They Shall Inherit the Earth

A common theme of this blog has been my personal feelings that I am less of a man than those that I look upon as being 'manly'.

For most of my life I've been able to hide behind the fact that I'm young. I am the youngest child of three, and have always considered 'adult males' to simply be older and wiser than me, and therefore have been able to push my inadequacies to one side. 'No worries', I could think; 'I'll learn these things when I'm older'.

Now though, I'm 31. I still don't know how to do a lot of 'manly' things, and I'm running out of excuses. Compounding this, Alise's brother Josh is younger than me, and is much more 'manly' than I am. He brews his own beer. He fixes stuff. He knows how things work. Out in the wilderness, he could survive happily and could probably bandage my wounds. He travels around Washington State in a very cool looking bike-type-thing (see here), and despite mechanical problems I have no doubts that he'll get it back on the road and will probably modify it so that it's better than ever.

I have decided though, that it's just too late for me to learn these things. I shall not bother to play catch up. I shall though push our child into learning practicals, so that he, or she, can be called upon to fix my things when they should break. 'I gave you life!' I will tell them. 'Least you could do is put up some shelves! Call me when you're done and I'll take a photo of them and put it on the fridge. You can check it out when you're fixing said fridge...'