Words to Live By

Perhaps some of you have seen this little exercise on Facebook in the past few weeks. It goes something like this:

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence along with these instructions in a note to your wall.

And voila, you now have a random little bit of information from one of your many tomes to brighten your day.

But that's not really enough for me. I mean, you have this scrap of text, but what are you going to do with it? I then decided that I would do this exercise, but take the sentence as my personal motto for the rest of the day.

The book is called Guyland. It's about how from ages 16-26, white American males are wastes of space with no responsibilities and no desire to grow up. While it's in no way whatsoever applicable to me or my equally lazy, waste of space friends, it's still a good read.

Page 56, line 5. "Each of us cuts his own deal with it."

I figure basing my life around a random sentence from some book completely out of context from everything else around it is just what religious extremists do, so if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me.

What can I tell about my new ethos?

1. It seems to be individualistic. Each of us has to cut the deal for him or herself. No one's going to cut that deal for us.

2. It's also pluralistic. This deal is your own deal. It's not my deal, but that doesn't seem to be a problem.

3. I don't know what this "it" is that we're all cutting deals with, but it seems to be powerful. There's something beyond all of us that's important... and needs to be dealt with.

4. The phrasing of cutting deals means that the world's not perfect. We might not get everything that we want, but we do the best we can with the choices we're faced with. And since all people have to cut their own deals with "it," maybe you'll be more sympathetic to the tough choices your fellow humans have to make.

So, in a nutshell, we're all on our own, together, working imperfectly with something bigger than ourselves. Not too bad, page 56, not too bad.

...

I've now made the mistake of reading the surrounding paragraph, and it's yet another example of how context ruins everything:

"Virtually every male in America understands something about violence. We know how it works, we know how to use it, and we know that if we are perceived as weak or unmanly, it will be used against us. Each of us cuts his own deal with it."

I'm just going to go ahead and say we should disregard what the author thought he meant in this divinely-inspired paragraph. Michael Kimmel lost the way of truth while writing the book. For shame.

But, then again, we can't judge him too harshly. After all, each of us cuts his own deal with it.