[lisarea]

I am not a journalist, though, so I am not in competition for that title. And competing for most manly is like competing for who is the best at second grade, anyway.

A few years ago, I guess, Popular Mechanics had some stupid feature on the N number of skills you needed to be a real man or something. It was full of a bunch of super-dumb shit like "installing an antivirus program on your Windows computer" and "plugging in your television" and shit, and then had a couple of 'hardcore' things tossed in, including a kayak rescue that was being seen as aspirational or something, like that recipe for roast bear in The Joy of Cooking, I guess.

I had done that one, though, too. I passed some sort of test for some kind of wildwater lifeguard certification that included rescuing a capsized human dummy plus their kayak and towing them back to shore simultaneously.

But why, Lisa Pea, if you passed that certification, do you not remember what it was even called? Wouldn't you have had, like, a certificate on your wall? Well, no I didn't, because while I was allowed to take the full advanced skills test, eleven year olds were ineligible to be certified at that level.