The last time I took a friend to watch Rugby, there was no hitting. The club has changed its image. So we were hit-free. It was a viciously hot, horrible, dry afternoon in mid-November. The opposition was Xavier. And the score was, naturally, 0-0.
It almost wasn’t 0-0, though. Midway through the second half Xavier should have had a penalty, but the referee missed it. What happened was this. One of Xavier’s irritating, perky, little forwards (who’s now my seatmate during Linggwistiks class) burst through into the area and our lumbering hapless defender kicked the shit out of him, then took out a machete and flailed at his neck and then shot him three times in the back and spat upon his cold corpse.
OK, so I exaggerate. But not by much. Clearly the ref thought a penalty would spoil the thematic trope of cumulative, unrelieved, mind-numbing tedium. Or maybe he wasn’t watching the game but was instead transfixed by the girls seated on the side, pretending to be interested.
My older friends keep on telling me that it’s no use trying to get women interested in the things that matter to you. They won’t understand. No sexual deviation or perversion you might wish to inflict could possibly bamboozle or horrify them more than Rugby in Laguna. You could urge them to go with you in a rakrakan to the max mosh and they’d probably object but, even so, they would probably get the point, however repellent it might be. But our little interests, our little hobbies, our weird obsessions, our boy stuff: that’s private and should remain so. The best thing we can do is keep them hidden from view and even, at times, deny that they exist at all. But we blunder ahead regardless, certain that the very thing they find attractive about us is the very thing, in fact, they’d rather not know about. “Love me,” we whisper tenderly over the beer, “love my incipient autism.”
Here are some more consuming obsessions that I would personally not tell a girl about: membership in the local Dragon Boat team; addiction to Knoxville’s Jackass; anything to do with table tennis, or racecar driving, or rubber shoes, or pet fish, or the complex processes by which one might accumulate a large sum of money. Computers.
And of course the reverse is true, too. I read somewhere once that gender differences in the behavior of children as little as three weeks old have been detected. Baby boys will exhibit enthusiasm and excitement when shown what we might call things on a television screen: railway locomotives, airplanes, footballs, a PS2 running Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas etc. Whereas little baby girls become animated and beside themselves with interest when shown what we might call people. In other words, the sort of stuff that interests us in later life is hot-wired and very, very different for men and women. Your girlfriend’s equivalent to your Hero Clix collection is, in fact, her best friend—probably that sarcastic beeyatch who is forever sending your girlfriend text messages which she won’t show you. You should no more be expected to share to her affection, or interest, than she should be expected to watch Rugby in Laguna on a filthy afternoon in April. Or sit rapt to attention listening to Fat Boy Slim.
