Another Post Without Smut

Our ever expanding language

Kids these days have a word for everything. I was talking with EFU on the phone yesterday, and I asked her how things were socially. She said they were pretty good, but that so many people there were hooking up that sometimes there weren't many people around just to hang out with. Then she said, "I was sexiled four times last week." I had not heard the term before, but apparently it's quite common. In any case, I'm sure you can guess what it is. It's the equivalent of the old necktie on the dorm room door. If one of your roommates is hooking up with his (or in this case, her) girlfriend (or in this case, girlfriend), you can't go in the room to get your stuff because you're sexiled. Apparently, one of EFU's roommate's girlfriend is at a college a couple of hours away and drove up to visit EFU's roommate and "they went at it all the time last weekend." I was going to tell her that since they're lesbians, they'll stop having sex within about six weeks, but I didn't want to be mean.

EFU has already joined her campus' GLBT activism group. I have tried to explain to her that if she wants to meet straight guys, she's probably hanging out in the wrong place, but I'm glad that she has a strong sense of social justice, of course. Anyway, I'm probably fifteen years away from wanting grandchildren, so there's no hurry.

Speaking of neckties, most of us no longer need to hang them on dorm room doors or around our necks for work, but nothing works better than old neckties for securing a man to your bed. They're more comfortable and easier to work with than rope, and the silk is very sexy. And if you're working in a room with dim lighting, no one will see any stains. Or notice your questionable taste in neckwear. Paisley? Dude. Many of us have gotten rid of our old neckties except for the ones we still wear on the rare occasion when we need them, but used ones are available cheaply and in abundance at second hand stores. Or you can just appropriate your partner's, like I do. Lawyers, obviously, will not have this problem.

Yet another example of why I never get anything done

I got a pack of m&ms from the vending machine the other day, and there were only three reds. There were eighteen oranges. There were also many blues but very few dark browns.

I think a lot about m&m color distribution. I was not really aware of what was going on when red m&ms were pulled from the market (1976), but I certainly remember them coming back in 1987. Around that time, I read an article -- probably in the Boston Globe -- about the color distribution of m&ms. At that time, m&ms were red, yellow, green, brown, and tan, and there were more browns than any other color. Orange came in when red left. I didn't mind orange, but I was appalled when there was that voting madness in the early nineties to determine the new color to be added. Over time, I have grudgingly come to accept blue m&ms, but I usually eat them first so that I don't have to look at them. Then I eat the orange ones because I don't much like orange.

I'm not sure when they ditched the tan m&ms, but I approve of their removal. All in all, though, the history of m&ms is a sordid one. One thing the Internet is really good at is destroying the notion of an original idea. A lot of other people have already spent a lot of time considering m&m color distribution. And with considerably more rigor than I have employed. Back around 1999 or 2000, though, I did keep a spreadsheet to track the color distribution in bags of peanut m&ms. I had tracked about fifty bags before I gave up. I don't usually admit this because my official position is that peanut m&ms are an abomination.

I always separate my m&ms into piles by color, but I don't always eat the colors in the same order. It depends a lot on my mood. Sort of like the way Tyrone Slothrop picks the colors representing his hookups in Gravity's Rainbow. By the way, I've tried three times to read Gravity's Rainbow, but I've never finished it. I'm not happy about that, but I figure I can try again. There is a great deal of sexual variety written about in GR, so I reckon it's good research. I'm not going to start color coding my hookups, though. That's just too complicated for me.

(By the way, and à propos of nothing, when I was in college, I worked with a young woman who claimed that the different colors of m&ms had slightly different flavors and that she could tell which color she was tasting without looking. We got a blindfold and tested her abilities. She was mistaken.)

I thought that finding such a small number of red m&ms must be an anomaly, so I got another package, and I found a similar distribution. That's when I began to worry.

I have a spreadsheet that I use for things like my budget and my various savings/retirement accounts. I used to use it to track my consumer debt, but then I paid off all the debt. I have a car loan now, but it's too simple to bother tracking on the spreadsheet. I added a page to the spreadsheet to begin tracking m&ms. But I didn't record the numbers from the bag that concerned me, and after just one more bag, the plain m&ms disappeared from the vending machine. Clearly, there's something that M&M Mars doesn't want me to uncover.

By the way, when the consumer affairs people at M&M Mars refer to m&ms, they use capitals, a greengrocer's plural, and quotation marks, so that it looks like

"M&M's"

I do not approve of the capitalization, the greengrocer's plural, or the quotation marks. But it's their candy, so I suppose they can write it anyway they want. Motherfuckers.

Anyway, it's no secret that there's an all out attack on masculinity these days, and the new distribution (the one additional data point that I got confirms my initial analysis; clearly, two data points are not enough to allow generalization, but the available data argues in favor of a distribution of 30-20-20-10-10-10 for orange, blue, yellow, red, green, and brown, respectively) of m&ms is yet another example. In times past, dark brown -- a traditionally masculine color -- was always the most prevalent color, but now it is almost an afterthought. Red -- the color of sexual aggression -- has undergone a similar reduction. While it's true that blue is the color most likely to be a man's favorite color, it's also true that blue is a color that calms you down.

Back in the day, when I was first hooking up with guys, I had more than my share of condom issues. I have since gotten over them, but one of the ways that I used to prepare for a hookup was to eat some chocolate. The combination of sugar and theobromine is a good one for someone with condom anxiety. And even if you don't have condom anxiety, it's good for your intermediate-term stamina. If I'm going to be eating some chocolate, why the hell do I want to be calmed down? (Full disclosure: I will eat a bag of m&ms before a hookup in a pinch, but dark chocolate is a far better choice. The darker, the better. There are now dark chocolate m&ms, but I haven't tried them. Or if I have, I don't remember.)

Anyway, the worst offender here is clearly the increased preponderance of orange. Orange is the color men hate most. Putting thirty percent orange m&ms in a bag is akin to saying, "We spit on your masculinity. Why don't you marry a dominatrix and buy her a strap on so that she can skewer you like a roast pig?"

I would boycott m&ms over this horrific situation, but I feel like I have a responsibility to guys everywhere to continue to monitor the situation. Perhaps the next time I'm at Costco, I'll get one of the 54-ounce bags (because a two-pounder just wouldn't be enough, obviously) and do a count on a larger scale. Knowledge is power.