Before I begin this entry, I suppose it would be appropriate for me to mention that I watched today's Red Sox game with my dad as it was broadcast nationally on TBS. As bad as we are at them, I treasure each botched high-five I exchange with my dad, especially the atrocious one we had to awkwardly repeat after Nick Green's walk-off solo home run in the bottom of the 9th inning of today's game against the Atlanta Braves.
My dad works an awful lot, and he works very hard to ensure the best for my family. My mother, bless her heart, is a stay-at-home mother, and for this I'm forever indebted. However, this meant that my father had to shoulder the singular financial responsibility of providing for his family; a task that has been traditionally taken for granted and never lauded enough. He has always been a sort of idol to me, though I could never and would never want to do the sort of work he does. I try my best to listen to him when I ask him about work, and while I feel that I'm grasping the gist of the myriad office lingo he uses (without the intention of making me feel small, it should be noted), I'm still just as confused and slightly bored by it like when I was small. He's been the pinnacle of responsibility, and though he never comes down hard on me, and always offers help to me whenever I feel like I need it, I find it really hard to look him in the eyes sometimes. I think it's probably because I feel like I just can't measure up to him, and that I've got big boots to fill. It's not that I can't bond with him, but we are as different as we are similar, I feel.
For instance, he works in an office in a management position. He's very good with money, and always comes off as cool, calm, collected, and rational. He doesn't drink or smoke (not that he didn't when he was my age), yet defies traditional "square" traits. I'll never forget when one of my older, wittier friends in high school Speech and Debate told me that he thought my dad was way cooler than I was. It kind of hurt at the time, and it kind of still does, but not because I disagree with him.
I could never work in an office setting replete with cubicles, acronyms, and memorandum. I'm currently not as good with money as he is (understatement of the year). I drank a considerable amount through college, though I don't smoke at all. I'm definitely a lot calmer and rational than my sister was growing up, or so I thought until the last two years of college. And though I don't think I'm a square, I'm planning on joining the San Diego Police Department and I'm definitely not one of the "cool kids."
But one thing we hold very dear to us is our fondness for Boston professional sports. His is the New England Patriots. Mine is the Boston Red Sox. We both lean towards the sports we played growing up (football for him, baseball for me), but we love the other team almost as much as the other. So despite our differences and the professional gap that will most likely always separate us, we always come together to discuss sports with zeal. Some of my favorite memories of my dad involve simple trips to El Torito whenever my mom was feeling under the weather (she's allergic to cilantro, so we never get Mexican food), where we'd order tableside guacamole and talk Red Sox and Patriots. Every Sunday we'd get wake up early an watch football. I try to text him in-game scoring updates while he's in boring board meeting and I'm sitting on the edge of my desk chair fulfilling my daily spiritual duty to my beloved Red Sox.
I used to worry that our relationship was too predicated on our bonding over spectating sports. I thought it was silly that something as seemingly trivial as professional sports could matter so much to me. And while it's certainly not the foundation for our relationship, nor the be all end all of it, it's a crucial part because it's one activity we can both enjoy together on the off chance that our free time overlaps. Now I feel silly and somewhat ashamed that I ever doubted my relationship with my father. I love him dearly and will always look up to him for as long as he's a Red Sox fan.
But for those of you out there who do not indulge so, I wonder what Father's Day means to you. The North American Commercial Federation's Subcommittee On Holidays seems to have reached the conclusion that garden tools, screwdriver sets, luxury vehicles (including compensatory vehicles, a.k.a. "schlongmobiles"), hi-tech electronics, and sausages rank highest in demand amongst the general paternal population. I can't watch a baseball game without watching some middle-aged guy riding an obnoxiously green mower with a Deerection, and that's not counting Father's Day. But aside from Viagriculture, I'm afraid that the diabolical marketing veeps out there are actually behind the Man Laws of our world (sorry Burt, though I'll give you "beeracolada"). I believe even the most honorable of our sex, those who devote their lives to bestowing happiness and hope upon the little ones they care for, fall prey to the predilections of money-grubbing marketeers hell-bent on cashing in their auto-created norms.
In order to infer American male stereotypes, one need only watch ESPN on Father's Day. Sure, there might be the occasional sweet and touching advertisements about buying your dad Just For Men so he can convince his prospective employers to offer him a job in this economy. But on the whole, ads go straight for the jugular. Of course you have the fat guys sitting around barbecuing, drinking beer, and watching the game. That will never change, because that stereotype has become a cliche in and of itself almost to be simultaneously parodical.
But the ads that kill me are the tool, car maintenance, and agriculture ads. The running gag is that the man always messes something up because he's too headstrong and his wife was right all along. She presents him with the correct weed killer or the right size wrench or the preferred car oil, and then he's forced to apologize to his smug wife, who clucks her tongue or paternalistically pats his head and walks away.
Aside from the critical gender arguments one could make about these ads, I find more disturbing the reliance of each of these ads on fears of inadequacy and self-consciousness. Alarmist ads are nothing new. They feed off the fear of the consumer instilled by the company who wishes to sell their cure-all solution. However, these new breed of ads cultivate new fears of inadequacy in men, be it in the bedroom, the garage, the backyard, or around the house.
Tools, paints, and gardening ads seize upon the theme of something being broken or unsightly. The wife is dissatisfied with the husband's inadequacy to fix the broken window or repair the caulk, paint the room, kill the weeds, or cut the grass. The ads first reinforce the male stereotype of the handyman in this scenario. Then, they play upon the man's fears that he cannot fulfill his duty as the handyman unless he purchases the right tools for the job, because without them he has failed one of his roles (as husband, or if he's building a tree house, as father).
Automotive maintenance ads focus on the theme of wastefulness. This is a change from previous advertisement inclinations towards power and speed, thanks to our gradually awakening national conscience toward environmental preservation. Nonetheless, the wife or manly man narrating the ad scolds the targeted man for wasting horsepower, efficiency, or gas dollars because he's not using the right oil. That or you're letting down his own car by not "giving your engine what it wants," in which case the consumer has fallen slave to an inanimate object, quite literally.
This is not to rob people of their capacity for integrity and independence from the sirens of sexy ads. In fact, there remains a significantly part of me skeptical that people imbibe SoCo's thick, sickly sweet cough medicine just because the advertisements exhibit hip graphics. Sexy young women in tight jeans and still tighter tank tops melding with anachronistic lava-lamp colors of auburn and neon green evokes the same feeling you get when someone is trying way too hard to be nice enough to score a date. I'm hardly even fazed by the implied insult these ads spit in our faces, that we can't get sexy girls made of marbled ribbons of chocolate and granny smith-green surrounded by exploding SoCo and Lime kaleidoscopes unless we partake in their ritual bastardization of "the usual suspects." The company cloaks the Casablanca origins of "the usual suspects" in the veil that is the motif of a gang of friends out looking for merry mischief on the town, when in fact one of them will end up with a DUI, another with an indecent exposure charge, and two with herpes. I would like to think, and to be truthful to my inner romantic, do believe that people are smarter than this.
But alas, the very existence of these ads challenges my hope for our race. Inferring via the laws of the market, these types of ads exist, and are repeated by every other company whose market involves the 13-65 age grouping, because they work. If their tactics failed to secure their targeted audiences, future advertisement campaigns would attempt other hooks and lures to snare the brand loyalty of our materialistic minds. Yet, they never seem to change, no matter the product, no matter the time period. It's as if our steady march of technological development is followed closely by a stampede of sensual junkies craving the latest and greatest visual stimulus.
To me, advertisements are always a key fixture on Father's Day simply because of their conspicuous presence and their shameless preying on our collective self-conscious. It seems to me on a day reserved for celebration of those individuals who selflessly devote themselves to an idea beyond themselves, prosperity for their beloved children, that ads should maybe lay off the implicit accusations. Then again, that's why I'm a poor, proud owner of a BA in something other than business management.
-Yours truly,
Joe's Os
DO NOT CROSS--------------RED SOX LINE-------------DO NOT CROSS
The above is the warning that beyond lies a murky, seedy realm of Red Sox baseball. Do not cross that line unless you are willing to fall slave to my obsessive rants about grown men playing a boys' game. It is not for the faint of heart, nor for the squeamish, because I'm about as blasphemously fanatic about the Boston Red Sox as a Christian Crusader in Damascus.
Timothy Wakefield went for his MLB lead-tying 10th win of the 2009 season, but couldn't come up with it. However, Wake's start was a fairly decent start, going 6.2IP, giving up 9 hits, and 4 earned runs. It didn't seem like his knuckleball was fluttering much, probably due to the wind blowing in towards the batter and the rainy weather.
David Ortiz scored the go-ahead run making it 3-2 after hitting his 6th HR of the season into the Green Monster seats. He absolutely crushed that ball opposite field, as it landed high into the Monster seats against a strong wind. He's looking like he's back from the dead lately, as he's hit 6 home runs in his last 36 or so at bats after only hitting 1 in his first previous 192 at bats.
Ramon Ramirez came into the 7th inning with two outs and a man in scoring position, and quickly surrendered the game-tying hit (the run was charged to Wakefield). He then got the next batter, but lately it should be noted that Ram-Ram has looked anything but unhittable. Maybe he's not the Jesus we all thought he was.
Okajima, who's usually dominant with his precision gave up the lead retaken by the Red Sox in the bottom of the 7th inning after J.D. Drew's opposite field RBI line-drive off the Green Monster. Interestingly enough, the home plate umpire Bill Hohn ejected Atlanta's long-time manager Bobby Cox, reliever Eric O'Flaherty, and 3rd baseman Chipper Jones for arguing balls and strikes, after he granted ball 2 to Drew on a pitch that was down and in, but clearly a strike that would have struck Drew out. On the very next pitch, Drew retook the lead for the Red Sox, so it's understandable that they would have been frustrated. Then again, the umpire was bad for us too, so stop whining and sit the fuck down Cox.
Papelbon came in to pitch the top of the 9th inning, not in a save situation, with the game tied at 5. He rewarded us with yet another Papelbon adventure. They showed a stat before he began pitching. Last year, in 69.2 IP, he gave up only 8 BBs. This year, in only 28.1 IP, he's already given up 16. Somehow, his WHIP miraculously remains around 1.40. He loaded the bases with a hit and 2 BBs, then with 2 outs, he got Matt Diaz to swing ridiculously at a ball that was two feet over the brim of his hat.
Nick Green, who's played outstanding defense in the past month and is hitting nearly .300 on the season, came through with the game-winning walk-off HR that perfectly wrapped around Pesky's Pole. Green says that he didn't realize that it was a walk-off win until he rounded 2nd base and saw all his teammates jumping up and down and slapping each other and congregating at home plate.
I love the rant about ads. Very, um... true.
ReplyDeleteWe will never be adequate enough for those advertizing executives.