Mysterious Blue Liquid vs. The Game

Once again, I hate my Y-chromosome. It comes with so, so many irritating social obligations — holding doors open, carrying packages, pulling out her chair at the dinner table — and none is worse than the perpetual need to be masculine, especially when God thought it would be funny to give you the chromosomes but not the growth hormone to make that possible. This is why we go to the gym, make dirty jokes, and watch those retarded "Jackass" spin-offs. (Well, there's also the suppressed homoeroticism inherent in close male friendships, but we'll talk about that some other time.) Which is all well and good until there comes the time to put your metrosexuality on display; right now, I'm writing sappy graduation notes to my friends at college.

The first step is to make a list of questionable words — that is, words that might make me seem either gay or horny or both. This eliminates words and phrases like "sweet," "such a good friend," and "wonderful." Not to mention that there's no way I can sign my notes with the l-word (that would be "love," for those of you with dirty minds) even though all of my girl friends coolly sign their most mundane e-mails with that word. The problem is that these happy-graduation notes are supposed to be sentimental, histrionic, and even holding a dash of that drunken ain't-you-so-beautiful-honey romanticism that society says I ought to eschew as a guy.

I guess the alternative isn't that much better. It's a trade-off between magazines with articles about bulking up and magazines with articles about slimming down, or commercials showing cotton absorbing some mysterious blue liquid versus commercials asking me whether I need to get back in the game. Maybe if we're lucky, in our future lives, God will reincarnate all of us as hermaphrodites.