Caught! (Photo: Carlo Nicora)
As testosterone-filled, virile, heterosexual men, we can’t stop looking girls. Having a girlfriend or spouse doesn’t stop us – it’s like a disease. I’m sure there is some method of mind training to stop us looking but then we would miss out on all the beauty that is around us. As Tim Ferriss says, sunny weather+girls in skimpy clothing = Happy Guys.
The Yes Man (Photo: SBishop)
“Say Yes more.” – Maitreya
“Make it an AWESOME day! (who else is going to do it for you?)” – Mike Spillman
“KILL THE JOB!!!”
(Photo: DerrickT)
Ignore what they say. Instead, watch what they do.
I’m buggered, then.
Victor Borge
Some quotations for you to sip on.
“Everything is going to be all right in the end. If it’s not, then it’s not the end.”
“Laughter is the closest distance between two people.” ~ Victor Borge
“Be yourself; everyone else is taken.” ~ Oscar Wilde
(Photo: maryatexitzero)
Thoughts on Manliness
I read a blog on manliness. It’s called The Art of Manliness. Though its decor reeks of cravats, old spice, and pipe smoke, it’s a decent blog and deserves its large readership. It teaches the modern man how to be manly in a era of unmanliness (this era of unmanliness, as you know, has a lot to do with Feminism). I initially found it humorous but the blog as a whole deals with the lack of manliness quite seriously. There were two posts that struck me: “The Writing on the Door” and “Nice Guys Don’t Have to Finish Last”. The first article was written by Angela Bailey and she discusses the dilemma she often faces whenever she and a man approach a door at the same time:
I’m never sure what he’s thinking at this point, but I know I have two choices: I can hang back and see what he decides to do or I can speed up and reach for the door before he gets the chance. I’ve gone both ways here. Usually I make the decision at the very last moment using my keen peripheral vision to quickly assess his cultural values, upbringing and emotional state of mind.
This anecdote leads onto a larger discussion of the roles that men and women assume in society now. Feminism has rightly taken tremendous strides to empower women but has also taken away some of the traditional male roles. This leaves the modern, younger man in a bit of a state, procrastinating on whether it is alright to open the door, pull up a chair, escort safely home the modern woman. Angela goes on to say that women deplore the lack of manliness in today’s men and that men should take back their battered masculinity and be men again.
The second article struck me because it’s something that I’ve seen so often in my life: it’s where a guy uses their niceness to cover their insecurities. This, as the article says, often descends into weinerdom. I couldn’t put it better myself. Instead of being the nice guy or an utter bastard, the article suggests an alternative: the extremely confident gentleman.
The extremely confident gentleman? I didn’t know there was such a thing! This article said that it was ok to be a nice guy; you just have to back it up with confidence. This was a great insight for me because I genuinely don’t like arseholes or being an arsehole and I’d felt that on some level a man needed some arseholeness in order to be attractive to ladies. Instead, the article listed what it took to be a confident gentleman:
Be a leader and a decision maker-not a push-over.
Be ambitious.
Have a cool man skill or hobby.
Be supremely confident about your relationship.
Be supremely confident and comfortable in your own skin.
I lack all of these attributes so I was both a kid in a candy store and a depressive, angsty teenager. A candy store kid because I had finally found the Everlasting Gobstopper, and a depressive teen because of the time and journey I would have to undertake in order to acquire these attributes. I groaned.
I groaned even more when I read Steve Pavlina’s “How to Be a Man” again. It’s a fantastic article:
A man doesn’t adopt a confident posture because he knows he’ll succeed. He often knows that failure is a likely outcome. But when the odds of success are clearly against him, he still exudes confidence. It isn’t because he’s ignorant or suffering from denial. It’s because he’s proving to himself that he has the strength to transcend his self-doubt. This builds his courage and persistence, two of his most valuable allies.
Wow.
My open-mindedness (or is it just my passivity?) has contributed to my lack of manliness, as I “empower” the woman by letting them make decisions, whereas the articles above state that men who make the decisions empower the women! It relates to Steve Pavlina’s point that a man must be the giver of love i.e. he must be proactive. In fact, most of Steve’s article is about being proactive. I am the embodiment of the reactive man. And that is why I need to Be a Man.
(Photo: Justin Marty)
…or not.
Yesterday I saw a magazine stating in big, bold letters, “30 Ways to Improve Vista.” I scoffed at it because a) I’d given up on trying to improve Vista and b) a magazine article stating so many ways to improve it proves that Vista is a crappy OS. This appears to have been silently approved by Microsoft themselves as you cannot upgrade Vista to Windows 7 – you need to do a clean install. Still, on some level I really wanted to get Vista back to the way it was so I skimmed the article. The article wasn’t helpful for my problems.
So what are my problems with Vista? It’s very slow now. I have a Fujitsu-Siemens V5535 which has 1.8Ghz and around 800mb of RAM, so it’s a very modest laptop. This, combined with the necessity of installing a firewall, antivirus, antispyware, has meant that it has gotten very slow. The computer was quite fast at first without these programmes and moderately quick when I installed them. But gradually over time it has gotten slower, and slower and slower. Currently whenever I boot up, there are a million svchost processes and I’ve no idea which ones to shut down. Plus, if I had to close 20, 30 of these processes every time I used the computer I’d go nuts. Programmes now take ages to load up and if I click them whilst they are loading, the window says “not responding” and the programme takes even longer to load. It is absolutely infuriating.
So I gave Linux a go. I tried the Ubuntu flavour. This was also infuriating as I spent at least 8 hours trying to fix the screen resolution. I told myself to stop, but I kept on going. And going. And going. Then I finally managed to get the bastard working. And what a Inglourious Basterd it is. Once I fixed the resolution from 800×600 to 1280×800, everything else was easy. The fact that it is practically virus and spyware free was a revelation: “I don’t need a virus scanner? Or a firewall?” And it was quick, despite the apparent age of my computer. Previously on Vista, flash videos only worked smoothly if I’d just booted up. Otherwise I had to wait for them to finish buffering before I could watch them properly. It was impossible to watch videos on BBC iplayer. So imagine my surprise when my computer was already scorchingly hot but it could run the iplayer videos. With ease. I think I fell in love.
So anyone who’s reading this is having problems with Vista, give Linux a go. You have to do a bit of work to get it going but the results are completely worth it.
Absolutely delish.
I don’t drink wine at all. I bought it because I was going to a get together at some faraway house and was curious why all the ladies in my area buy rosé at a ferocious rate. The first taste of it was just like regular white wine but then it transformed into something wholly and utterly delicious. It was so delicious that it disappeared within half an hour. Mmm.
