Boying

It's no secret that boys do stupid things. Thanks to the internet (and a loosening of the "clean family fun" formula that America's Funniest Videos clung to throughout the Saget years), it's possible watch videos of boys doing stupid, reckless, and personally harmful things to themselves nearly every hour of the day, without seeing the same video twice. It's kind of glorious, actually. Who would have thought that the internet would prove to be useful for something other than carrying porn quickly and efficiently from one location to the either?

I'm not sure WHY boys do stupid things, though. As a boy, I've tried many times to break the phenomenon down to better understand it.

And I feel like I am uniquely qualified to analyze this curiosity because, on the one hand, I am a very rational person. I easily recognize activities that will harm me, are unnecessarily risky, and will, ultimately, have no payout worth the trouble they might cause.

On the other hand, even KNOWING that something is a bad idea, I find that a little part of my brain is always pushing thoughts into my head along the lines of "But what if? Wouldn't that be cool?"

Actually, that probably sums things up as best as I can figure it out. If there were no boys in the world, there would not exist the concept of "cool." Girls are too practical and too easily dissuaded from doing really stupid things. Well, really stupid, physically irresponsible things--they still do really stupid inter-personal things all on their own, and without men in the world to balance that out, I think it would only be the matter of a short time before no girl in the world would talk to any other girl because "that bitch has a lot of nerve." If there were no girls, on the other hand, it's tough to say how boys would fare. Because, let's face it, a solid 75% of the stupid things boys do has the rider attached named "I think this will really impress her." Eventually, though, that 25% of "doing things because they are cool" would probably spell the end of my gender. Either that or the fact that we would stop bathing, eating sensible food, or leaving the comforts of our recliners would do us in quickly enough.

Anyway, girls also don't understand the difference between the reality of WILL happen and the fantasy of what COULD happen as its "understood" by boys. Girls' brains are always quick to dismiss the COULDs as too remote of a chance to even mess with. But boys' brains always live somewhere right in between. All it takes is the slightest little nudge from the concept of "coolness" for the possibilities of COULD happen to outweigh the almost certain negative consequences of what WILL happen, resulting in an attempt to make something happen that almost certainly will not, just in the off chance that it works.

And, yes. I know I'm making sweeping generalizations here. Obviously this doesn't apply to ALL boys and girls. There are always exceptions--as about one out of every twenty videos of amusing self destruction on any given episode of AFV proves. But I'm just dealing with the relative concept of "boying" here, which LARGELY holds true to the gender.

Moreover, I think it takes several years for the WILL capacity of the boy brain to develop. For at least the first ten years--and probably extending into the first twenty for many boys--they live only in the COULD section of their brains, and only the fear of imminent death can dissuade the boys who have just enough wherewithal at their disposal. Anyone who's read no more than three of the posts on here concerning Gabe's development can see that this is clearly the case. He rarely does the "right" thing when the "more interesting" thing is clearly staring him in the face, even if I am telling him, outright, that he is going to hurt himself if he keeps doing it.

Mostly, Gabe's attempts to achieve "cool" result in the destruction of house and home and the bruising of many body parts--often not just his own. But late last week, I was able to turn his own innate desire to do destructive and probably stupid things into a passingly useful activity.

He wanted to "smash" things. We have a special hammer in our yard--a rubber mallet that we've long since written off as lost to the terrible misuse it has suffered--that he uses just for the purpose of smashing. Sometimes it's pears, sometimes it's just rocks in the driveway (usually it's just rocks in the driveway--and I can't for the life of me figure out how he's managed to keep finding interest in that, even after he's done it for dozens of hours--I guess he just keeps hoping that, eventually, something really cool is going to happen).

He started off with the rocks again, but then I thought, "Hey, why not have him smash something that actually NEEDS to be smashed, like our aluminum cans!" So I pulled out some cans and set him to work.

And he went after it with gusto. Trying to smash the can with ANYTHING he could find, and when it didn't work to smash the can with the object, he tried to smash the can ON the object. It was actually kind of fascinating.

You can nearly see the gears in his head turning as he tries to find the objects that will return the greatest smashing potential or that might render the coolest effect.

After he smashed every can in our recycling bin, he moved on to building a pile of sticks in the backyard. Again, not sure what the payoff was supposed to be, but he seemed to think it was worthwhile (it's also worth noting that, while picking up small sticks in our entire yard and putting them on a pile is a "worthwhile" activity, even though he gets nothing out of it, we still can't convince him to pick up the dozen toys or so he has spread out over a five foot area with the reward of not having those toys put where he can't play with them--an OBVIOUS payoff. It's truly a marvel how the mind of a young boy works).

While he did that, Norah began to do something curious. She picked up one of the crushed cans and started hitting it on everything she came across. Clearly, she learned this from Gabe, and I can't imagine she would have EVER thought to do something like that if she hadn't seen Gabe do it. Probably that proves something relevant to what I was saying earlier, too. But, to be honest, since I've been working on this for, like, an hour now, and it's not going to impress any chicks, I really haven't been paying much attention.

Anyway, here's what I managed to catch of Norah with her can.