baby mama's boyfriend

Baby Mama and I went to a movie yesterday – perhaps the last one we’ll see together for a long time (that doesn’t involve Pixar animations).   We saw Horrible Bosses – a benign comedy chosen primarily for Baby Mama’s crush on Jason Bateman.  I didn’t mind it, although I had trouble suspending my disbelief for the part about the guy who hates that his uber-hot boss Jennifer Aniston keeps trying to have sex with him.  During a scene where the guy feels harassed because she’s wearing just a lab coat and panties in the office, one moviegoer in the theatre actually said out loud “How is that a problem?” – thus vocalizing what every straight guy in the place was thinking.

as bosses go, i strongly believe it could be worse.

By contrast, I had no trouble at all believing Jason Bateman’s monologue at the start of the movie:  “My grandma came to this country with 21 dollars.  After working hard her whole life and taking shit from no one, she turned that 21 dollars into 2000 dollars.  That…sucks. Grandma’s problem was that she took shit from nobody.  These days, the key to success is taking shit.”

Baby Mama’s boyfriend isn’t wrong – as I learned from my McQueen experiment, standing up for yourself and doing your own thing rarely gets you anywhere (unless you’re Steve McQueen, and he’s dead).  As I mentioned in a previous post, people claim to admire individualists, but in truth they usually try to oppress and kill them. If you’ve read of a true maverick who successfully blazed their own unique trail in life, it’s probably for the same reason you’ve read about a recent plane crash – it happens so infrequently that it’s newsworthy.

For many males, this is perhaps one of the most emasculating truisms of professional life: in the workplace, a handful of us get to call the shots while the rest of us have our shots called by that handful.   In such a top-down management structure,  some shit-taking may be required, and no doubt it’s hard for a man to feel like a man when he’s kissing his boss’ ass – unless, of course, that boss is Jennifer Aniston and he is literally kissing her ass.

Not me, though.  Just like Jason Bateman,  I’ve learned to appreciate the art of going with the flow…basically, of puckering and planting.  Perhaps it’s the failure of my experiments in hubris, or the recognition that fatherhood requires me to place my unborn child (and my responsibility to provide for it) ahead of my own ego – regardless, I now believe there could be few things more manly, more necessary to being a Better Man (and father)  than knowing how, when the occasion demands, to eat shit and call it pudding.

To explain why, it might help to re-frame the discussion using terms other than “eating shit” – that suggests any man who understands the dynamics of his workplace and acts accordingly  is a bit of a pussy.  Really, this is about adaptability, a subject I’ve covered before:  Navy SEALs are expected to adapt to shitty situations all the time, and I doubt they hear people calling them pussies that often.

resistance is futile

So maybe it would help to quote some more movie dialogue, this time from a character in the David Mamet film Redbelt: “Everything has a force. Embrace it or deflect it–why oppose it?”  That movie was about jiujitsu, and the character was describing a prevailing concept of that particular martial art.  The meaning is simple enough: resistance is futile.

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Steve-O in happier times

The best stories are all about the details, the nuances, those additional layers that elevate it from marginally funny anecdote to the stuff of legend.  So it is with Steve Slater, former Jetblue flight attendant.  It wasn’t enough that he told a rude passenger to fuck themselves, he did it on the PA.   It wasn’t enough that he told a rude passenger to fuck themselves on the PA, he realized almost right away that he’d put such a kink in his commercial aviation career (one he obviously didn’t care for) that he may as well turn that kink into a permanent wave: he facetiously thanked no one in particular for his terrible time in the air, grabbed a couple beers from the fridge, pulled the emergency lever, inflated the slide, slid down and walked away from the plane.   Right now, Johnny Paycheck is looking down from heaven and smiling.

But wait! It gets better! As you would expect, sliding down an emergency slide unnecessarily and walking across the tarmac to your car is kind of a big deal in airport security circles.   Mr. Slater had to answer for his crime, but when the police went to his house on Long Island to arrest him a couple hours later, they found him...having sex! Because dropping a load of malt on a partner’s back is how alpha dogs celebrate ill-advised decisions. Hoowah!  I have no doubt that Mr. Slater is about to inspire copycats;  employers all across North America should prepare themselves for a widespread workplace revolt as disgruntled workers everywhere make similarly grand, symbolic, career-ending gestures.

Now, as inspirational as Steve Slater may be, should a Better Man do this?  As tempting as it is to say “fuck YEAH!” I’m going step off that ledge, pussy out and go with a tepid “uh…no.”   Early in my career, I had one job where the circumstances were so bad I felt I had no recourse but to leave immediately.   Now, it would’ve felt great to pee on my boss’ desk, but before I relieved myself I thought it would be good to confer with my dad, a wise man who put up with a lot of shit in his life (I know this because he lived with my mom). I told him what was happening, and what I felt I needed to do. He replied with fateful words: “What would Tarzan do?”

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