Empty Calories & Male Curiosity, #32 🥃

What’s Your Answer to the Question: “What Do You Do?”

QUICK HITTERS:

1. This week I received a couple of really nice and thoughtful comments from listeners of the SilentPunt Podcast (episode #26 here). They were from people who, prior to those comments, I didn’t even know listened.

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   While I don’t do the podcast or this newsletter to get pats on the back, it certainly feels nice knowing that something you’ve worked hard on is appreciated.

2. As you may have noticed in recent months, I’ve started to enjoy reading fiction a bit more

   

   Seriously though, this week’s book recommendation is a novel by author and Substacker J.F. Riordan. A few months ago I recommended her memoir, Reflections of a Life in Exile, but recently I purchased the first installment in her North of the Tension Line series. I thought the July 4th holiday would give me a good chunk of time to start it. Well, I’m almost finished with it now and I’m absolutely loving it.

   

   Maverick had just eaten a hair tie before this week’s shoot. He’s such a good, bad boy.

3. I think the reason I’m loving J.F.’s book, and fiction in general, goes back to something Travis & I talked about on the podcast earlier this week: meditation.

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   Personally, I find it difficult to sit still and meditate. But I have several activities that I find meditative. Things that, as I am doing them, I am so immersed in them that my brain is only focused on that one thing.

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   All of a sudden¹, you look up and you’ve been doing this activity for an hour. That’s how I feel about North of the Tension Line. It is taking me to another place, and I feel fully immersed there.

4. Meditation, reading, blah, blah, blah…..how about some good ol’ fashioned violence:

   football.dailyzone

   

   A post shared by @football.dailyzone

   GOING DEEP:

   What’s Your Answer to the Question: “What Do You Do?”

   A while back I wrote about our culture’s obsession with labels. Specifically, labeling generations (here). But what about you as an individual? What’s your label?
   
   When someone asks you what you do, what is your answer? Is it an easy answer or a hard one? Do you have more than one answer?
   
   Whatever your answer, you are revealing something about yourself to the asker. And those answers are codified in status. 
   
   If someone tells you they are a teacher, and another person tells you they are a professor….is your perception of them the same? Probably not. Because in your mind you have an opinion of what both of those things are.
   
   When I think of a teacher, I think of an elderly female elementary school teacher wearing an old-lady dress. When I think of a professor, I think of a nerdy old man, dressed in an old, ill-fitting blazer. I think this, even though the best teacher I ever had was a male high school English teacher. And the best professor I ever had was a female who always, as far as I can remember, dressed sharply. 

   And it’s not just appearance. There are all sorts of other assumptions we make: the teacher's life is cushy because they have summers off; the professor is probably a genius; the teacher is probably an extrovert; the professor is probably an introvert. 
   
   On and on.  
   
   The world is full of these assumptions. 
   
   But how often does getting these assumptions wrong hurt us?
   
   

   

   Credit: TreeThinker, Etymology of The Day

   Have you ever heard a military veteran refer to themselves as a combat veteran? You know what they are doing right? They are making sure you know that they were actually in battle. Not like those other veterans that stayed stateside, or slung hash under the decks of some ship in the Mediterreanean. 
   
   How about a nurse? Do they introduce themselves as a trauma nurse? A NICU nurse? Or just a nurse?
   
   I am not the exception to the rule. When people used to ask me what I did for a living I said, “college football coach.” I didn’t say “coach” or “football coach.” Because I was more than that, and I thought my label should reflect it. 
   
   Invariably, after introducing myself as a college football coach, I’d get a nice smile from whoever asked and something like, “Oh wow, that’s cool.” But as often happens in life, the other shoe would drop with the question of, “where do you coach?” 
   
   Whatever D3 school was my answer at the time was always an air out of the balloon moment for this person. Here they were thinking maybe they’d hear some cool story or juicy gossip about some famous person they knew, or even perhaps take a selfie with a famous college football coach. 
   
   Then nope, just some slapdi*k making 50k a year coaching 6-foot-235-pound offensive linemen.

   But how we all view the world is so different anyway. If my wife and I run into the same person we haven’t seen in a while, but at separate times, she might say something like: “Did you notice she changed her hair?”   
   
   And I’m like, “She has hair?”  
   
   However, I might notice that she didn’t mention her middle daughter. And she always talks about her middle daughter. Is everything ok with that girl? What age should she be again? Maybe all the previous talk was just overcompensation.   
   
   Maybe instead of being proud of her, she is embarrassed by her, and that’s why she always talks about her? Because she doesn’t want everyone else to find out what a shit show she is. 
   
   But maybe now she’s not a shit show, and her mom doesn’t know how to work that into conversation: “Hey, remember Becky, yeah, she’s not as much of a fu*knut anymore.”    
   
   Then I remember most parents don’t refer to their children as fu*knuts.  
   
   Most parents anyway.  
   
   The point is, we all have different perspectives. And the more we try to live our lives in an effort to fit into some idealized version of who we think we should be, the less time we are spending being who we truly are.  
   
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   I’d love to hear from you in the comments:  

   1. How do you answer the “What do you do” question?

   2. How do you feel when you are asked that question?

   3. Are you truly interested in the answer to the question when you are the one asking it?

1. Did you know the phrase is “all of a sudden” and not “all of the sudden”? I certainly didn’t.