Haggis: It's What's for Dinner

This past weekend was Burns night (January 25th), the birthday of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. It is traditional to have on or around that night a Burns Supper, a gathering designed to celebrate the life and works of the Scot who gave us "Auld Lang Syne," also known as "that song everyone sings on New Years Eve but I always could only mumble along." It is also my annual opportunity to eat haggis.

The reason I bring this up is because the last two years I have had the privilege of being invited to one such Supper, arranged annually by the department's resident Scotsman and possessor of, unquestionably, the most awesome name ever: Gordon Dangerfield. Gordon and I shared an office for a year, and thus he was subjected to my broken sense of humor and penchant for opening my mouth well before thinking. Out of what could only be a sadistic desire to see me fail, Gordon asked me to give the Toast to the Lassies, a tongue-in-cheek (but good spirited) address that simultaneously roasts the fairer sex but, in the end, expresses our genuine affection for them. I delivered said speech that first year, and after the butter knife was removed from my torso and the worst of the bleeding stopped, I was elected to the position again. Last year's supper went off with similar success.

But in the interim since then, Gordon has been called back to the old country for personal reasons. He was one of those people who helped me learn how to navigate our department, someone who always kept his priorities straight. With Gordon and his wife Liz gone, there are no more Burn Suppers here, but in honor of the occasion, I've decided to post last year's speech. Slainte.

Another Toast to the Lassies

The Toast to the Lassies was originally designed as a thank you to the women who prepared that evening’s Burns Supper. While I was raised in an Irish Catholic household, I’ve been told that less civilized corners of the globe allow men to prepare meals and events alongside women, albeit often to the chagrin of all who would partake. Luckily, tonight is quite the exception, and so let me steal a quick moment of your time to first thank, by way of a quick toast, our gracious organizers Gordon and Liz, and our hosts Carolyn and Deckard. Your generosity and hospitality are warmly appreciated.

I had the pleasure of delivering the Toast to the Lassies last year, and apart from a few minor beatings in the parking lot afterwards and some extensive vandalism upon my vehicle, I escaped the joyous event unscathed. So sitting down to write a new Toast this year, I naively assumed I would have a leg up. Not so. I once again found myself unsure of how to proceed. And to my great shame, I could come up with nothing other than the trite evasions I give my freshman writing students on a daily basis:

Well, one can always open with a quote, and George Bernard Shaw, that great Irish man of letters, was on occasion known to quote himself, if only to liven things up a bit. Regrettably, I have yet in my scant twenty seven years of life to have said anything of worth, and while I have been assured by anonymous third parties that my lovely fiancé Kelly is utterly replete with pearls of wisdom, I bear that curse of the masculine sex in which I never entirely listen to the women in my life. No doubt this toast will suffer all the more for it.

There’s statistical evidence, which has a certain charm. For instance, women outlive men, on average, by about 15 years, which means once we croak you get all our stuff and then at your leisure may go through our computer files and find out just how sick we really were.

Strange facts can also be an attention getter at the start. In medieval France, you may not know, one punishment for an adulterous wife was to make her chase a chicken through town naked. Unfortunately, my research was unable to unearth what the chicken was being punished for.

But what I sometimes remember to tell my students on my better teaching days, and what they invariably remind me of anyway in their writing, is that these introductory tactics can also be gimmicky and trite. And I would never want to be either of those in a matter of as grave seriousness and honor as this toast. So let me speak from a more genuine place of perplexed but heartfelt masculine adoration.

The lassies are utterly selfless, for instance. They will readily give us the opportunity to investigate any suspicious sounds in the house, wearing nothing but our boxer shorts and an ill-fitted Lionel Richie t-shirt, waving a lampstand before us threateningly as we pray the intruder doesn’t fancy academics. She can immediately roll over and go back to sleep, secure in her knowledge that we will triumph over this more experienced and certainly better armed adversary, and will claim no share of credit when the local papers run their story on the savage beating we gave the entertainment center.

They, of course, have a greater threshold for pain than we do. We all know they trump any claim we can make (kidney stones is a favorite) with the unpleasantness of childbirth—with or without the rather obligatory fruit or sporting-good metaphors sometimes used to give us men a visual; any man who has not been reminded of this numerous times by the women is life is obviously and blissfully stone deaf. But I believe their psychological fortitude goes unsung far too often. I have, entirely by accidents that I rue even to this very day, stumbled upon shows such as America's Next Top Model, Platinum Weddings, or Gilmore Girls, and even a bare minute of airtime has threatened to burn the very eyes from my skull, as if I dared look into the face of God. The fact that women can not only endure one unholy sitting of this torture, but can return to it again and again, evinces the sort of deliberate and repeated masochism any man can admire.

And despite many of our vocations in the humanities, regardless of formal training, women have a far keener appreciation of the nuance of language. While we men of course realize that different words must have different meanings (even if we don’t always know what they are), we are sometimes unable to adeptly deploy them. For a period of time after our engagement, for example, I continued to call my fiancé “my girlfriend.” She in turn asked me, “Are you trying to piss me off?” (Which, let me assure you, is best treated as a rhetorical question, men! This is a trap!). Anyway, once I properly schooled my tongue, I then happened upon the idea that by occasionally calling her “wife” I would average out the previous oversight. The tactical deployment of this clever little stratagem, however, garnered only strange looks from Kelly, as if I had a horn growing out of my forehead. I was no longer even meriting a verbal response on her part.

Part of the problem, if I may call it that, is that for all their glorious qualities, we simply do not understand them. For example, if you compliment a woman on her thin figure, even not in earnest, you will receive a smile, perhaps a modest blush across her cheeks. If you compliment an older picture of said woman on how thin she was then, you will reap the kind of punishment pharaoh enjoyed for refusing to release the Jews.

They simply see things differently than we do. When Kelly and I decided to get a dog, I stupidly assumed we were getting a dog. As it turns out, we were getting a practice baby—I still have not received the memo. But what I have received is repeated reminders that I will apparently make an uninvolved, distant and borderline abusive parent, which I again lay at the feet of the Irish Catholic upbringing.

Now only a grad student would even consider making this claim, but regardless—something I once learned about theory may help me resolve this issue with the lassies here tonight, and that is this: some of those particularly opaque theorists out there (we all know who they are) write the way they do because the moment you think you’ve got something under wraps, you can stop thinking about it. And maybe that’s then why it works out so well that we don’t understand women: so we can keep on thinking about them. About their strength, and about their intellect, about their curious toleration of the menfolk who bustle around through their lives and scuff and break all the nice things they own and can only offer to open the occasional mason jar or crush a spider in exchange. So let’s think a bit on the lassies tonight, and when that smile inevitably dances on your lips, remember she’s the one who put it there. And in this world, that’s always something to be thankful for.

If you will, please raise your glasses with me for a Toast to the Lassies! Sláinte!