blanket statements about men

Ratpackslim once said to me that men make better screenwriters or playwrights because they like to control things. Men are more adept at playing "god" when writing characters, assigning their preferences, speaking their words, driving their lives and their fates on the page. In most companies, men rule the top tier of executive positions. They make informed decisions which direct the path of an organization. They fancy themselves all knowing. Makes them feel special.

Although you could argue that nothing is for sure, not the success of new product line or the number of tears at a family reunion, I'm fairly certain that men love the responsibility and power of control. They love this so much that in the rare occurrence when they are stripped of any hand in the outcome of events, they do what will appease their omniscient leanings, they bet money.

I'm in the middle of work when my boss asks me to book a conference room. Soon after this, I'm asked for the dialing instructions required for a conference call. Not out of the ordinary in my line of work however, when I inquire about the topic of said conference call, the answer is: "NCAA picks." I try to come up with a response sufficiently demonstrative of my incredulity. But, my speech has been impaired on account of my choking on male bravado. For men, second to the satisfaction of strategically spearheading a successful perhaps even lucrative venture of any sort is the testosterone-laden thrill of knowing that they predicted the most number of winning college basketball games out of sixty-three match-ups.

I did a little math the other day. I was curious about how difficult it would be to simply guess the winning combination of all sixty-three games if each was purely a 50/50 toss-up (no pun intended.) Sixty-three games played in four rounds. After scouring the internet for a little help, I figured out that the odds were 1:2^63 or for those of us who did not pay attention in algebra and forgot how exponents work, approximately 1:9,223,372,036,854,780,000. How do you even *say* that number? The winning odds are increased significantly given "seeds" and all that jazz, but still. Oh, sweet palomine, when a man wins the company pool, is it a rush! Knowing that a whole season of their carefully paid attention to team statistics and individual statistics and injuries and player strengths and specific player shoe choice and left-handed vs. right-handed and height and weight and hometown and nickname and all names of family members who have ever touched a basketball and idiosyncrasies during practice has finally paid off is a reward greater than any Christmas bonus or gushing theater review. The prize is a pithy monetary sum presented with a 10' tall trophy of full frontal, rock out with your cock out BRAGGING. Which brings me to my next conclusion about men which is that as much as they like control and accurate predictions, they also like to brag.

I sit in my cube or in my car or in my living room and for the best four days of any sport in a calendar year I am subjected to wagering, competition, conversation, strategy, prognostication, commentary, channel flipping and advertising; all spinning around in an orbit centered on the male gender's denial of control. To quote Nicole Kidman as Dr. Claire Lewicki in the classic movie Days of Thunder, as she says to injured stock car driver Cole Trickle played by a short and uncrazy Tom Cruise: "Control is an illusion, you infantile egomaniac. Nobody knows what's going to happen next: not on a freeway, not in an airplane, not inside our own bodies and certainly not on a racetrack with 40 other infantile egomaniacs." Now there's a sure bet.