As though the concept behind this day weren't already execrable enough, here's Ada.

What a bunch of misandric twaddle.

It's an "anti-valentine", just in time for anti-valentine's day, which is a day I totally get because I've been single for a lot of them. If you're single, the best thing I can think of to say to you today is just keep your head down because it'll soon be over with.

Don't, please don't, write hatefully shallow, shallowly hateful memoranda like this Ada Calhoun has written. (Nerve.com, since it's such a shallowly hateful little taste-maker of a publication, has a two-week window for viewing articles in order to prevent non-subscribers from feeling superior for prior taste-making judgments proved false in the light of hindsight. However if you're coming upon this post sometime past Feb. 28th, you can, perversely, still find it at alternet, where normally they post social security anti-privatization rants and other vitriolic rejoinders to Bush propaganda alongside their weekly sex columns and theatre reviews.) Don't, please don't, write bad garbage just because you're frustrated, sexually or otherwise: always have a point.

I'll get into it in a bit, but first I want to set up a little scenario because I'm going to return to it later to illustrate something. Scenario: I'm about to be promoted, and I am currently training the fellow who's going to replace me in a week. The job I'm leaving, as well as the one I'll soon begin, are down-in-the-muck, physically demanding, not-terribly-mentally-taxing blue-coveralls jobs. 'Scuse all the hyphens.

We work twelve-hour shifts, and after an hour or so of training, it sort of becomes clear, or should anyways, what the job entails and whether or not you're going to have a knack for it. So I have hours of time to kill in close proximity with this man who is doing what I do and going where I go. The topic turns to music: we're listening to CBC Radio 3, which happens to be playing an aggravatingly wrong-headed profile of Edmonton's music scene. I offer:

"Man, you'd think there was nothing in Edmonton but alt-country and hardcore bands."

His reply:

"Yeah, but it's CBC after all."

I mistakenly think I get what he means, but I prod anyways:

"What do you mean?"

And he thusly mystifies me:

"Well, all that piano bullshit."

"Piano bullshit?"

"Yeah, you know, that classical piano shit. My dog could make better music than that."

And I see in a moment that the man has a huge hate-on for classical music of any kind. It takes me a moment to see this because we've been listening to boring roots-rockers and not classical pianisms, but I realize that it's probably the same to him anyways. For him there are three kinds of music: the classic rock you love, the new rock you need, and classical piano. Unless his dog actually did make music, which I suppose would for him constitute a fourth category, one somewhere between the first two and the last in terms of preferability.

He is, in short, the kind of man who talks about the things his dog can do even though he does not actually have one.

And yet. This man is my replacement. He'll be doing for precisely twenty-five percent of his breathing time exactly the same things I've been doing with the same twenty-five percent of mine for the past six months. He'll be making the same money I did. He'll be experiencing shift lag to the same extent I did, though he may not think to call it "shitflag" as I do. He doesn't even live that far from me.

All of this is important, and I'll get into it. For now, back to Ada Calhoun.

She has grown disenchanted with what she calls "the clever, conceited men of McSweeney's" (it's hard not to picture a themed calendar), just as she once grew enchanted with the grunge crowd, typified for her by proto-yarler Eddie Vedder.

Vedder is rejected for being a paragon of a movement she rejects as "anti-intellectual" and unattractively sincere; Dave Eggers is tossed over for basically exactly the opposite reasons. The new, acceptable masculinity? Wes Anderson. His school of masculine aesthetic? The new New Sincerity, I suppose.

What the hell is she doing? These men are propped up as archetypes of masculinity and weighed against each other, which I guess is fair even though it's meaningless. She means, though, to present them as romantic possibilities, their essences reflected infinitely through all members of a certain class of men. Men are either Vedders or Eggerses, or Andersons if they're lucky, though next year Topher Grace might have an album out or something. The classic man you love, the new man you need.

It reminds me of a permanently lodged bit of dialogue from an ancient TV series called "Almost Grown" which starred Timothy Daly as one half of an endlessly reminiscing couple. The show was along the lines of "thirtysomething", and the line went something like this:

"In my father's day, men had it easy. There was one male archetype: John Wayne. Then MASH came along, and women wanted the sensitive, Alan Alda type. Now, who the hell are we supposed to be, Emilio Estevez?"

Now, who the hell are we supposed to be, Conor Oberst?

It is thinking like this that makes this day so fucking hard for any guy who doesn't have someone to share it with. And Ada Calhoun is perpetuating it. But fuck her.

Calhoun's romantic history is apparently littered with hopeful nightly trips to the neighborhood Chinese bakery through streets apparently littered themselves with television sets and computer monitors just asking to be smashed by hip young alternawriters with no sense of tasteful, romantic restraint. How facile and dishonest. When was the last time you came across an abandoned television on a jaunt through your neighborhood? I mean, okay, New York, but still. It's a regular occurrence?

Of course not. It's an invention designed to illustrate the hidden anti-social side of the affable McSweeney's gentleman. An archetype of man. Which she is now categorically rejecting. New year, new themed calendar.

We are, in the end, just men. We have much more in common with each other than we have areas where we differ. Me and the fellow I'm now training to replace me, who believes his dog could make better music than anything CBC Radio might be playing, belong to an archetype of man - the blue-collar shift-worker.

We are, though, unique in small ways, ways our mothers appreciate. And girlfriends, if we're lucky to have them, will hopefully appreciate them too. At least I hope my girlfriend's actually into me, including all the things I have in common with the guy with the talented non-existent dog, not, oh God I don't know, Emilio Estevez.