Summer Interlude Continued...

Summertime

...and I haven't had a serious thought in a month.  So here's a photo of moonlight on the beautiful St. Lawrence River to tie me over.

Monday Morning

She loves the natural light
Captured in black and white

In The Blog Colony

I just finished re-reading Franz Kafka's short story 'In The Penal Colony'.  I thought the description of a prisoner tortured by an apparatus that slowly writes out the guilty sentence on his body and who, once he becomes aware of what is being written on him, then dies would be an apt analogy to the experience of those who have taken the time to read this blog.  So, before I go on with the random thoughts of a middle-aged man more concerned with the mind in middle age than with EKGs, PSAs & EDs, and without ever pronouncing his verdict, here's a photo of my recent birthday dinner in Ottawa; to show that I actually get out and have fun quite often.

What's To Become Of The Boy?

Today I was at a luncheon featuring, as guest speaker, the current principal of my university alma mater.  During lunch, before he spoke, there was some discussion at my table about the recently emerging phenomenon of disproportionate enrolment and achievement of young women in post-secondary institutions; and the emergence of women in the work world generally.  I found it interesting that issues that I've recently been trying to sort out in my mind and get into this blog have registered with others (of both genders).  So, I'm going to press on and try to get some things down here.  My biggest problem is how to approach these issues without coming across as chauvinistic or anti-girl power or a defender of underachieving boys.  BTW, the title of this entry is the translated title of a Heinrich Boll memoir.

Stale Male Pale

Disclaimer:  I am a white male and may have received unequal treatment and unearned advantages from my society as a result.

In a teaser clip for a story coming up later in a broadcast of CBC News - The National one evening last week, a female headhunter announced something to the effect that "no one is interested in stale male pale".  The story was about men who were, by circumstance of their unemployment, at home running the household.  I didn't watch the story until the next day because I didn't want to get riled up right before bedtime.  Turns out the HR woman was referring to senior management positions; and turns out the out-of-work men were enjoying their new roles.  The effects on society of the 'mancession' and the 'decline of men' was also covered recently (and with much comic effect) in an article in the New York Observer.  I want to explore these issues in the next few entries, as I think they tie in with previous posts regarding the inevitability of change, the lure of nostalgia, and the subtle nature of changing relationships.  To my children, hang in there - I'm going some place with all this.

Something Is Happening Here

Collapse, as often as not, is the result of persisting in an old attitude towards some important relationship, which, in the course of time, has changed its nature.
         D. H. Lawrence, quoted in The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

As a divorced man, tell me about it!  But it applies to so much of life.  When did these manufacturing jobs start being sent overseas?  When did banks stop making decisions locally?  When did flossing become so important?  Relationships are too complicated to hope that we could ever come close to fully understanding their changes as they slowly unfold through time; even for the most astute and attitude-adjusting among us.  Some collapse is inevitable.  I say approach your relationships with good will and good humour and you might be OK.