This is one of the best books I've read in a long time (and I'm only halfway through).
Here's an excerpt from "Manhood for Amateurs" by Michael Chabon:
This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit, one whose source and object of greatest intensity is yourself. To behave as if you have everything firmly under control even when you have just sailed your boat over the falls. "To keep your head," wrote Rudyard Kipling in his classic poem "If," which articulated the code of high-Victorian masculinity in whose fragmentary shadow American men still come of age, "when all about you are losing theirs"; but in reality, the trick of being a man is to give the appearance of keeping your head when, deep inside, the truest part of you is crying out, Oh, shit!
For those of you who've posed the question "How are things going?" to me lately and gotten what appeared to be a cool and collected response like "Great!" or "Couldn't be better!" know that deep inside the truest part of me was crying out "Oh, shit!"
I think the proper term is "Oh, darn!" But I agree that not only men, but all of us that should be responsible adults have to exude an aura of knowing what's up even if we don't, just to keep those we are stewards over calmed down! Luckily for me, I know there IS someone with all power, all knowledge and enough mercy to shower on me, and...who happens to be only a prayer away. Love you, my boy!
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