Serendipity
By Joanne Marie Combong - Pijuan

Ah Men! (An Introduction to Men 101)

Move over boys and men. This topic is for women only. I have decided that for the next three Tuesdays, I will dedicate this column solely for women. No, I won't talk about shoes, fashion, beauty, or babies (although on second thought, my subjects are actually overgrown infants). But I will talk about the one topic we women love to talk about (when boys and men) are not around -- Ah Men!

This whole month of June, “Serendipity” will dissect, discuss, lambaste, criticize, applaud, praise, and pay homage to our men. We will aim to understand the perplexing enigma we call our fathers, husbands, sons, brothers, and boyfriends. We will attempt to solve the mystery of the male species and try to delineate the truths from the myths.

For me, there's no better time to do all these than now. June is in fact a month for Fathers, specifically on June 19 and a month for weddings (the groom is actually as important as the bride, you know). There are other personal reasons for me for writing about this topic as well. My husband just celebrated his birthday a few days ago and two of my brothers will be celebrating theirs this week. My son is also going through an uncontrollable and unexplainable post-summer rampage where all his sentences start with “I'm bored”. So with all the testosterone and male energy throbbing in our household this month, I decided to pay a little tribute to the men in my life (a tribute that ironically, they will never get to read – Hah!).

Before we even talk about their quirks, idiosyncrasies and qualities, I think it's but right to first define them. I did a semi-extensive research on the definition of the word “man” and found out that for a three-letter word, its definition is longer than my arm. So, here's a comprehensive but shorter consolidation of all of its meanings (Old English, biblical, scientific, dictionary, etc. definitions):

Man: ( dictionary ) A human regardless of sex or age; a male human endowed with qualities, such as strength, considered characteristic of manhood; ( scientific ) a member of the genus Homo , distinguished by a highly developed brain, the capacity for abstract reasoning, and the ability to communicate by means of organized speech and record information in a variety of symbolic systems; ( biblical ) Adam, used as the proper name of the first man. The name is derived from a word meaning "to be red," and thus the first man was called Adam because he was formed from the red earth; ( Old English ) the principal sense of man was “a human,” and the words wer and wyf were used to refer to “a male human” and “a female human” respectively; ( thesaurus ) ape, beau, beefcake, boy, boyfriend, butch, daddy, dude, gentleman, guy, hunk, husband, lover, macho, master, mister, old man, papa, stud.

There are three things that struck me upon learning about the different definitions of “man”. One, it is a generic name of the human race (calm down feminists); two, it denotes that man is always in opposition to woman (in almost all aspects); and three, it's synonymous to everything that we women both love and loathe (see the thesaurus definition).

There is that old and trite adage, “Men, can't live with them, can't live without them” (and there's also the distorted version that I read when I was surfing through the numerous writers' blogs in the net, “Men, can't live with them, can't shoot them in the kneecaps”). I have probably used the adage a hundred times and most of you women will agree that yes, we women indeed have a love and hate relationship with our men. But it is this same love-hate relationship that has fueled (and will still continue to fuel) thousands of years of procreation and passion between the two sexes.

And so, for my next articles, join me as I celebrate and denigrate men. Get your umbrellas girls, this June, it's gonna rain (the good, the bad, and the ugly) men – hallelujah!