It's insulting for a football fan to be accused of backing a team because they are winning. I wonder if I might be guilty of this
By Jeremy Au Yong, Life! May 12, 2008
MANCHESTER United fan, eh?' he says to me in a smug condescending tone. 'Oh please, another one of those.''Another one of those, what?' I retort. 'Another one of those who don't know anything about football and just looks for a team that are doing well,' he says.
In my mind I was thinking, 'That's rich coming from an Arsenal fan' but of course I'm too civilised to say that to his face.
Instead, what I said was: 'Hey, what's that on your shoes?' When he looked down, I sneezed in his hair. Sometimes there's no reasoning with Arsenal fans.
For those who may not be familiar with the cut-throat world of football fan rivalry, the ultimate insult you can make to a football fan is that he is a wagon jumper, a fair-weather fan, a person who is only supporting a particular team because they are winning.
You can say almost anything else about his chosen football team - the players are a bunch sissy pretty boys, the lead striker is a diving cry-baby, his manager has the organisational skills of a baboon on heat - and he'll probably engage you in debate.
Call him - or me, in this case - a fair-weather fan and you are liable to get some boogers in your hair.
Naturally, being a fan of Manchester United Football Club, I am a prime target for such insults from bitter, jealous fans from other teams. The team have been champions of England nine times since 1992 (could be 10 by now), so we make an easy target. Only when Chelsea emerged was there someone else to share the insults.
If there's one thing worse than being called a wagon jumper, it's being called a Roman Abramovich-era Chelsea fan. Trust me, every Chelsea fan you meet will stress he was a fan long before the Russian pumped the annual GDP of Guam into the team.
Anyway, my Arsenal accuser did get me thinking: What if he's right?
I mean let's face it: Like most Singapore-based football fans, I don't have a very good reason for supporting a team playing thousands of miles away, named after a province I've never visited.
I've never so much as set foot in England, let alone Manchester. I have never seen the team play live and never met one of their players. Heck, my father doesn't even support the team so it's not something I picked up from him.
There's no real way to explain my devotion to the team apart from liking the way they play and - dare I say it - because Manchester United are a winning team.
I really started getting interested in football only around age 12. And that so happens to coincide with the year Manchester United won the English league for the first time in almost 30 years.
And as they have never really been a bad side since, my loyalty has never been tested. Sure, there have been years where we didn't win anything but the team have never finished lower than third in the entire time I've supported them. I've sort of begun to take it for granted.
I'm convinced I'd still stick with them if they went through a bad patch. And if that's what it takes to prove myself, then maybe one season they should just... scratch that, I don't need to prove my fandom that badly.
So what am I saying here? Did I just announce that I am a fair-weather fan? I guess I have, or at least that I have not proven I'm not.
And you know what that means? It means many of you, yes you, are fair-weather fans too.
You - like me - picked which team to support based on who's winning.
Come on, surely you are not going to tell me you picked Arsenal after you watched them draw 1-1 with Fulham through a dubious penalty. Or that you picked Chelsea because of their 'determination'. Or that you picked Liverpool because you admire teams that consistently finish fourth.
Just look at the demographic breakdown of football supporters. Different generations clearly support different teams. Assuming most kids come to football around 12, then most Liverpool fans would be at the very least in their mid or late 30s and came to football when Liverpool was doing well. There'd be a few pockets of Tottenham fans there as well.
The younger set, now in their teens or their 20s, would be a mix of Manchester United and Arsenal, as well as a bit of Chelsea. There may be one or two unfortunate souls who came to football in 1994 when Blackburn Rovers won their one and only recent championship. Also, there won't be Watford fans anywhere.
I'm writing this on Thursday and I do not yet know whether Manchester United will win the league. So I thought I better get this off my chest now. Because if they won, then I'd have even less credibility to talk about fair-weather fans, and I'd never hear the end of the wagon-jumper insults.
Actually, whatever, if Manchester United have won the league, you can call me whatever you want.
I promise I won't sneeze in your hair.
Truth hurts, published in life! as "girls laugh when guys squirm" on Apr 14
- by Jeremy Au Yong
A QUICK warning before I begin: Today's column discusses a very R21 movie and therefore deals with some rather R21 concepts.Still, just in case this falls into the wrong hands, I will be replacing some words with more ambiguous terms, say, Michael Jackson and Paris Hilton.
Right, on with it. In case you haven't figured out, the topic I intend to address today is the very controversial and very sensitive subject: How to make women laugh.
My long-held belief has been that men and women generally laugh at the same sorts of things, except when it comes to one particular topic - Michael Jackson.
Men love Michael Jackson jokes. They can't get enough of it. Every man knows some, even seemingly high-class serious folks. If you're ever in England, go ahead and ask any male member (hah!) of the British royal family. If you ask Prince Charles and he can't tell you one immediately, I will give you $5. (Exception: Michael Jackson may not know any.)
I personally know about a billion. I regard myself as something of an authority on MJ jokes. I challenge anyone to tell me an MJ joke I've never heard.
So anyway, through my years of experience whipping these jokes out at parties, I learnt that women do not laugh at them.
More often than not, they cringe and roll their eyes. So I just assumed women have no patience for any joke involving Michael Jackson, or for that matter, Paris Hilton.
As it turns out, I was wrong about women, again.
Last week I went to watch the movie Teeth. It's supposed to be a horror flick, but if you walked in halfway, you would've thought it was a comedy by the way the women were laughing and sniggering.
The men, however, watched in stunned silence. I was silently squirming, and had to watch most of it cuddled in the foetal position.
Let me just say upfront that if you are in possession of a Michael Jackson, you will consider Teeth the SCARIEST MOVIE IN THE WORLD.
I'm normally quite good with scary movies. I was not affected at all by The Ring or The Grudge or Shutter. But I was a wreck in Teeth. It's been a week now and I still shudder replaying scenes in my mind.
It played on all my fears: Fear of women, fear of nuclear radiation, fear of dentists, fear of arthouse flicks and, of course, fear of damage to my Michael Jackson.
Teeth, you see, is a movie about a girl who somehow mutated to develop shark-like teeth in her Paris Hilton, such that any MJ it comes in contact with is bitten off.
(As is my routine during horror movies, I frequently had the urge to yell: No! Don't go in there!)
The chomping happens several times in gory detail and must rank as the most disturbing bits of cinema ever. You couldn't tell though by the way the women hooted every time MJ got munched.
That got me thinking and I think I detect a trend. Having your MJ cut off - among men's greatest fears - is actually hilarious to women.
I remember a lot of women sniggering about Lorena Bobbitt. In 1993, Ms Bobbitt shot to fame when she cut off her husband's king of pop with a kitchen knife.
Men were running around like dogs with their tails between their legs. Women, however, seemed amused. Men started sleeping on their stomachs.
There was no less chuckling in Singapore when a national hero no less, former national athlete Fok Keng Choy, was bitten in his MJ-ticles by a python.
I still remember his quote in The Straits Times after. 'Words cannot describe it,' he said.
Similarly, words cannot describe the feeling for me watching Teeth and seeing a man have his severed MJ - guys, look away - gobbled up by a dog.
But how can someone, women specifically, laugh at that?
The consensus from my female friends was that it was funny on two levels.
First, it depicts anguish of someone who has lost something dear, a feeling women identify with.
Secondly, the movie turned the tables on men in the long-running power struggle between the genders.
I listened to them and gave it some careful thought, trying to work out the meaning of it all.
After about seven minutes of intensive thought, I had an epiphany.
It's not something revolutionary or new, rather it affirms some long-held notions.
Here it is: Women enjoy seeing men suffer.
It's that simple. I mean I used to joke about it, but Teeth actually showed me that there may be something more to it.
How else to explain this reaction from my female friend:
'You know what I thought was the funniest thing about the movie?
'You. You were squirming.'
I DON'T mean to boast, but last week - get ready for this - I bought two new pairs of pants.
I will explain why this is so impressive in a bit. But, first, let me state for the record that I did not buy new pants because I was too fat for the old pants. It's just that the old pants had begun to rip at the seams. (I suspect that a man fatter than I broke into my house at night and tried on my pants.)
Okay, now on to the impressive part. I accomplished this new pants purchase, including trying them on for size and getting measured for the alteration, in under 10 minutes. Yes, that's a rate of 0.2 ppm (pants per minute).
I consider this impressive because I have seen women shop, and at no point do they get anywhere close to my speed, except during a sale.
During run-of-the-mill shopping, the fastest shopping speed I've personally witnessed a woman attain is 1 tph (top per hour). Heck, I've even seen a friend take more than five hours to buy nothing.
As I'm sure most people are already acutely aware, men and women have vastly different approaches to shopping. Women shop, men buy.
American humorist Dave Barry once put it this way: 'I can't shop with my wife. The problem is that she almost never has a clear objective. I always have a clear objective. Without a clear objective, you're just wandering randomly around a store, which is NOT the point of shopping.'
He has a point. For men, going shopping and not buying something is considered a failed trip. For women, the act of actually buying something is incidental and not an integral part of the shopping experience.
Most men equate shopping with hunting. Naturally, we assume the same approach should be taken for both tasks.
Take a primitive man going out to spear a mighty dinosaur for his family's dinner. Before he leaves the cave, he does his homework: He checks what kind and size of dinosaur is required, how many spears he is going to need and roughly where this dinosaur can be found.
So his hunting/shopping trip is lightning-quick. He sees the dinosaur, spears it, drags it home and takes a nap.
This is not how women operate. First, she probably has only the vaguest idea of what dinosaur she wants. She's just going out to 'browse'.
Should she see a dinosaur she likes, she will want to check out other dinosaurs as well to see if there is a better one that she can kill with fewer spears.
She may also look at smaller dinosaurs or shrubs that will match that dinosaur.
She will ask some of her female buddies what they think of the dinosaur. For example, does the dinosaur make her look fat?
And that's not the end of it. A woman who is not even feeling hungry will willingly go out to watch a friend spear dinosaurs.
Then there are situations when a woman goes out to spear a small dinosaur and comes home with a whole family of brontosaurus she killed with her MasterCard spear. Without a clear objective, the outcome of female shopping is highly unpredictable.
Now, I'm not saying this is necessarily bad. I'm just saying we need a way to reconcile this difference because it causes male-female tension.
A woman accompanying a man will be upset if he wants to go home within 15 minutes of getting to the mall. She had dutifully followed him while he shopped for his things, and now it's her turn.
A man accompanying a woman shopping, on the other hand, has only one thing on his mind: How to be not shopping any more. This makes for awkward shopping conversation.
Her: What do you think of this top?
Him (without looking up): Nice. You should buy it.
Her (upset): You didn't even look! You don't even care if I look ugly.
As you can see from that sample conversation, this is not a minor problem. So what to do?
The simplest solution is just not shop together. This is a fine solution currently being employed widely. The only drawback is that the standard Singaporean woman is capable of spending a tremendous amount of time shopping, and you couples out there may find dating time drastically cut.
Another option is the man creche. I recall reading about some malls in Europe setting up little areas with video games and massage chairs for bored men to kill time while the women shop. I wonder if it ever caught on.
Still, I think it's a fabulous idea and if a local mall had one, you'd see me there every weekend.
I won't be hard to spot. I'm the one with the new pants.
WE NEED to talk – the four words that will make any guy’s heart plunge into his gut – she said, after opening the gift.
Sigh, what did I do now?
To be honest, I wasn’t fully sure if she would like the gift I had bought, but
I certainly did not expect to have to “talk” about it.
As far as gifts go, I thought it was okay. It was something she needed and I
thought she would appreciate it.
I had bought her a mobile phone charger.
I mean, she was always forgetting to charge her phone so I thought it would be
useful to have a back-up phone charger she could take around with her.
But I realise now that I, like many men before me, had become embroiled in a
bad gift disaster.
Nearly all men, I dare say, would have gone through moments such as this –
where a seemingly well-meaning gift was received with “the look’’.
The “look’’ is a non-verbal form of communication perfected by women that
delivers the message that the “lookee” is in big trouble.
We have a terrible problem buying gifts for women – as if we were born without
required brain parts to pick out gifts that women will like.
My brother, for one, is a fine example of someone completely devoid of the
gift-giving sense.
He is, otherwise, a rather thoughtful, considerate person but, for some reason
or other, cannot bring himself to buy anything that doesn’t need to be plugged
in.
He once bought my mother – the same mother who was then only coming to grips
with the Internet – a flatbed scanner.
A year earlier, he had bought her an inkjet printer and thought the scanner
would complement it nicely.
Even though she has since embraced the Internet wholeheartedly, the scanner
still gets only the most minimal use. She finds that it makes a rather handsome shelf.
Then there is Sidney, an uncle who bought my aunt a top-of-the-line PDA phone.
The thing was twce the size of a normal phone and had so many functions, it was
like a small computer.
We all thought it was seriously cool.
It took my aunt two months to work out how to change the ringtone. She hasn’t told him, but she doesn’t really want a phone that can play powerpoint presentations.
She wants a pink one.
Then there is Martin, a friend who must surely take the cake.
The chemist gave his girlfriend what he thought was a killer Valentine’s Day present: a cordless steam iron. She didn’t talk to him for two days.
The main problem, you see, is that all of us were buying gifts that we personally wouldn’t mind receiving.Men like things with a lot of functions. They do not appear to be what women
want.
American humorist Dave Barry once described the ideal gifts for women like
this: “The gift should not do anything, or, if it does, it should do it badly.”
I suppose that’s why women like diamonds so much: They are essentially useless.
But consider the following pairs of gift options.
Gift 1: A one-litre pack of aloe vera scented Shokubutsu brand shower cream ina handy plastic dispenser. Good for the whole family to use.
Gift 2: A pack of five small decorative soaps, shaped like fruit.
Or...
Gift 1: A table lamp with a 3M polarising light filter to cut out glare and also uses a special energy-saving bulb that can provide 10,000 hours of light.
Gift 2: A small hand-made scented candle in the form of an angel that the recipient will never ever light.
To a man, any of the two Gift 1 options is clearly superior, but should they buy it for a woman, they will find themselves in serious gift-giving trouble. And even when some of the more courageous among us try to adhere to this “useless gift” rule, we seem able to mess things up.
A friend, Rachel, recently received for her birthday three jars of beach sand from her boyfriend.
They were taken from three different beaches in Australia. He no doubt thought he had, in that gift, achieved the nirvana of boyfriend sensitivity.
As Rachel described the gift to me, the jars were not decorative ones but rather simple glass bottles with a label on them, not unlike a geological survey sample.
Her reaction initially was to pour out the sand from each of the jars assuming the real gift – possibly something with diamonds on it – was buried within. When it became evident this was not the case, she remarked: “Haha, where’s the real present?”
I understand the relationship is now a little rocky.
But whatever it is, men, I urge you not to give up. Just keep at it and one day I’m sure you’ll buy that one thing you think is useless in just the right way and she’ll open it, look at you lovingly and say: “We need to talk’’.
STOP me if you've heard this one.A woman says to her friend: 'I made my husband a millionaire.'
The friend replies: 'What was he before?'
'A multi-millionaire,' she says.
Chances are, many of you wanted to stop me. And it's no wonder too, because this is a very popular joke, especially at weddings.
It's popular, I always thought, because of the sheer ridiculousness of its assertion - that a woman can single-handedly spend such a vast amount of money. Ha ha, very funny, whoever came up with the joke.
Well, at least that was what I always assumed.
I now realise I was a fool.
It turns out it was not a joke at all. I'm convinced it's a documented case study.
I have learnt that some women, if they put their minds to it, are able to spend an enormous amount of money in an incredibly short time. (I realise men are no angels in this department. I'll get to that later. Tradition dictates that I make fun of women first.)
Recently, I was given the opportunity to observe some friends of mine, many of whom have recently received their year-end bonus, shop. And I'm forced to deduce that some women can spend so much because they don't have the ability to discern how much stuff costs.
A woman is capable of looking at a few pieces of leather stitched together with somebody else's initials stuck on it and say to herself: 'Only $900 for this bag! What a bargain!'
A man looking at the same bag might say: 'This costs HOW MUCH? It looks like it costs $5 to make.'
The bag doesn't even do anything special that a normal $20 bag can't.
You can put stuff in it, just like a normal bag. You can take stuff out, like a normal bag. And when you get upset with me and swing it at my head, it leaves a nasty bruise just like a normal bag. Ouch.
But really, that's about it. You would think for that price, it would be waterproof, bulletproof and be hand-stitched by no less than a member of the British royal family.
And that's just bags. Don't even get me started on shoes.
To me, this observation that women have an inability to assess the value of things makes perfect logical sense.
Strangely enough, when I presented this remark casually to some of my expensive bag-owning friends, they reacted as if I had just said the most insulting thing in the whole world. One inquired if I was drunk, had been smoking crack and no longer desired the comforts of female companionship.
I realised we did not all agree on my recently formulated universal truth. So, being the open-minded new age guy that I am, I let them explain why they were willing to shell out upwards of $900 for a bag, into which they would put a $500 purse, containing about $12.50.
And at the same time, why they were willing to pay the sticker price on the bag with no questions asked, and yet would haggle for 30 minutes with a street vendor over a $5 scarf? I mean, being brand-sensitive only goes so far.
I found their responses very enlightening, if not mildly scary.
One said: 'It makes me feel good. Like how heels make me feel sexy.' (Whoa, I thought. Maybe you and your shoes should get a room.)
Another ventured that it's a status thing. It's a sign that you've made it.
'In that sense, women actually want to pay $900 for a bag. They don't want to pay less,' she said.
She went on to share examples of how some really rich women would spend thousands on a watch even when the watch face makes it difficult to see what time it is.
'It's a declaration that, if I can afford this watch, I don't need to know what time it is,' she said.
My friends also pointed out that even though a cretin like me cannot differentiate a $20 pasar malam bag from a $1,000 one, many, many women out there can. And they will say nasty things about you if you carry an imitation bag and do not immediately declare it as such. ('Hi! Long time no see. Oh, before we go any further, let me just say I bought this bag from Thailand. So how's the family...)
At this stage, I guess I should talk about men for a bit. Men are also able to spend copious amounts of money in a short time on way more stupid things they don't need - gambling, booze, women, stupidly fast cars, wars, etc.
But the difference is, when men make these purchases, they believe that there is nothing out there which achieves a similar function for a much cheaper price.
For example, a man going out to buy a Ferrari knows he cannot go and soup up his Hyundai to get equivalent performance.
Also, a man making a major purchase will spend some time thinking about it and researching it. Whereas a woman is capable of saying 'I'm going shopping today' and coming back with a few thousand bucks worth of stuff.
I'm sure many of you out there can think of exceptions. Even now, a few come to mind. But this column is not about those people.
This is about people who don't have a firm grip on their finances and are prone to impulse buys and just want to make fun of others to make themselves feel better, especially after they've just blown a few hundred bucks on computer games.
You know, people like me.
No, not my two front teeth - By Jeremy Au Yong
DEAR Santa,
I can explain.
Over the past 15 years or so, I may have inadvertently said that I do not believe you exist maybe two to three hundred times. But you know I wasn't being serious, right?
It was just a phase I was going through. After all, you did ruin one Christmas for me.
It was in 1989 when I was just a little kid in primary school. I remember it like it was yesterday.
Not that I am holding a grudge or anything, but can you imagine my horror on Christmas morning when I woke up to find that you left me - by way of a present - a three-pack of underwear?
That's seriously messed up, Santa.
That kind of present is the sort you see really, really bad kids getting in movies. It's not supposed to happen in real life and certainly not to a good kid (relatively) whose only real crime that year was punching a few classmates. (I blame the booze.)
Anyway, that's in the past now, and I'm going to let it go. It's just something I had to get off my chest.
It's Christmas and 'tis the season of goodwill, forgiveness and all that.
And now that I've put that behind me, I am going to get down to the main purpose of this letter: to ask for stuff.
(Come on, you owe me for that whole underwear thing.)
This stuff isn't just for me either. I have taken the liberty - albeit without prior consultation with the other members of my gender - to ask for stuff on behalf of all men.
However, if you just want to give it to me, that's fine too. I'm not picky.
Perhaps, you think you already know what I'm going to ask you for, based on what I have been going around telling people I want.
Well, a flashy car, bucket-loads of money and a miracle diet would certainly be nice. But since I am asking on behalf of more than just me, I thought I would widen the scope.
The loot I'm hoping for is meant to help foster harmony among mankind.
After all, bringing men and women closer together has always been what I've been about. And if that means I, personally, have to lead the way by being close to many women, then it is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
Don't thank me.
Anyway, right at the top of my Christmas list is the ability to read minds.
That policeman in the TV series Heroes can do it and he scored some major points with the ladies.
I think if every man had the ability to read the mind of his girlfriend or wife, life would be much better.
For one thing, we would be able to prevent petty arguments.
Let's say you read your girlfriend's mind and she's thinking: 'I've just spent a few hundred dollars drastically changing my hairstyle and he hasn't said a word. He didn't notice. To him, I'm like just part of the furniture. He doesn't care about me.'
You could instantly respond: 'Wow, what a beautiful new hairdo you have. I noticed something different the moment I saw you but I was too taken aback by the breathtaking beauty of it all to say anything earlier.'
Or, if you can tell she is about to ask you 'Do I look fat in this?' or 'Do you love me?', you could go hide in the toilet.
Next on the list is some sort of unique talent that can be demonstrated at a party, like cool magic tricks.
A group of female friends went to a bar recently and witnessed what they thought was the most awesome magic trick ever.
A guy burnt a card (king of diamonds) chosen at random, and when he rubbed the ashes on one of the girl's hands, it formed the letter K and a diamond shape.
I don't see what the big deal is. They, however, have now been talking about this for five days straight.
The last time any woman talked about me for any considerable amount of time, it was to complain.
Third on my list of wants is some sort of fashion sense. When I bump into people on the street, I get one of two responses: 'Wah, did you just get out of bed?' or 'You just came from jogging?'
This happens no matter how well I think I'm dressed.
Granted, I do not want to be given so much fashion sense as to get compliments about my dressing.
That will probably cost money and time. No, I'm looking for just enough so that my friends will be willing to walk beside me in public.
I could also use some sort of sweet greeting generator to help me sign greeting cards and autograph books at parties.
I absolutely suck at those. Women will write long meaningful, heartfelt messages in them, while I will scrawl something like:
CONGRATULATIONS/HAPPY BIRTHDAY/SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS and then sign my name.
Also useful I think would be eyes at the back of my head. Christmas is traditionally a busy period in the English Premier League and some extra eyes will allow me to watch football while simultaneously pretending to listen to someone.
Final thing Santa, now that I think of it, I could use some new underwear.
Merry Christmas.
BOY, do I love technology.I say this on account of my new alarm clock.
I recently bought a new, technology-heavy alarm clock that allows me - this blew my mind - to determine the interval between me hitting the snooze button and the alarm sounding again.
Armed with this powerful new feature, I was able, just a few days ago, to put in a record 22-minute snooze - a feat tech-less prehistoric man could only dream of. (The most prehistoric man could hope for was five minutes.)
But as wonderful as that is, it is not the only thing I love about technology.
The other great thing is that it is developed by scientists. Why is this so great?
Well, because a lot of scientists - and I say this with the utmost respect - are absolutely rubbish when it comes to picking up girls.
I do not make this sweeping stereotypical generalisation without basis. (I make it without research.)
At one stage in my life, I spent four years pretending to study computer engineering and, as a result, hung around almost exclusively with such people.
During that time, I witnessed on numerous occasions us science people crash and burn when putting on our smoothest moves.
We would head back from our failures and console ourselves at our computers, working on something we hoped would help us score with the girls.
It was at this stage of my life that I wrote a bit of software where pictures of this girl I was after would dance according to whatever music was playing. (I showed her this particular effort. We are not together.)
But that is not the point. The point is we are working on it. And there are way smarter people than me out there failing with girls, which is to say some great things have been invented in the past for the sole purpose of trying to hook up.
I dare say practically every major invention by a guy had something or other to do with a woman.
Just take the Internet, for example. Oh sure, the inventors might say it was designed for military communication, but those of us in the know understand that it was made to download naked pictures and chat up girls through MSN.
But coming back to my tech-loving, I must say my favourite contribution of scientists to the dating game is the SMS message.
I came to a new heightened appreciation for the romantic role text messages play while at a dinner where a friend was grilled (not literally) over a love interest he was in denial about.
We were getting nowhere as he hemmed and hawed, but we made a breakthrough with the question: How many SMS messages do you send to her a day?
'About two or three,' he said and that sent everyone into hysterics.
It got me thinking about why we considered the frequent text messages so telling, and here is my conclusion after some 20 seconds of deep analysis: It is nearly impossible for two normal single people to have that much to say through little messages on the phone.
As a single guy, I never sent anyone text messages every day. There's just not enough material. You have to keep it short, so it's not like a letter and yet it needs to be urgent enough to justify a text message.
To be able to sustain such a textual relationship, one must necessarily delve into the realm of superfluous, random, pointless messages - sometimes known as the 'good morning/good night' SMS.
These messages are of absolutely no use to two people not romantically interested in each other.
Despite the name, they can contain much more than a simple greeting. Rather they present unsolicited content that serves no purpose other than letting the sender reach out and touch someone. Picking up the phone may be a bit daunting and awkward, but a text message provides just enough distance.
Friends I discussed this matter with all admitted having sent someone they were interested in similar completely unsolicited messages.
'Yawn, so sleepy :o' or 'So many ppl in Orchard Road today' or 'I feel like a milkshake' were among some examples.
My personal favourite: 'Meow. I'm so full.'
I don't get what cat noises have to do with it. Whether it means she just ate a cat or whether cats are supposed to have 'full' meow, I don't know.
But those four words perfectly exemplify what I'm talking about. It provides the receiver no useful information apart from forcing him or her, for a moment at least, to think about you.
All right, if others can invent something that revolutionised courtships, surely I can make more of my dancing picture software. I'll get right to it, after this quick nap to re-energise.
Wake me up in an hour... make that an hour 22 minutes.
IF I were a woman...
Boy, if I had 50 cents for every time I started a sentence with those words...
Okay, so I’d still be pretty poor. Counting the first line of this column, that would make it, let me see, exactly one time I’ve used it.
I’ve always accepted as a peculiar quirk the fact that my brain is unable to even entertain the imaginary, purely hypothetical scenario of reversing my sexual polarity.
I don’t know how many guys have the same problem, but when someone asks me – this question tends to come from women – which guy I would like to go out with presuming I was a woman, my mind goes blank. (Of course, my mind is not particularly full under normal circumstances, which is why I write a newspaper column.)
Women certainly don’t appear to have this mental block. From what I can tell, most women have already spent considerable time deliberating and discussing who they would be attracted to if they were male. Just ask any woman.
For example, I am willing to bet anyone $5 cash that Queen Elizabeth II would be able to answer that question without the slightest hesitation. (I’m going to need video proof before I pay up.)
Anyway, I was contemplating this particular gender issue this week, not for any parliamentary reason, but because of this fascinating unprovoked e-mail a colleague sent me.
Here, without revealing his name lest he kills me, I produce the following unedited excerpt: “I have a crush on the Japanese actor Takuya Kimura after I saw him in the Japanese drama Beautiful Life.
“He played a cool, aloof and talented hairstylist (but an underdog in the salon) who fell for a terminally ill girl (which makes him so very noble!) He’s my idol ever since!”
But he (my colleague not Kimura) made it clear that 1. he was straight and 2. he did not like Mr Kimura in a romantic way.
Rather it was that he found the Japanese heart-throb so unbelievably cool that he wanted to hang out with him, like forever. It was what he termed a “man crush”.
Call me a social holdout with cruel but handsome eyes if you must, but I had never, until that e-mail, even heard of the term.
So I did a quick Google search, and what do you know, this kind of thing turns out to be quite common.
There are thousands and thousands of sites with loads of people quite publicly declaring their platonic “man crushes”. I was stunned at first. But then I started seeing it everywhere.
Batman and Robin clearly had some man crushing going on, as did Starsky and Hutch, and the characters in nearly every movie involving Will Farrell – Talladega Nights and Blades Of Glory to name but two.
I wondered if I, too, was capable of having a man crush.
Have I been in denial all this while? I mean, I’ve always sort of looked up to professional footballer Ryan Giggs.
The Manchester United player has got amazing skills, supreme loyalty to the club and in 1999, he scored a spectacular solo goal against Arsenal in the semi-final of the FA Cup.
Often, when I am daydreaming, I am brought back to that glorious moment when he ran around five Arsenal players to slam the ball in the back of net. It was pure magic. I could have hugged him.
Wait up. Did I just say that? Maybe this man crush thing really has more to it than I thought.
Maybe, just maybe idolising Kimura isn’t that embarrassing after all, and is merely an expression of male admiration for a successful man. Nah, it is still very embarrassing. If he were my man crush, I certainly wouldn’t be prepared to tell anyone, let alone record it forever in an e-mail that can be easily forwarded to the whole office. (Just kidding.)
So maybe there are limits to this phenomenon. One ground rule I have just come up with is this: The object of the man crush must also be someone other men are capable of looking up to.
So while I think it might be acceptable to have a giant poster of Ryan Giggs or U2 lead singer Bono on your bedroom wall, the same does not apply to Orlando Bloom.
But other than that, I guess I have now bought into this “man crush” concept. I am willing to accept that it’s totally possible for a straight man to have a platonic crush on another man.
I also seem to have semi-admitted a personal man crush on a certain footballer – quite some progress since the start of this column. I guess all that’s left now is to ask myself... Shucks, my mind went blank again.
IT STARTED innocently enough.
I was having tea with a friend at a coffee shop. And we were engaging in what I thought was a casual chat when, out of the blue, it happened.
“It” refers to my friend getting angry with me. It would not surprise you to learn that this friend was female. Let me recount to you the chain of events leading up to this unfortunate incident.
1. The Australian World Cup (yes, World Cup!) rugby team scored a try against Fiji. 2. A cheer rang out from the TV behind me which was showing the game.
3. Instinctively, I turned my head to the TV to see what had happened.
4. No more than two seconds later, upon seeing that Australia had indeed scored a try, I turned my head back to continue the conversation with my friend.
Let me just stress at this point that guys cannot help but look at the TV if somebody scores. It might be any sport, football, cricket, canoe polo, it doesn’t matter. If there’s a sudden cheer, we must look. We cannot not look. It’s in our DNA. That doesn’t mean we are not paying attention to you women.
For example, during the briefest of moments I had my head turned, I had diverted some extra brain power to my ears to monitor the words she was saying, just in case I was given a spot test.
Women are always giving men these listening spot tests. “What was the last thing I said?” they will ask in a stern teacherly voice. And if you don’t get it 100 per cent correct, you will be in trouble.
Sometimes – as in my case – I got it right and still got in trouble.
Apparently, she was in the midst of saying something important, something momentous, something so crucial that it required my full undivided attention. Yes, so monumentally important and urgent this piece of information was that – in the absence of my undivided attention – it shrivelled up, died and was reduced to “nothing”.
She: I have decided that..... (notices the turned head)
I: (turning head back after a split second) You have decided that...?
She: (with upset look) Nothing.
Now, let’s consider why this has happened.
Women might say it was because I was being insensitive. Just when someone was opening up to you about something she felt very deeply about, you decided it was more important to look at some strangers a few thousand kilometres away run with an egg-shaped ball across a line. “How incredibly dense are you?” women will say.
Men in turn will respond that, once again, women have taken a trivial matter and blown it right out of proportion.
I say it’s just one big misunderstanding. You see, women and men have vastly different approaches to talking.
For men, it’s just a means of telling people what you want.
For women, it’s an event, an experience to be enjoyed and is full of little nuances,
That’s why talking to a woman can be like watching a play by Shakespeare. It requires a lot of concentration, it’s difficult to understand and it always takes longer than you think.
It’s quite clear men have the far superior approach. For example, no man would ever get angry at another for ignoring him momentarily to check out sport.
As a matter of fact, men would find it quite strange if another did not actively look. (“Are you okay? You didn’t look at that goal?’’) In fact, if there is a TV with sport on in the vicinity, it is quite likely all men will talk to one another without ever making any eye contact. It’s a very efficient system.
Men are also more efficient with the phone. Our conversations are short and straight to the point. (“Eh, help me buy 1143, $2 big, $2 small. Okay, bye bye.”)
Women, on the other hand, are unable to have a phone conversation under 30 minutes. (“Can help me buy 1143, $2 big, $2 small? It’s not too much trouble, right? I mean, if it is, just let me know, I can go myself. I just thought that since you are in town you could help... Sure? Okay, thanks. Oh, do you know why I am buying this number, it’s very funny. You see, yesterday my son was on the bus coming home from school when he saw this horse...”)
And it goes on and on. A casual call from an old friend can take upwards of two hours. If they are planning a birthday, it can stretch to two days.
Aside from being more efficient, men are also easier to understand. That’s because we adopt the dictionary meaning of the words we use.
Women, on the other hand, invent new ones, especially when they are angry. For example, “Fine” never means “Fine”. It means something more like “Very very not fine and it’s all your fault”.
“Nothing” means “something very very bad that is all your fault”.
But even when they are not angry, the meanings of words tend to get muddled. Among the most problematic are “hungry” and “full”.
I have a friend capable of moaning about how “hungry” she is on the way to a restaurant, and then order a salad of which she will eat only half.
I have another friend who – no matter what she eats, it could be two peanuts – will proclaim: “I’m so full. I ate too much.”
It’s indeed a serious problem. One that men and women have to tackle together. Women can try to talk to men only when the TV is off. Men, in turn, can try not to take everything women say literally.
It’s worth a shot. I mean, we’ve got “nothing” to lose.
INDULGE me for a moment, if you will, and consider this hypothetical situation: Let’s say you are a guy. (Actually, this situation applies only to those for which this part is not hypothetical.)
Okay, so you’re a guy and you are out with friends at a bar watching a football match. Your girlfriend calls you and insists you had promised to go shopping with her. You ditch the game to meet her (like I said, hypothetical) because:
1. You have genuine care and concern for this very important person in your life and you would gladly go out of your way to do your duty as a boyfriend just to make her happy. After all, you did promise, and it’s just a football game. You can catch the highlights later, or
2. She scares the bejewels out of you.
If you picked the first option, you are possibly the best boyfriend in the world. Either that or you are lying through your teeth. If you picked the second option, then it is quite probable that you – like bits of corn scattered in a chicken coop – are hen-pecked.
When I asked my friends this question, they invented a third option: “Who the heck picks shopping over football? Please come up with a more reasonable hypothetical situation.” Sometimes, they can be real wet blankets.
Anyway, back to the hen-pecked men. The term seems to have gone out of style, probably due to the scarcity of live chickens in urban areas. A term more commonly used by younger folk now is “whipped”.
They mean the same thing, but whipped has a few add-ons. In general usage, the word is always accompanied by doing a whipping motion and making a whipping sound, which for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to spell. But it is a sound everybody knows.
I did a quick poll around the office and was offered the following alternatives: “Pa shhh”, “Puh woosh”, “Peh wssh” and even “Piak”. For simplicity, I am going with my own suggestion: “Puh chhh!”
Sample usage: “Yeah man, that Shawn is totally whipped. Puh-chhh! (makes whipping motion with hand).”
For men, the notion of being a whipped man is no laughing matter. You can tell how serious it is simply by seeing how hard men try to pretend it’s not serious. That’s the male coping mechanism. Just look at how many jokes there are about prostates.
So yes, men will rib their friends who are whipped and tell jokes like: Marriage is a process where a man loses his bachelor’s and gains a master.
Heck, the whole whipped action plus sound thing is designed to make fun of people. It is a thick layer of denial, covering what is some major pain. As you are no doubt aware, society – women in particular – is to blame.
Society has placed these expectations of machismo on a man. For example, they must not be afraid of spiders. And it’s tough to reconcile being a manly spider-killer with having to ask for permission to go bowling. And really it’s kind of confusing as well.
I mean, here you are pandering to every need, whim and fancy of your girlfriend, but other women are not exactly going: “My goodness, how nice he is to her. That is sooooo sexy.”
No, what they are thinking is: “What a wimp. Give me a real man.”
As if that wasn’t enough, it also has the potential to make us insecure. The prevailing theory that men believe is – for any two people not equally invested in a relationship – the one who has less to lose gets to wear the pants. An imbalance of power, therefore, only fuels the persistent fear that you are not her first choice and will be ditched if the first choice comes along.
But Jeremy, I hear you say, isn’t it just so typical of irresponsible, narrow-minded chauvinists like you to focus on the handful of whipped men while ignoring the hoards and hoards of women who have absolutely no power in their relationships? You don’t hear them whining.
Of course, you are right. But maybe, just maybe, by highlighting the plight of men in this situation, I am helping to lift society to a greater level of awareness on whipped-ness, and maybe there will come a day when men and women will realise the folly of their ways and foster a greater sense of justice and equality for whipped men and women everywhere.
A lofty ambition, I know, but as the saying goes: If you are not part of the solution, then you are writing a newspaper column.
I was planning to spend a little more time thinking of a solution, but I promised a friend I’d go shopping.
