Picking Up the Gauntlet

Dania threw down the gauntlet this weekend. She suggested on Saturday that I write on my blog. I countered, saying she shouldn't expect more of me than she was willing to do herself. Since October 18th, she had done two blog posts, and I had done five. It really was unreasonable for her to expect me to post more than her. She thus declared me the winner of the "Blogger Award," but noted that I had to continue in my frequent blogging to maintain the award. Since that time, she has done three posts. Two of those were barely, if in fact at all, a paragraph in length. As the creator of the award, however, she gets to set the rules on how it is won, so I will count them as posts. Luckily, I have some new topics to write about.

Sometime in our conversation on Sunday, I made the claim "girls always make guys abandon all reason." I quickly qualified this statement by getting rid of the "all." All reason is too extreme, but girls do make guys abandon reason on all too many things. Let's consider, as an example, the very existence of this blog. A reasonable male college student who has a very boring life and doesn't particularly care to share his life with other people would not create a blog. I have better things to do with my time. Like homework. But no, I take the time to write entries for this silly thing all because Dania Frandsen tells me to and Jazmyn Hall actually cares to read it. Girls have made my sense of reason fly out the window.

On a more broad note, there is an entire section of modern social sciences focusing on Game Theory. The point of Game Theory is to reduce complex situations of real life to simplified "games." A very popular and well known game is the Battle of the Sexes. Basically what the Battle of the Sexes says is that each member wants something different that cannot be accomplished simultaneously in the same place. However, to each member, it is more important that the membership is together than what that particular member wants done is done. It's the principle behind leaving a movie if your date isn't enjoying it (or, inversely, staying because your date is enjoying the movie even if you aren't). It's what makes guys "like" chick flicks. We don't actually enjoy them (at least not the majority of the time), but we find it much more important to be with the girl than voice our opinion. We abandon the reason that tells us that the writing is no good, the plot is predictable, and the cinematography is par at best. Really, when compared to epic films such as any one of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, chick flicks just don't even come anywhere close to measuring up. But we guys ignore this reasoning and submit ourselves to the torture of pretending to appreciate chick flicks in order to spend time with females. The entire premise of the Battle of the Sexes is that guys ignore their basic reasoning skills because of girls. Yes, it works the other way too. I'm not trying to say here that guys are somehow better (or worse) than girls. All I'm saying is that the males of the world do some pretty crazy stuff in order to enjoy the company of females. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.