October 6, 2020 – The Twentieth Blog in the RestorationAge

Send help, the election isn’t over. 2020 has become a black hole; in which all that is swallowed becomes devoid of light. I’m attempting to be patient and trying to not check my news feed every five minutes. I’ve even become fixated on the ability of today’s news anchors, no matter the station, to talk for hours ad nauseam about the same. damn. thing.

Today’s blog was actually going to be written in three parts. The first I wrote on election day, before any results came in. The second was written during the between days because it was certain there would be such a thing. But the third was to be the after -and there is no after, yet. At some point there will be if the black hole would kindly spit this election back out.

So instead, for your weekly McBlog fix, I will share a convo that Mike and I had this afternoon as we worked side by side to reseal our backyard privacy fence. There was a lot of time to “Paint the fence. Up, Down.” as Mr. Miagi would say.

The discussion centered around the use of some words to describe a person versus a general way of action. It was so profound that after the back and forth I actually thought, out loud mind you, about writing a woman’s dictionary for men, because obviously we have a language of our own. Let me see if I can put this enlightened discussion on the page. It sounded so good this afternoon, but am afraid it may suck now.

Mike and I were having some sort of discourse about a mundane subject and he was particularly harsh, so I said, “Don’t be an asshole about it.” To which he responded, “What if said don’t be a bitch? That wouldn’t go over well.” I had to explain to him that the words “asshole” and “bitch” don’t exist on the same plateau. “Bitch”, obviously has a much higher atomic weight.

It was my point that the word “asshole” is gender neutral. Basically, any person can be an “asshole” about any ole thing. And to call someone an “asshole” is a polite, yet aggressive, way of saying that you disagree with them or you don’t approve of their actions. As in, “Don’t be an asshole.” or screaming “ASSHOLE!” when someone cuts you off in traffic.

Using “bitch” or “bitchy” is NOT gender neutral. It is mostly likely being used as a slam to the female sex in particular. A guy wouldn’t tell another guy that he was being bitchy because that would just be weird. “Bitch” connotes the description of a woman more than a description of an attitude. The same can be said of using the word “Dick” for men. “Dick” connotes the same description of a man, more than a description of an attitude. “Bitch” and “Dick” live on the same plateau – “Asshole” sits a couple rungs below.

So therefore we deduced we each don’t want to be called either a “bitch” or a “dick”, but we most certainly can be “assholes” about many things.

Yes, these are the things we discuss. It’s true love y’all.

LLM