manliness.

It’s no secret that machoness isn’t my forte. For proof, just take a look at that first sentence. No macho man has ever used the word “forte.” But I use it all the time. One time, right after I used it, my father-in-law called me a metrosexual. It really caught me off guard. I didn’t know if his declaration was the type of thing where he’d recently learned a new vocabulary term and wanted badly to put it to practical use, or if he really thinks I’m a little on the femmie side. Either way, it got me thinking.

I’ll admit that I’ve long found myself partial to a nice pair of tight-fitting jeans and even once owned some maroon corduroys. But that doesn’t make me floppy-wristed. So what if I’ve never shot a gun or sliced through freshly dead deer hide with a pocketknife or even successfully closed a pocketknife? That doesn’t mean I’m any less of a man. And so what if one time when I was working behind the counter at a local frozen yogurt store a toddler asked his mom why I had hair like a girl? So what? If I hadn’t been occupied adding gummy bears to his sugar cone, I would have asked his mom why her son required Velcro shoes and spoke with that ridiculous lisp.

But what does he know? There are plenty of manly things about me. I have never met a jar I couldn’t open. I eat meat occasionally (even if most of the time it’s grilled chicken tossed over a cozy bed of organic baby spinach (dressing on the side)). And unlike the conventional metrosexual, I wouldn’t be caught dead within five miles of an open container of clear nail polish. Not five miles.

Frankly, it’s a good thing Angela and I had plans later that evening to pick out fabric for her new sofa, otherwise my day would have really been ruined.