“RJ is a newspaper columnist whose humor column, "Pogi from a Parallel Universe" comes out every Wednesday in the For Men section of the Philippine Star, the Editor-in-Chief of UNO Magazine, a seasoned television, events and weddings/debut host and actor."
We praise our favorite male appendage that has given us endless hours of pleasure, but which has also been a victim of frequent abuse: Our opposable thumbs.
There are many ways to secure a date with a woman that will not require coercion, self-flagellation or public humiliation. One of the more obvious ways to get her to say yes to the date is to subtly impress her by your job. Nothing impresses a woman more than a career choice that reeks of ambition, virility and prosperity. By my reckoning, you can impress her with the following careers: as a presidential aspirant, as a popular adult movie star or as an investment genius behind a get rich quick scheme. These careers will surely get you noticed not only by women, but also by the proper authorities.
But, even the support of the major political parties, a rabid fanbase of No Girlfriends Since Birth (NGSB) men, and select SEC directors, will be as futile as poll automation in 2010 when you engage the woman in the most dreaded of courtship rituals during a dinner date: small talk. Because, my three female readers, engaging in small talk has the same appeal for men as a colonoscopy.
By the time most men are finished with puberty, they have become virtual masters with their appendages. Unfortunately, manual dexterity is not the same as verbal dexterity as men remain perpetual white belts in the art of holding a conversation with the opposing, este, opposite sex. Women, on the other hand, can karate-chop men into verbal submission faster than a politician switching camps during election season because they are biologically hardwired to outtalk men. And this has been the case even before the invention of indoor plumbing. According to Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps, men were hunters for thousands of years: we spent our days scratching our groins, farting and then laughing hysterically about it, while waiting patiently behind some bushes to clobber our dinner. On the flip side, women were the child-bearers: they spent their days praying for the invention of disposable diapers while raising their kids interacting with other women in their tribe.
Even back then though, our hairy ancestors would rather risk being turned into a saber-toothed tiger’s Happy Meal instead of spending five minutes at the end of his day to tell his mate how his day went (Of course, what could he really say to his mate except that he had scratched his groin, farted a lot, and laughed about it with his Neanderthal barkada). But men have a scientifically verifiable excuse as to why we can’t hold a conversation as well as they can hold a drink. Gender issue specialists Allan and Barbara Pease contend that, unlike women, speech and language skills are not specific brain skills for men. Although speech and language operate mainly in the man’s left brain, it has no particular location on that side of the brain. When a man talks, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans reveal that the left hemisphere becomes active as it searches to find a center for speaking in the brain but is unable to find one. Sad to say, our center for language skills in the brain is as missing as this administration’s moral compass. And this confirms what my three female readers have known all along about men: That we have really nothing inside our heads.
Since men have limited brain locations for speech, we needed to find a way to communicate the most information possible with the fewest words possible. And since man could not figure out how to communicate through flatulence, man collectively pleaded with the Almighty to save us from heathen small talk. After having a good laugh for several hundred years, God took pity on man and gave us text messaging.
A sustained conversation has been the downfall of many men, even for adult film stars and for investment geniuses (and most especially for presidential aspirants), because the more men talk, the more likely the women will see through our charade: That the entire five minute “conversation” was merely a spiel of memorized topics and rehashed pick up lines that were strung together and given unholy life, when all them men really wanted to say were they are several key words like “underwear”, “desperate”, “butter” and “helicopter”. This is a classic case of verbal mismatch: Men exhaust all that they can possibly say and hope that it will sound like a sentence (which comprises the first thirty seconds of their date), while women have enough verbal ammunition to last them until the wee hours of the morning. This is the reason that men drink copiously during dinner dates: we hope that slurred speech, coupled with a few grunts and several loud belches will resemble a conversation.
This is why we thank the Lord for text messaging: It is an abbreviated conversation, free from the confines of spelling, punctuation and grammar, and can be said in less than two hundred lines or less (at may smiley face pa). Whenever you talk face to face with a date, there is always the possibility that you can screw up and insert the word “naked” if you talk longer than five minutes. Granted that when text message a woman, there is still the possibility that you can screw up. But, you can screw up in a much shorter period of time. And, more importantly, she cannot slap you via text.
Texting even allows you to feign wittiness because you can forward cheesy romantic texts that you googled online and claim them as your own. But for the less resourceful men out there who have no time to formulate cholesterol-forming text messages because they need to send the same text message to ten girls simultaneously, they can always resort to the pakyut texts which simulate thoughtfulness like “Mis u na me mwah,” “M thnkn f u” or “Sinong tatay mo?”. And, if you finally run out of things to text, you can always send out the all-ambiguous “=)” (No, that is not a phallic symbol. Unless you want it to be.)
However, my fellow thumb-texting men, let us try not to abuse text-messaging as much as we abuse our other fleshy appendages. Take the curious case of Mr. Serial Texter – a man who lacked love, a man who lacked sympathy, and a man who lacked several million brain neurons.
A former officemate, who shall remain anonymous for security reasons, had become the unwitting victim of a male friend whom she had met in a church group. After the end of one prayer meeting, she noticed that this man was sulking in the corner of the room, his head bowed, his eyes swollen, and his thumb permanently attached to the keypad of his cellphone.
She was drawn to this sad little creature with bad posture and carpal tunnel syndrome. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“The girl I was making ligaw.” his lips trembled. “She…she basted me!”
“Wow.” she thought “That is so sad. His vocabulary is so out of date. Basted is so eighties.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
He wiped his nose on his sleeve, “Do you mind if I text you? There’s nobody I can seek comfort in anymore.” He blubberd. “They won’t even take my calls at 91.5 Energy anymore!” He struggled to grin. “Can I have your cell phone number?”
She half-smiled back. “Why not?” she said. ‘How harmful can it be?’ she thought.
The very next day she received thirty texts from this man asking “Hwru?”. Being the amiable, Catholic reared schoolgirl she was, she first replied rather politely with such texts as “I’m good today, but I hope you are doing better?” to “I’m quite busy at the moment” and finally to the all ambiguous “=)” (And there was totally nothing that was phallic about it). But after the twenty-third time that he had sent the text, she abstained from replying. “God,” she prayed, “grant me patience.”
Her cell phone was peaceful for all of three minutes when she received a flurry of thirty more texts from him asking “Is it a gud tym 2 text u?” For the first couple of texts, she tried to maintain her ever-pleasant (yet rapidly diminishing) demeanor by replying “I’m not that available right now” or “Some other time” and, of course, the all-familiar, all-knowing, “=)” (Still nothing phallic about it). But after the thirty-fifth text, she refrained from sending any more replies. “God,” she prayed, “grant me sympathy.”
And, of course, he couldn’t help but send out a volley of fifty more texts asking her, “Did I do anything 2 ofend u?” Not one of those texts deserved a reply. Not even the omnipotent reply of “=)” (Not even if that omnipotent reply was a phallic symbol). “God,” she prayed, “grant me a heavy blunt object that I can use to crush his fingers.”
After switching off her phone, she took a deep breath, a shot of vodka, several tranquilizers, and called me for advice. “Is it time to hire professional mercenaries?” she begged. After we couldn’t find a gun-for-fire who was within her budget, I told her to text back a message that would tell him she had had enough, but at the same time end on a slightly comforting note. And although she wanted to text him back a slightly comforting message that said “^&%* u =) head”, the actual message read, “M a very bz persn so I cnt txt bak all d tym. Hope u undrstnd. Pls dnt txt me if I dnt txt u.”
When she sent this message, her cell phone went silent for all of five minutes. She crossed herself and looked skyward. Then, in the sixth minutes, he texted her back, “Ok, I understand. SO WEN S D BEST TYM 2 TXT U?”
My friend has since gone into a hiding in a small African country where the most modern form of communication is smoke signals. As for Mr. Serial Texter, we just allowed him to keep texting and texting and texting. Sooner or later, his appendage will eventually turn manhid and gangrenous. That would be punishment enough.