Juggling
Being a Baby Boomer, I generally have a confusion (not so much a barrier as true confusion) over gender fluidity. I identify as him/he if I must declare, but I have yet to include that on any proper titling or letterhead the way it is becoming standard for people in the groove of modernity. My youngest son is producing a short play that is entirely about a very gender fluid situation with a gender-bimodal protagonist interacting with another gender-bimodal antagonist and when I read it I came away totally confused with the pronoun shifting. It distracted me to the point of not really being able to embrace the storyline very well. That is meaningful since I am fundamentally a storyteller and consider myself reasonably adept at spotting a storyline, staying with it and even anticipating it. I am forever telling Kim the next line in movies, which I find an indicator that as a storyteller I can generally see where the author is going (I’ve had my Sixth Sense moments of confusion as well, though). But in that short play I was completely lost and tangled up by the gender shape-shifting and all the them/they positioning and transitioning.
I mention that because I am now going to say something that I will declare up-front is probably gender-insensitive and maybe even gender-biased. But I believe men are most often about focus and women are much better at multi-tasking. I don’t think many in my generation would fundamentally disagree with that observation though I imagine the more gender-sensitive among the Boomers would probably stay far away from such a characterization or Pidgeon-holing by gender. As my readers know, I am either too intrepid or too stupid to stay away from making inflammatory observations, so I will use my gender-identified self-deprecation hallway pass to say that men do not multi-task very well for the most part. I’ve heard it described that, like the old nursery rhymes about how boys are made of “snips and snails and puppy dog tails” and girls are made of “sugar and spice and everything nice”, men are like dogs with a bone. Once they have the bone in their grasp like a horse biting down on a bit, they have to find a place to bury it. Dogs needing desperately to bury bones can be a very cute natural analogy or it can be a sexually-charged locker-room reference, but I mean it in the former, non-sexual context. It seems to me that a dog with a bone is on a narrowly focused mission and if he cannot chew on the bone in the moment, he is determined to put it someplace he will remember and others will not get to. It is very primordial and it goes to survival of the species if the male dog is, as Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom would say, the main breadwinner in the wild. There you go, you knew I was going to offend someone soon crashing about in this realm.
But let us focus on focus for a moment. It seems clearer and clearer to me that we are moving into a brave new world that is increasing becoming dominated by the female of the species. I do not mean that in a negative way, but rather in a strongly positive way. Men are unreliable and notoriously unable to cope with the complexity and speed of change of our accelerating modern world. Women seem to do it better, which is why, increasingly, women are taking over the arenas of law and medicine (they already own veterinary medicine and that old dog should just be happy that they do). I have previously noted that all three of those professional advanced degree academies are now predominantly enrolling female students over male students. This is not some convoluted effort to subvert male domination, but is a natural phenomenon wherein women seem better equipped mentally to cope with the complexity and multi-talented requirements of those professions. Basically, men are left scratching their balls by the side of the road and choosing to do what I did, which is to go to business school where our focused, bone-burying talents are best applied.
Luckily for me, I believe I inherited a degree of gender balance that takes after my mother. She was more adventuresome and bone-burying than most women of her era. She was not gender-confused, but she was 50.001% female and 49.999% male. That is not an empirical measurement, but merely an observation by a son that feels he takes after his mother rather than his father. My father was something like 75% male and the other 25% he dedicated to those female qualities that would help him ensnare and propagate with females like the Venus flytrap uses its plantness to lure insects to its carnivorous jaws. So as a card-carrying member of the 49.999% female contingent, I should be able to multi-task better than most men, if I am right that multi-tasking is a gender-dominant trait. That’s my reasoning and I’m sticking to it, but personal experience tells me otherwise.
I guess that multi-tasking must be in that 0.001% of the femaleness coefficient that I did not inherit. I am, unabashedly, a man of focus, that dog who needs to bury that bone at all costs and cannot see past the bone-burying to other tasks until it is done. And here’s the thing, I see myself increasingly moving into a multi-tasking, women-driven world and I am forced to figure out how to manage. It is, I find, strange for me to say, but I am forced to learn how to juggle suddenly. Several years ago I tried to learn how to juggle. That means, technically I think, to handle more than two balls at a time (an interesting numerical constraint with balls given the maleness of this conversation). I got to the point where, with great focus and practice, I could juggle three balls and was perhaps heading to four balls when I chose to end that madness. I had to psyche myself into starting the juggle and it usually took several attempts to get it going. But when i got it going, I was OK at it….for a moment of two, whereupon I would overthink things and invariable drop all three balls. Juggling is hard…at least for me.
I have thought about juggling this morning because as I head into Labor Day (another fine analogy there for th picking), I am confronted with multiple balls that want to be juggled in my life. I have a big expert witness case that is sopping up lots of time, I have an old expert witness case that tugs at my calendar each Friday, I have a new expert witness case that I have been mandated that could start with an information download at any moment, I have yet another case that I believe I am getting and I have yet again another case in the London High Court that I was told today I am “perfect” for and for which I am being considered. This is all on top of a three-credit course at USD that starts in a week and runs for three months and another course scheduled for the Spring. We have a flurry of family affairs in process and a trip to New York CIty planned for a bit more than a week from now.
So this morning I awoke and realized that I hadn’t written a story for today. No bone is more important for me to bury each and every day than to write my story, so here I am writing a story about why I am late (by 90 minutes) in publishing my daily story. Damn, I hate juggling! Give me a bone and a place to bury it please.