Call Yourself a Man

I'm a big fan of life's great simple joys. The way the wind sounds or the sun looks as they stream through the trees, for example. I think it's a rather nice outlook to have for the preservation of sanity and enjoyment of life without always being caught up in the superficial. One of the great simple joys of being a man, I find, is the ability to open jars. Given that in our present day and age there is not typically much cause for me to exhibit my strength and skill by hunting, opening jars is one of the last remaining vestiges of manhood. I have upper body muscles, therefore no lid shall stand in my way. It appeals to my inner caveman. So why is it, then, that I so often find myself doing dishes while also making pasta? On the Mohs scale of jar-opening hardness*, pasta sauce jars rate at about 7.2. Not really all that difficult, because as I mentioned I happen to be a man. But with wet hands this task becomes near impossible. The hardness may as well have jumped up to >10 (that's the range of nanocrystalline jars, also known as hyperjars). Makes me feel like an infant. By now you might be thinking to yourself, "But couldn't you just wipe off your hands? Or wait for a while until they've dried?" The answer to that of course is, "No, you fool." Wiping off your hands doesn't actually work, as anyone who has ever attempted to do so in a public restroom can tell you. The paper towel dispenser / air hand dryer industry is a sham, by the way. It's completely futile. As to the second question, I don't want pasta later, I want it NOW. Perhaps some of you are possessing of enough foresight to begin cooking before the first pangs of hunger start to set themselves upon you, but my brain does not function that way. I can't even be bothered to get my procrastination done on time, because I'm always putting it off til later. As a result instead of figuring out what sorts of things I could put in my mouth I'll just lay around, gradually growing weaker while also increasingly hopeful that someone will pass by and drop something delicious within arm's reach. This is always a mistake, as my metabolism is a force to be reckoned with. It's fierce. When I don't feed it, it gets quite upset with me. Should you threaten its supply of sustenance it just might murder you in a shadowy alley. Finally, just before it threatens to turn against me (I wonder what the name of the concept of being killed by an aspect of your physiology is?), I make a last ditch desperate stance to cook something. Sated, the beast goes back to sleep for another four hours. I really ought to plan my dishwashing / pasta making schemes better, so I can help myself avoid some of these near-death situations.

*I promise it's a real thing. It's one of the lesser known contributions by Friedrich Mohs. You think diamonds are hard? Try opening a jar of them sometime. You pretty much can only get into them by scratching the lid off with other diamonds, but oh wait, they're all in the jar. Don't ask me how anyone ever got the first jar of diamonds open. I really have no idea. Some people feel the Mohs scale is a bit archaic as it is a purely ordinal scale, and would prefer to switch to rating things on their absolute jar-opening hardness, but I like the old ways myself.