What’s the Manliest of Holidays? The Fourth of July, Although Not for Men Like Me

July 6, 2012 by

I love the Fourth of July.  Not only is it the best holiday of the year, and the most suburban holiday of the year, but something else just occurred to me this past week: Independence Day is the manliest of the holidays.

Everything associated with the Fourth is manly:

We celebrate the achievements of manly men.  The whole holiday commemorates a bunch of men deciding to declare their independence.  Independence! What’s more manly than that?  Now, of course, it’s absolutely HORRIBLE and SEXIST that only men signed the Declaration, and my wife has pointed out that “all men are created equal” doesn’t at all imply that any of them are the equal of women.  But it is what it is: the Fourth of July celebrates men doing a manly thing.

What do we celebrate on other holidays?  Christmas is about a woman giving birth, or more secularly about a big fat man giving away free stuff. Not manly.  Thanksgiving?  All about having a big meal, which is relatively manly except that the main thrust of the holiday is COOKING the meal, which isn’t manly at all.

We blow stuff up!  What’s more manly than taking fistfuls of gunpowder and setting them off for no reason other than to see what the explosion looks like?  It’s the ultimate peacock display: lots of noise and flashes of light, accomplishing absolutely nothing. And if you’re like me, you get the potential bonus of blowing up your house when you try to connect a propane tank by yourself.

Blowing stuff up!  Now, THAT’S a manly holiday.  Christmas? Putting up decorations, buying gifts, writing cards. Yeeesshh. Thanksgiving?  Cooking.  Halloween?  Dressing up.  All these are girly holidays.

We cook manly food in a manly way.  Indeed, the Fourth of July is the one day of the year that men are expected to do the cooking, mainly because the “cooking” is simple enough for them to handle.  Here’s the recipe: (1) take meat, (2) put on hot grill, (3) cook until done.  No measuring, no mixing, no ingredients, no setting a timer.  Simple. Easy. Manly.

All that said, I should be clear that I am not at all a manly man.  It’s sad, really. I don’t know how to fix things, or make things, I work in an industry (real estate) that is about 90% women, and my main job requires me to basically type a lot. Put it this way — at a costume party a few years ago, the theme was that people had to dress up in a representation of their “uniform,” and most of the men had ACTUAL uniforms to wear: doctor’s scrubs, fireman gear, manly stuff like that. I wore a tux.

My glaring inadequacy, in fact, has become more pronounced now that I’m living in the suburbs.  There are just more manly men living out here. You live in the city, you’re surrounded by bankers and lawyers and other girly men like me.  All the manly men — the cops, the firemen, the contractors, they live out here in the suburbs. You see them at Home Depot on weekends picking up lumber and table saws and pistons, or whatever,, when I’m usually there to get replacement light bulbs or batteries or something. I’d like to say that it was 17 years living in the city that made me so soft, but I was pretty much a marshmallow my whole life.  Living in the city just hid the fact, since I had a super and stuff like that.

So when I say that the Fourth of July is a manly holiday, I say it mostly in appreciation for OTHER men, the manly ones, the guys who can actually do stuff and fix stuff and make stuff. And I was brutally reminded of my own shortcomings in this area this year.  We were having our annual party at my mom’s house, which we’ve done for many years because she has a pool.  She also has a grill, but it wasn’t working.  So, in the classic family fashion, she didn’t actually try to fix the grill, she just bought a new one.  That’s really the way we do things in the Rand family, which might explain my basic inadequacies in this area.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t get the grill delivered, so I had to pick it up.  Ideally, a real manly man would have a truck or something to go pick it up, and maybe one of those dollies or something to move it.  Of course, I have an SUV, not a truck. And I don’t have any dollies, other than the ones my kid plays with.

So here I am, on an incredibly hot day, trying to get this giant grill into my SUV. Again, this is a challenge I never had to deal with when I lived in the city. First of all, I would never have had the need for a big grill, or a big anything, in my old apartment.  Second, no one would have ever expected me to bring it home.  What would I do?  Strap it to the top of the cab, like Mitt Romney’s dog?

Now, to give myself a little bit of a break, I will point out that grills are VERY HEAVY, and so it was never going to be easy to get in, even for a manly man.  But I tried. I actually lifted it into the air, pulling out some tendons in my back (if backs have tendons, I guess) and almost getting it in.  But it was too big.

Which brought me to the next great divide between the manly man I wish I were, and the girly man that I actually am.  A manly man would have tools to take apart that grill to get it in the car.  I, of course, had no tools in the car. But I did have something almost as good: twenty dollars of cold hard cash.  So in the great Rand family spirit that led us to buy a new grill rather than just fix the one we had, I proudly took that crisp twenty dollar bill and slipped it to a guy at the store who actually had tools. In fact, a whole STORE of tools. So he helped me take the grill apart and get it into the car.  Of course, by “helped me,” I mean that he did it while I watched with an attentive look on my face designed to indicate that I could do all that if I only had remembered to bring the right screwdriver, or wrench, or plunger, or whatever it was that he was using.

Once that beautiful display of basic economic market dynamics was completed, I sped off to my mom’s house to start the reassembly.  And I’m proud to say that I actually was able to put it back together, or at least at the very end I didn’t have any leftover screws or bolts — which is not always the case when I put something together, when I usually reassure myself that that most manufacturers put in a couple of EXTRA bolts JUST IN CASE.

Even better, the grill worked, once my manly friend Mike helped attach the propane tank, something that I’m not quite ready for at this point in my development. But I did do most of the cooking, so there’s that.

Burgers for everyone!

Filed Under: Best of, Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,

Why Independence Day is the Most Suburban of Holidays

July 3, 2012 by

I’ve written before that Independence Day is pretty much the best holiday of the year.  Compared to other holidays, it’s a breeze. You hang out by the pool, throw some stuff on a grill, and watch other people blow stuff up.  You don’t have to do a lot of traveling, or feel the pressure to visit family you don’t really like, or do a lot of difficult cooking (4 different types of stuffing!).

But something else recently occurred to me: Independence Day is the ultimate suburban holiday.  It’s the one day of the year when it is incontestably, incontrovertibly better to live in the suburbs than in the city.  Why?

  • You need a pool.  You can’t celebrate the Fourth of July properly without being able to take a dip.  You want to spend the day in Central Park sweating your face off, that’s fine, but after a few hours you’re going to be thinking about jumping the fence on the reservoir or taking a wrench to the nearest fire hydrant.  Otherwise, you can go to one of those city pools, which are apparently very exciting.
  • You need a grill. And not one of those crappy portables that you can put out on your fire escape in violation of like a hundred building codes, which can barely singe a decent piece of meat.  You need a big, manly barbecue.
  • You need outdoor space. Now, some lucky people in the city might have a small backyard, or a deck or something, but that’s not enough for a proper Fourth of July party. You need grass. You need places to sit and take a nap in the sun.
No, if you want to do the Fourth of July properly, you need to be in the suburbs. It’s like the ultimate revenge for us suburbanites — you want to live in the city, with your hot people and your great clubs and fantastic restaurants and your culture and all that?  Fine, but on the Fourth of July, you’re going to be BEGGING to come visit me so you can sit by my pool and eat my hamburgers.  BEGGING, I tell you!
And that’s really what happens. You know how difficult it is for me to get people to come visit us out here in the suburbs?  Impossible.  No one wants to schlep for our annual super bowl party, much less a random weekend night.  Why would they leave the city to come hang out with us. The only hook I have for the Fourth of July:  a pool (not even mine, but my parents’ house is ten minutes away and well-provisioned), a grill, and a great view of the fireworks from my condo in Nyack.  Suddenly, people who won’t take my calls the rest of the year are lining up to hop a train to Tarrytown.
Sweet Revenge!!!
Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , ,

Why the Fourth of July is the Best Holiday of the Year — Particularly When You Can Watch Fireworks from Your Home

July 1, 2010 by

I love the Fourth of July.  It’s absolutely the best holiday of the year, much better than Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Christmas is great, particularly when you’re a kid.  But as an adult, Christmas is mostly a big pain.  You have to go buy a bunch of presents, stress about whether you need to buy presents for this or that person.  You have to figure out how much to tip various people in your life  (the guy who delivers the newspaper, seriously?) .  And I always end up having to go to like a million holiday parties all through December, which just leaves me a big soggy fat mess.  And, of course, not everyone celebrates Christmas, so we all end up in that ugly “if you say ‘Merry Christmas’ you must hate the Jews, and if you say ‘Happy Holidays’ you murdered the baby Jesus” fight every year.

Thanksgiving is great, and everyone who matters (i.e., Americans) celebrate it, but it’s also kind of a pain.  Lots of travel, all that cooking, and half the time I end up getting sick and lying on the bathroom floor groaning all day Friday.  That’s not a fun holiday.

New Year’s Eve sucks.  Don’t talk to me about New Year’s Eve.

Memorial Day and Labor Day are just three day weekends.  One of them starts the summer, the other ends it, and I can never remember which is which.

Valentine’s Day doesn’t count. If you don’t get the day off, it’s not a holiday. Sorry, honey.

The Fourth of July is just awesome:

  • We all get to celebrate. You say “Happy Fourth of July” to someone, you don’t start a culture war.
  • The weather is great.  A summer holiday.  Sadly, no football like Thanksgiving, but you can’t have everything.
  • It’s easy.  To celebrate the Fourth, you need a pool, and a barbecue.  You’re done.  You want to get a couple of sparklers, go nuts.  Throwing hot dogs and hamburgers on a grill is nothing compared to figuring out a stuffing recipe for a turkey.
  • No obligations. No church, no temple, no getting dressed up.  Bathing suit.  T shirt.  That’s the uniform.  I know that some towns have a reading of the Declaration of Independence, which sounds just wonderfully patriotic but a horrible distraction from eating more hotdogs.
  • It’s not a “family” holiday.  No traveling 200 miles in traffic to see that uncle who put his creepy hand on your knee when you were 12, or your mother’s cousin’s estranged aunt or whatever.  If you like your family, spend the day with them.  If not, no one’s going to guilt you for blowing them off.

And, of course, you get fireworks.  Glorious fireworks.  The sun goes down, the fireworks go off, you eat some watermelon, you relish the fact that you’ve got another two months of summer.

So I love the Fourth of July.  In fact, it was one of the real, if minor, selling points of this condo we bought.  From our terrace we have a full frontal view of Memorial Park in Nyack, which is where the village has its fireworks show every year.  It’s like having an apartment on the Upper East Side overlooking the East River fireworks, except, of course, that it’s not.  It’s in the suburbs.

So not the same.  But fireworks are fireworks, and this year we’ll be looking at them from about 200 feet in the sky, almost eye level with where the explosions happen.  And I guess it’s not as good as having that Upper East Side penthouse, but it’s a lot better than standing on a crowded, hot street in Manhattan shoulder-to-shoulder with about a million other sweaty people and craning my neck to see the show.  I’ll be in a chair.  Drinking.  So that’s pretty good.

Happy Fourth of July!

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,