things that make men manly. Unfortunately, modern society dictates that we cannot always make these things the sole purpose of our existence. Instead, we have to find other ways of being manly.
There’s something incredibly manly about standing there cooking bacon without a shirt on. It’s manly in a way that loading a dishwasher isn’t, even if you do load it half naked! I shallow fry my bacon. Some people grill it; fuck that. That is not manly. I’m a man I can take the fat!
Cooking away did get me thinking though, which is rare (the doing two things at once, not the thinking). There aren’t enough opportunities to be manly in life. So I thought I’d make a list of tips on how to be more manly than you currently are. Whether you are a man or a woman, you can use this list to improve your sense of manliness. We’re not sexist here at Self Help for Happy People. Women can be manly too.
Barbecuing in a storm - because we're not going to let the rain stop us.
- Be in charge of the barbeque.
- Light the fireworks
- DIY
- Make pancakes
- Shine Shoes
- Build a camp fire
- Sharpen a knife
- Catch a fish
- Cut down a tree
- Chop firewood
- Get outrageously drunk
- Take a punch
- Throw one back
- Take up a manly sport
- Play a musical instrument
- Do something romantic
- Have the last word
- Have a threesome
- Change a car tyre
- Ride a motorbike
- Read a real map
- Carve a turkey
- Hold hot stuff
- Carry heavy stuff
- Making lists
Cooking raw meat over fire; this is one of the mostly manly pursuits in modern times. There’s a prestige about being the man in charge of the barbeque. If the host of an event isn’t the one in charge of the tongs then you can expect to see men queuing up to be centre of female attention as they sweat over raw-in-the-middle, black-on-the-outside burger.
Fireworks explode. We get to be responsible for letting that happen. If we could get our hands on more powerful explosives we would. In fact, real men
Fixing things is manly. Putting up a fence or a wall is very manly. It gives a sense of this is mine and I am building a wall around it. It is manly to build walls around all sorts of things – houses, gardens, fields and emotions. Plumbing, electrical wiring, fixing the TV, fixing the wobbly table, building a vibrator from scratch… it is extremely satisfying to Do It Yourself rather than paying some other guy to come and do it for you faster and better than you can.
Yes, Pancake Day is that time of year where fathers all over the globe take to the kitchen to “show how it’s really done”. Making pancakes from scratch is more manly than it sounds, and a must if you have children in your life.
I mean properly shining them, with brushes. None of this wet flannel or easy sponges for cleaning shoes shite. Brush like you’ve never brushed before. Get those black bits all over the newspaper on the floor. Ahhh… childhood memories.
Fire, it is the ultimate of manly things. All men are pyromaniacs. Getting to be a pyromaniac in the wilderness on a cold dark night with the stars ahead is beautiful. Everyone should do it. Sit back watch the flames burn, sit quietly and contemplate whether you should really have put that much wood on the fire, or whether it is a little too close to the nearest tree, and listen to the fire crackling as the embers glow. Seriously, what is more manly and awesome than that?
You can do this whilst sitting next to the fire. The knife may well end up blunter than when you started. Still, it feels very manly while you are doing it.
Sitting in a boat all day, doing nothing, it sounds like bliss. Apart from the boat part it sounds great. Still, fishing is a manly pursuit (as is hunting), and there is something manly about killing something and then eating it. It also stops those pesky vegetarians stating “well you get your meat in shrink wrapped form, you wouldn’t go out and kill and gut it yourself”. Fuck them, tell them you can and you have and it tasted great. Then ask if they have any pets.
Destruction, it’s a manly thing. Cutting down a tree is a manly thing to do. Not that I advocate chopping down trees willy-nilly. Trees deserve respect. Anything that can still be standing upright after hundreds of years is a worthy adversary. Cutting down a tree with a chainsaw may speed the process up, but for a full dose of manliness use real saws.
Because once you’ve chopped down a tree you need to prove your mastery through further destruction. Chopping wood is great. It’s almost like a form of meditation. Use an axe or a machete. Axes are manly. For smaller pieces a good machete is also suitably manly. These are also items that you can sharpen for extra manpoints.
Not a little tipsy. Not drunk to the state of rudeness. Wipe a week out of your memory. Out-drink everyone around you, make an arse of yourself, forget where you live, pee against a wall, sit on a bench for a little while, remember where you live, pass out in bed fully clothed and then get the fuck back out there the next day and do it all again. Last a week. Every man should spend one week of his life recovering from that week.
Every man wants to know he can take a good punch. In fact, men probably brag more about hard they have been hit than how hard they can hit. It’s because we’re solid. We cannot be broken. We are invincible. We are Thor the hammer-wielding god of thunder, lighting, strength, destruction, fertility and protection. We can take that goddamned punch and we can…
Yes, we took it, then we gave it back – with interest. Real men can throw a straight punch. We can throw a haymaker too, but we don’t need to. We have finesse. We want to throw a backhand to your solar plexus, uppercut to your chin and follow it with a hook to your liver. We want it to hurt. If we can’t kill you we can at least make you hurt. Hitting things is manly.
Rugby, football, and boxing are manly sports. There is nothing manly about badminton. Nothing. I don’t care who you are. Pool is not a sport. Sports are games where you have to change your shoes. Pool is a game. It is manly though.
There’s a reason why most rock bands are male. Guitars and drums are manly. We like to make noise. It ranks right up there with fire, destruction and hitting things. If you’re a drummer you get to do all four.
Awww, isn’t that cute. Yes men really do get a sense of being manly through doing romantic things. We put a lot of care and attention into those romantic gestures. We don’t care if they are cheesy or old fashioned. It’s manly to open doors for women, carry their shopping, cook them a meal, buy them jewellery. It’s the nearest men get to pretending we have a sensitive side.
Men need to have the last word in arguments. We need to be right, even if we both know that we’re wrong. Seriously, all you women out there, we’re not trying to continue the argument, we’re not trying to upset you, we just need that last word. There’s nothing you can say or do to change this so don’t try. My word is final.
I mean, come on, this had to be on the list. Manly men have threesomes. Preferably not with other manly men, but hell, I’m not going to judge you. Ideally I’d prefer to keep the number of men in a threesome as low as possible, and certainly no higher than 2. Numbers of participants higher than three are also acceptable substitutes for threesomes.
If you are a man and you have to call out your breakdown cover because you can’t change a tyre then I pity you. Just picture it.
Motorcycles can be dangerous and so they will always be cooler than cars. Riding a motorbike provides freedom, it provides fun, it provides that little moment of excitement when you’re not sure you’re going to make that corner. Motorcycling is that time when it is perfectly acceptable for men to dress in leather and have something powerful between their legs.
Fuck satnav and fuck asking a stranger for directions. I can read a map and I am going to prove it. Maps are a source of interest for men generally. We love knowing where stuff is, which is ironic because we can never find our keys. Maps are manly and follow similar rules to remote controls, under no circumstances are the females allowed to touch the map.
Yes, another food related one, but again, Sunday lunch, Christmas dinner, etc… as a man it is necessary for you to sit at the head of the table and carve that turkey. You will inevitably fail to resist the temptation to ask any adolescent present whether they’d prefer a leg or the breast.
“Careful that plate is hot” is something women should never utter. That’s pretty much the only encouragement we need to prove that we have asbestos fingers. That’s right, we can prove our manliness by taking hot plates through to the dining room without using a tea towel.
Sometimes men like to carry large, heavy things around. It may be easier to get someone else to help carry that table, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let it beat me, it’s going where I want it to go and I’ll do it on my own!
Making lists is a fucking awesome manly pursuit. Real men make lists of everything. Real men have a definitive order for those lists. If it’s attractive women there’s a reason they’re in that order. We have reasons goddamit! And yes, we do make lists of people we think are attractive, we also make lists about favourite albums, books and computer games.
From http://www.selfhelpforhappypeople.com/
Tuesday, 5 August 2014
How to Be a Better Procrastinator
Don't be fooled: People who dawdle are often very productive. They just need to refine their delaying tactics
Often procrastination is a way to let ourselves do a less-than-perfect job on things that don't require a perfect job anyway
You may ask: Why should I want to know how to be a better procrastinator? Being a procrastinator isn't as bad as being, say, a serial killer. But isn't it on the same level as being a shirker, a lazy slug, a worthless idler? Procrastinators are unproductive. No one should want to know how to be more unproductive, right?
But are procrastinators truly unproductive? In most cases, the exact opposite is true. They are people who not only get a lot done but have a reputation for getting a lot done. They don't have neat desks or even neat desktops on their laptops. They spend a lot of time playing catch-up. But they are likely to be creative and on the whole amiable. After all, if you tend to keep people waiting, it makes them crabby; it doesn't pay to make things worse by being crabby yourself.
First, don't listen to most of the advice offered to procrastinators by people who don't have this particular flaw. For example: "Keep your commitments to a minimum, so you won't be distracted." This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being. If a procrastinator doesn't want to work on something, it won't help to have nothing else to do. It's better to have lots of things to do, so you can work on some of them as a way of not doing the task that, for whatever reason, you seek to avoid.The truth is that most procrastinators are structured procrastinators. This means that although they may be putting off something deemed important, their way of not doing the important thing is to do something else. Like reading instead of completing their expense report before it's due. Nevertheless, such people feel bad about being procrastinators and often annoy others. That is where I think I have something helpful to say.
Second, don't sit around feeling bad because you lack willpower. That will make you a depressed procrastinator but won't help you get anything done. Most of us lack all kinds of powers. I can't lift my car by the bumper in order to change a tire. That's what jacks are for. I can't add long columns of figures in my head. That's what calculators are for. Tools give us the ability to make up for what we lack in native powers. The procrastinator has tools that allow him to manipulate himself to achieve results he can't get with willpower alone.
The key here is to unplug your laptop when you open your email. After a while, the battery will die. That will break the spell. You won't need to rely on willpower to quit your Net surfing; lack of battery power will do it for you. If you don't use a laptop, take a big drink of water before settling in to answer your email. Your natural alarm clock will break the spell before the whole day is gone.Suppose you are like me, and once you fire up your laptop to check your email, you are in danger of spending the whole morning on the Net, doing increasingly useless things. Some correspondent mentions Tajikistan; you don't know much about Tajikistan, so you Google it. You read the Wikipedia article. Which leads you to the Basmarchi Revolt. Before long the morning is mostly gone; you have learned a lot about the history of Central Asia but haven't done your expense report, or even finished reading your email.
A third bit of advice: avoid perfectionism. I don't mean avoid doing things perfectly. If you are at all like me, that's not a problem. I mean avoid fantasizing about doing things perfectly. Often procrastination is just a way of giving ourselves permission to do a less-than-perfect job on something that doesn't require a perfect job anyway. Or maybe it's a way of getting those we work with to the point where they say, "For crying out loud, just give me something!" You need to give your boss a memo that provides the basic facts; it doesn't need to read like Hemingway.
Last, but perhaps most important: Learn how to be less annoying to the non-procrastinators around you. For starters, be honest. Admit that you are a procrastinator, and admit that it is a flaw. Maybe someday you will no longer be a procrastinator. After you lose 20 pounds, get in shape, polish up your high-school French, and write that novel, you may get around to pursuing some self-help regimen that will eliminate this flaw from your personality. But for now, don't compound the flaw with denial. If you admit to being a procrastinator, others will probably try hard to find something nice to say about you.
—Dr. Perry, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford University, is the author of "The Art of Procrastination," to be published by Workman later this month.
From an article in the wall street journal
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