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Blog: "Tire Changing and Other Tests of Manliness" by Paul Jury I blew a tire on the freeway yesterday, going about 80 miles an hour. Before you get all afraid for my life, the freeway was pretty clear (for LA), and I was going straight, so nothing really happened. I calmly put down the cheeseburger I was eating and merged across 6 lanes of traffic and stopped on the shoulder. The burger got a little spot of ketchup on my upholstery, but other than that everything was fine. Remember, just because you blow a tire doesn’t mean you catapulting end over end and wind up in a ditch or something. Which is precisely what happened to my friend Jeff once... but you know. He used up all the bad odds. Not being in a huge rush, I decided to try to change the tire. Outside of 11th grade autoshop, I had never actually done this, especially not in the dark on the shoulder of a roaring highway, and I decided that accomplishing this task would make me feel manly. Failing miserably and calling AAA, on the other hand, would of course make me feel like a gigantic pussy, but it was a risk I was willing to take. Aside from taking 25 minutes to do it, I came out of the task feeling very manly indeed. The spare was on, my broken tire was stowed (with a nasty two-inch hole in it, I might add), and I found about 40 pencils than had fallen down into the spare compartment of my trunk, to boot. I didn’t even have to consult the manual, except to find out how fast I could go on the spare. 50 mph, for the record. My manliness was diminished only slightly by having to drive home 30 mph slower than everybody else, on a spare the size of a bike tire. I weathered honks and angry fingers of my fellow motorists with an even temper, taking comfort in the fact that, since I had just changed a tire on the side of the road and they had not, I clearly had a bigger penis than they did. Also, I’m sure I’d have been honking and fingering ten times worse, had our positions been reversed. By the time I got home, however, it occurred to me that perhaps I was getting carried way: that taking such manly pride in something as pedestrian (pun intended) as merely changing a tire made me, in fact, not manly at all. Still, not everyone can change a tire in the dark... Anyway, I’ll skip the internal debate… you all know what happens next. I made a list. The following is a list of activities that I deem “manly”, and where I think I might fall on a rating of 1-10. I think Garrison Keillor did something like this once, and I totally think I can change a tire better than he can.
5.07 average. I guess that's sort of manly. And no, “Making love to a woman” is not on the list. Because one can’t possibly rate themselves in that category without simultaneously scoring high in another manly column, “Being an asshole.” Also, Garrison Keillor would find it crass. See Paul's complete blog at www.paulspond.com |
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