Men explained (no, seriously)

I was reading Ki's post about not liking football and it got me thinking about something.

I'm not ashamed to reveal that footy is the only thing that succeeds in making me bawl my eyes out in a way that I'm not sure the death of a family member or the slaughter of an entire African village on the news, can do. There's my famous story about crying at the end of the Manchester United/ Bayern Munich game in the 1999 Champions League final when breaking up with my fiancee, two weeks later, couldn't do it.

It's simple: football is important.

No, it's not, but I would give up a testicle to see a picture of the girls reading this, expecting me to come up with some kind of era-defining wisdom regarding the workings of the male brain (the male brain: a euphemism, if there ever was one).

No, here's the serious explanation:

Part of my training as a boy (which I'm not sure was wholly successful) was the science of 'switching wires'.

What's that, you say? (Thanks for playing along). What's switching wires? Why that's easy! It's something most boys train themselves to do, so as not to cry and be made fun of, when they fall down or get beaten up or drop their ice cream on the floor: figure out something that makes you cry and train yourself to switch the impulsive reaction to it with that of a totally innocuous (and random) situation. Example: pain makes you cry. Switch wires: Pain does NOT make you cry...but double decker buses with no people in them do. Presto.

Of course, it could be years before you see an empty doubledecker bus (especially in Egypt) and were you to see one and the delayed reaction kicked in...who cares? People will think I'm weird? I like the taste of powdered milk, without water! I eat dessert ONLY before a meal. Being thought of as weird is a battle I won the medal of indifference for, years ago. Better be thought of as weird than weak.

It gets more ridiculous: sad things don't make me cry, sudden happiness does. Sad things don't make me sad, they make me angry. Intimate things don't make me open up, they make me want to run away...do you see how it works now?

Men don't actually suppress their feelings, they switch them around to cope with the pressures of the masculine expectation. That's the truth. We're really very easy to work out. Now will someone please explain women to me?