This past weekend, therefore, my shit was starting to look a little ragged. So off to the salon I go. I walk in and there’s a little girl sitting in the chair — neighborhood of eight years old — and 15 seconds later, I hear her gasp. I turn, and she’s got her hand over her mouth and she’s pointing at my toes. So I smile at her, cover my own mouth, and gasp, saying… “I KNOW! They’re PINK!” To which she furrows her brow, sits back in the chair, and interrogates, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

If you knew me, you’d know I have a beard (as in facial hair, not as in Katie Holmes). I also pretty clearly don’t have breasts. But I know it takes a village to raise a child, so I helped her out and said, “No, I’m a boy.” And this seemed enough for her. Until she later came back and told me, “pink is for girls!” to which I responded, “well, I guess that’s not true, now, huh?”

I imagine some might read this and think, “well, you know Michael, you paint your toes pink and people will talk.” Really? I need to live my life within the lines fingerpainted by an eight year old? What sort of low-ass common denominator is that?

“But Michael,” they’d continue, “all the adults were thinking that, too.” And maybe they were. And maybe I think they’re stupid. Because the people I know, their sexual orientation isn’t dictated by the color of their toenails or the cut of their trousers or the neighborhood they live in or whether they have the ability to list everyone who’s ever played Danny Zucko in alphabetical order. It’s dictated by who they care to wake up next to in the morning.

As my ex-girlfriend the smarter-than-I-am economist liked to say, “correlation doesn’t equal causality.” Maybe more gay men know the lyrics to “Music of the Night” than do straight, but to think that translates into some sort of sex/gender legislation points to a serious flaw in logic. Gay men are men who like to fuck other men, and everything else — the clues, the signs, the gaydar — prejudice wrapped in levity, and nothing more.

It’s more, however, than a question of prejudice, or narrow minds, or whether or not my toes are the right color to get laid on any given evening. It’s a larger question of our painfully broad need to define everyone. There’s certain things that most of us are comfortable not having spelled out regarding other people — how they trim the hedges, for instance. Then there’s certain things few of us are comfortable not having spelled out — sexual orientation being one, race being another. Gender, of course, is the biggest one. When most people encounter someone who, due to attire, hairstyle, whatever, is somehow unclassifiable as a man or a woman… they get friggin’ angry. As if the long-haired boy or the broad-shouldered woman ought somehow be punished for not running around in a blue or pink headband. Headbands which parents use on their children to demarcate their gender if only because at that age, nature sure hasn’t. But dare call their cute little boy a cute little girl, and there will be hell to pay. Really? Why? What does it matter?

This obsessive need to categorize, to label, this tyranny of taxonomy… ironically, it only hurts us ourselves. If we stopped caring so much about other people’s plumbing, we might afford ourselves time to connect with others on a more significant level. So next time you’re in a bar, stop trying to figure out if the person next to you is gay, or white or male. And while you’re at it, try not to ask what the person does for a living.

Instead of making judgments, try making conversation. It’s more fun and better for you.

And if you happen to see me in that bar, and you happen to be interested, buy me a drink. Flirt. If I don’t flirt back, it could mean a number of things — I’m tired, for instance, or maybe I’m just not that into you. But if I flirt back, it’ll be about more than your toenails.

Getting closer, I hear her scream “OH MY GOD! SOMEONE HELP ME!” and then drop onto the ground. Undaunted, though, she gets up very quickly and starts running to the corner, screaming as she passes inches from me to yell, “GOD WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME!” and then, as I turn to see her pass, she disappears into the fencing and barriers demarcating the construction of the Second Avenue subway. Turning to a woman walking near me, I ask her, “I DID just see that, right?” and she gives me the confirmation that I’m not, in fact, crazy — confirmation I have rarely needed more. There’s a construction worker there, and I ask him what had happened, but he’s looking up at a window from which I only assume the woman had descended. There are a few heads poking out of it, looking down the street, and I ask the construction worker if someone’s called 911.

I notice that I was kind of looking to the construction worker for some sort of guidance, which is kind of funny… that I would consider the construction worker an authority figure, or perhaps that I was so desperate to make sense of the situation I grasped onto whoever seemed least like myself. It was the guy he pointed to, however — a guy who looked fairly like me — who was on the phone with 911. The woman who confirmed my sanity asked if it was bad for her to want to just go on home to her apartment, and I said no, and went on home to mine.

And since my brother might read this, no, she wasn’t that hot.

Since I already planned to jump on a 3G iPhone in about a month — because I’m an early-adopter / kool-aid-drinker — I’m using a friend’s old Nokia 6820 to hold me over for the month. You might recall two things:

1. there was a time when the Nokia 6820 was the mac-daddy cellphone
2. that time is long, long passed

There are, however, some interesting observations I have about cellphone technology based upon this forced history-lesson / nostalgia trip.

1. We Miss Battery Life
I’m writing this post on a Saturday night, I last charged the phone Wednesday night, and the battery shows only about 1/3 spent. Hell, I might make it through the weekend on this thing. That’s kinda crazy. That’s also about the only nice thing I have to say about using this old-ass phone. (Update: Dan reminded me that the flip-out QWERTY on this phone was pretty awesome, too).

2. We Needed Glasses
Remember those photos of people sitting around 60s-era TV sets watching the Lone Ranger trot across a postage-stamp-sized screen? That’s what we looked like like staring at the screens on these things… which were, with little hyperbole, the size of a large postage stamp.

3. We Were Not Very Sure of Ourselves
On my iPhone, I click the SMS icon, select a person, type a message, click send. On this phone, I click messages, select text messages, click create message, type a message, click send, find a person, confirm I want to send it to their phone, click send. Then I need to navigate out of the sent item now on my screen… which it prompts me to re-send. Why? Hell if I know. But for some reason, we felt nervous about whether or not we’d actually sent the message. Or about who we wanted to send it to. Or about whether or not we wanted to send it to their cellphone… as opposed to, what, texting their fax machine?

4. We Deserve Honorary Degrees
I think that as a generation, we deserve a hell of a lot of credit for being one giant-ass focus group for interface designers who clearly tortured ants with magnifying glasses as children. The depths you have to go to find things in the menu structure of this OS… OMFG. I feel like I should be wearing a snorkel. And I shit you not, I still haven’t figured out how to adjust the volume on a call. (Update: I found the manual online. I know now how to adjust the volume).

5. We Took Alot of Shit from Networks
There are two soft-keys on the front of this phone, and there’s an option to customize them. So since I haven’t subscribed to mobile internet on this phone, I figured having the browser as one of the soft-keys didn’t make sense. Except you can’t change the right soft-key. The network wants you to sign up for more services, and dammit, they’ll force that icon onto your desktop and you’ll like it.

6. We Were Very Proud of Ourselves
Since this is a candybar phone, I’ve set it up for key lock automagically after 1 minute. So after about 30-seconds the screen goes dark, and then 30-seconds later, the screen lights up and the phone beeps… to tell me it’s locked the keypad. Really? You want to remind me that I don’t have any use of the phone right now? That makes perfect sense. Also, whenever I get a text message, this thing beeps like the President’s calling.

Incidentally, take another look at the campaign site for Obama. Right now, I see a photo of him with John Edwards. Is that really celebrating the endorsement… or is it the 08 Democratic ticket?

My first thought — being a child of the seventies who believes in constant, uninhibited communication and that my every emotion is a unique and beautiful snowflake — was to find my friend online and tell him, hey, buddy, just wanted you to know, your girlfriend has a great ass. Why? Because that’s what I’d want to hear. I’d like a girlfriend with a great ass. And I’d like other people to notice, and if they’re my friends, every so often and in a respectful manner, I’d like them to say so. I wouldn’t want them to stare, I wouldn’t want them to be a dick about it, and if they ever actually touched her ass, I would splinter their femur with a ball-peen hammer. But what do I know… not everybody’s me. It’s possible he’d be offended just by a comment. And it’s possible his threshold for ball-peen hammer femur-splintering is much, much lower than mine. I guess every guy is different.

Reminds me of a story. I was getting plastered with my boss and his boss at a strip club in the back alleys of Wall Street a few years ago. Conversation turns to women, and my boss’s boss says something like, “don’t get me wrong, my wife’s a beautiful woman, and she has a great ass…” to which I responded (being a yes man) “yes, she does.” I can only imagine I said this with a perhaps inappropriate level of enthusiasm, because the looks I got from those guys… damn. Then again, they were probably just surprised. I think they thought I was gay.

1.  give myself mad props for the phrase meme-lag
2. blog about it as the post-modern equivalent of mailing yourself a copy as poor-man’s copyright
3. apologize to the internet at large for how web 2.0 tastic this post is

That is all. Thank you for listening. PS: if someone can dig up verifiable proof that some other guy coined the term “meme-lag” like, 18 months ago, that would be SO fucking meta.