TEAM LAST CALL

Last month, Team Last Call began an inspirational series of columns for English majors addressing issues like masculinity, grammar mastery and the remarkable way in which those two things cancel each other out.

As a general rule, all English majors are fueled by the same basic elements: Pringles, Little Debbie snack cakes and a crushing set of insecurities. And TMZ. We are not an outdoor breed, and as such shouldn’t ever be expected to participate in activities that involve dirt, shirtlessness or roughhousing of any sort. We also have poor motor skills and tend to struggle with things like 1) upper body strength, 2) lower body strength and 4) math.

But we have positive qualities too, such as our ability to write self-help articles. Which brings us to today’s column, in which we will examine the practice of writing for a living and how it relates to fatherhood. There’s nothing quite like theresponsibility for another human life to really drive home the point that, by nature of the fact that you’re an English major, you don’t know how to do anything. Yet, as a father, you’re expected to have all the answers – especially if you’re having a little boy. There are things that you as a father need to teach your son. Tough things. Manly things. Things you know nothing about, like carburetors and leaf blowers and … what do you call those things again? The ones that are always denting your car when you’re not looking? Wives.

No, you don’t know about any of that stuff because you, the English major, were too busy crying over Artax dying in the Swamps of Sadness to learn anything useful growing up. While the other little boys played soccer and earned their Boy Scout badges, you spent your summers pretend-making out with Winnie Cooper in your elbow and trying in vain to get past Soda Popinski on Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out.

But it’s important not to let the past get you down. Just because you never learned how to “change a tire” or “fix a leaky faucet” or “develop pectoral muscles” doesn’t mean you’re not fit to be a proper male role model. Your son will simply have a different kind of father figure to look up to and emulate. The kind that has Lady Gaga on his iPod. On the plus side, by the time everyone’s kids are all grown, yours will be able to punctuate circles around the rest of them. Sure, he might be plump and dateless, but he’ll be able to write a sonnet like it’s going out of style. Which it undoubtedly has.

While some little boys grow up with images of their fathers fighting crime and rescuing kittens from burning buildings and felling trees with their bare hands, your kid will have visions of you curled up on the couch with a laptop balanced on your stomach, watching reruns of What Not To Wear when you thought no one was looking. But in your sedentary state, you’ll be able to teach him such invaluable manly lessons as 1) A scoop top and an A-line skirt can have a slimming effect on the hips, 2) It is too possible to make a meal out of Easy Cheese, and 3) As long as you’re wearing sweatpants, things like tissues and napkins will always be redundant.

Some little boys learn how to fish, or build furniture, or design little wooden racecars that speed down the track and win first prize like the one in that Subaru Forester commercial. You know the one I’m talking about. The one that makes you feel like a horrible father, even if you’re a teenage girl, for not knowing how to help your son build a car like that. Well, winning first place in the Pinewood Derby might seem nice for some kids, but it’s not in the cards for yours. Your son is going to enjoy advantages of a different variety. Other fathers could teach him how to drive a stick shift or properly grill a steak. I guess that’s exciting, if you’re into “knowing” how to “do stuff.” But only you, the English major, can teach him the crucial, panty-dropping art of correct semi-colon usage; you can also teach him the best way to hand a credit card to the plumber, how to eat his weight at Hot Diggity Dog and, most importantly, how to hide it from his wife when he gets home for dinner.

In summation, English majors have nothing to fear when it comes to fatherhood, apart from the certainty of failure. But other than that, you’ll do just fine. And who knows? If you keep your child focused on the right kind of activities, maybe in a few years he can show you how to knock out Soda Popinski.

My wife and I found out a few weeks ago that we are going to be having a baby boy. Since that time, I’ve been busy making a mental list of all of the things I need to teach him about being a man, including how to blow a good snotrocket and how to wear blue socks with black pants.
Then I need to teach him how to properly woo a woman, which is something I know a thing or two about, what with me being an English major and all. English majors, if you didn’t know, have been proven by science to be the world’s single sexiest demographic, thanks in part to our way with words and in part to the fact that we can put total lies into print and make them look like actual facts.
I decided to major in English for the same reason that all young men major in English: zero upper body strength. But I also had a desire to pick up women, and I figured that one way to go about that was to learn the seductive art of language. Because everybody knows that nothing’s a bigger turn-on to a college girl than having her grammar corrected.
I could hardly wait to make the ladies swoon with my masterful grasp of semi-colon usage. “Come over here, baby girl,” I’d say. “Daddy is going to punctuate your sentence in ways you never dreamed of. You heard me right, sweet thing. I’m about to parse this verb from the infinitive all the way down to the subjunctive. Trust me when I say that as long as we’re together, my participles will never dangle.”
Pickup lines like these never really “worked” on high school girls, but I always chalked that up their own lack of sophistication. If they couldn’t appreciate some well executed iambic pentameter, then that was their problem. Except for the part where they wouldn’t make out with me, at which point it became my problem. But in college, it would be different. In college, the girls would recognize genius when they saw it.
In college, the girls did not recognize genius. It didn’t take long for me to discover the ugly truth that an English major is about as attractive to college girls as a lip fungus. We are simply not cut from the same cloth as people like McDreamy and McBulge-pants, or whatever his name is, with their “chiseled physiques” and their “salaries that are big enough to live on.” And that, I’m sorry to say, is the kind of man that college girls go for.
English majors, on the other hand, tend to be introverted, lumpy, melodramatic Beta Males who, generally speaking, aren’t considered to be “hunks,” except for in the following sentence: “Once the team captains had selected their players, all that remained on the gymnasium floor were a discarded jock strap and the English major, a blubbering, asthmatic hunk of dough in navy shorts and tennis shoes.”
We do have our good points, though, including our soft, uncalloused hands and our ability to weep openly during that one scene when Frodo gets stung by the giant spider and is carried off by the orcs into the castle of Cirith Ungol. Or maybe that’s just me.
But no matter how hard we try, we English majors will never be the objects of lust for those young college women. We will never be able to titillate them with our gerunds. And our writing, while eloquent and emotive, has zero alcohol content, rendering it virtually useless to nine out of 10 college girls. And the tenth probably has a unibrow or wears Crocs.
But Darwin be damned: in the end, we somehow always find a way to get the girl. I personally succeeded – and this is something I recommend to every English major I meet – by making fart jokes.
Women love it when you can make them laugh. Which is something we English majors rarely do, or at least not without getting naked first. But through the magic of fart jokes, I found a way to use my otherwise useless degree to attract a beautiful, intelligent, awesomely weird girl who under normal circumstances would have always looked at me like I had just stepped in a big pile of caca-doodie.
Fast-forward 10 years, and here we sit, awaiting the arrival of our son – who, by the way, has already been proven by science to be the single most beautiful, intelligent, awesomely weird baby ever. And that one’s no lie.