Dear Mr. Man Points,
After reading about the health benefits of house plants, especially as they pertain to their ability to cleanse toxins from indoor air, I purchased some gerbera daisies, chrysanthemums, and peace lilies, but after I placed them in the living room and the kitchen, my roommates told me to either get rid of the plants or plan on finding a new place. To add to the insult, they have questioned my manliness. Do house plants really constitute a Man Points violation?
Bringing house plants into the home compromises your manliness, to be sure. This becomes apparent when you look at the unnecessary domestic hardships you’ve imposed upon your roommates. In case you’re unaware, you’ve just brought a gnat and mosquito magnet in your kitchen and living room. Happy? Additionally, you’re now beholden to trimming, watering, and caring for a bunch of unappreciative plants. Satisfied? If you must have flowers or color, perhaps as a concession to the woman visitors, go for plastic plants and flowers. No upkeep. No worries about under or over exposure to the sun. No worries about giving too little or too much water. No aphids, gnats, or mosquitoes hovering over your plastic ferns and roses. They don’t wilt or fade. And most importantly they’ll never die.
Once you enjoy the convenience of artificial house plants, you won’t be able to stop there. Take fireplaces and aquariums, for example. The expense and the mess from maintaining a roaring fire or keeping a bunch of tropical fish are staggering. You have to keep firewood in the side yard, which draws worms, black widows, and other pests. You have to deal with the billowing black smoke scorching your freshly painted living room walls. Meanwhile your aquarium has fish turds floating throughout it as it wafts a bacteria and algae stench throughout your home resulting in God knows what kind of disease and pestilence. Why subject yourself to this kind of abuse when there are plenty of DVDs on the market that feature lovely fires flickering in a romantic hearth or luminescent angel fish and sea horses in a pristine aquarium?
And let’s not stop inside the home. Let’s apply the same common sense to the garden. Thanks to the miracle of polypropylene, we can now say hello to a synthetic front lawn that is neater, greener, and healthier than real grass. We can say goodbye to mowing, watering, weed-picking. We can say hello to perfectly sculptured mountain grass, tea leaf bush, Victorian Rosemary, and bamboo. We can say goodbye to fertilizer, insecticide, and herbicide. And hello to lounging during those long, lazy summers in our hammock with no worries about being bitten by chiggers, wasps, and bumblebees.
But just so your neighbors don’t think you’re too perfect, you can buy a few nylon weeds. No need to make the neighbors too envious of your all-season bright green synthetic lawn.
Now I’m sure some men out there are questioning my position on synthetic lawns and gardens as they will point out that real men till their own soil, mow their own lawns, and trim their own hedges, as if these chores exemplify iconic images of manhood. I’m afraid, however, that these men are egregiously misguided for in fact the image of the sweaty gardener as he-man is obsolete. Yes, a generation ago it was manly for man to ride his Electrolux triple-blade garden tractor across his front yard with a look of grim determination. But in the new multi-task, multi-gadget economy, man must free himself from his outdoor chores and by doing so he has more time for making money. In the hectic pace we live in, therefore, it is time management, not upholding outdated outdoor manual labor, that earn Man Points.
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