“Must be a sissy if you can make a bed like that!”

“You’re supposed to be a guy.  Aren’t you embarrassed?”

“You’re gonna sleep in there again in a couple a’ hours.  Why do ya’ need to make it?”

“Did you learn that in home-ec?”

Just a tip…  Don’t go to a retreat with a bunch of young guys.  Especially if they’re jocks’.  Excuse me; sports enthusiasts.

But yeah, I can make a bed.  Yep.  You can bounce a quarter off of that bed.  That could be sissy material in high school, but I seem to remember they taught me how to properly make a military corner on a bed the same week they gave me an assault weapon and started teaching me self defense and the general art of killing people (they teach the fine art of killing people in the advanced special forces training and those guys don’t care if you can make your bed), so…  You were saying what?

Actually, I accidentally saw a segment on one of those daytime talk (talk, talk, Talk, TALK) shows about a new method to make your bed so it would be easy to remake in the morning.  It was NEW!  It was amazingly INOVATIVE!  It was… actually nothing your mother shouldn’t have taught you.  And she probably did; you just didn’t pay attention.  What she attempted to teach you is often called a “hospital corner” or, as mentioned, a “military corner”; a method of tightly tucking the top sheet under the bottom corners of the mattress to help it resist movement during normal nocturnal tossing and turning. Of course, you can also get the sheet to come out in other ways that are NOT normal tossing and turning, but I’m pretty sure your mother wouldn’t tell you about that.

So, what makes it NEW?  What makes it something they can call their own fresh idea and throw it out there as a fresh segment on a (freshly) informative TV show?

Two reasons.  First, the technique used was developed by someone long ago and is not owned by any one particular person.  In other words, it is what is called “public domain,” meaning it belongs to everyone.  More specifically, because of this fact, no one person or company can make money from it’s’ use.  If they could, the network lawyers would have refused to air the show and I wouldn’t have seen the piece in the first place and you would have been saved from reading this.

Secondly, you never paid attention when your mother showed you how to perform this intricate (not really) task, so you watched the television, enthralled with the newly found skills you now own.  If I remember correctly, the person who demonstrated the technique was a male-type-guy.  Don’t know if he was in the military or not – maybe he was a maid at a hotel…excuse me, valet, or manservant or…manmaid.  Whatever.  Either way, his orientation is not at question, not important and, furthermore, not any of our business!

So, really.  Why is it these people can pull out these old gems and serve them up as their own?  It’s because we don’t collectively attack them as frauds, slackers and/or idiots.  Or combinations of the same, depending on whether they lied about it, failed to do the research or just thought they were the first to discover electricity when they hit the light switch.

And, sadly, it’s because we don’t know how to do things for ourselves.  Let’s face it, we live in the same society that figures we don’t know how to go to the grocery store or read a cookbook so they sell us a meal on the world-wide-web.  We then receive a shipping carton from the UPS guy including “fresh produce and meats” and complete with step-by-step instructions…kinda’ like one of those model kits you put together when you were a kid.  And then we complain about box wines.  The same society to invent the motion activated paper towel dispenser so we don’t have to manually push that physically demanding lever.  The problem with this is you spend a great deal of time waving at the towel dispenser before you realize it’s an old fashioned pull-out model.

Now, to be fair, part of this is not a new society problem, but an old one, such as the adolescent comments at the beginning of the page.  That part of societal development used peer pressure as one of its tools to interject and strengthen what were then gender norms… You know, they bullied the other kids.  Still, what these kids learned was that these menial tasks were for girls.  Happily, this is not a view to which our current culture subscribes.  Now days we are under the impression that in order to be successful we have to pay for these tasks to be done by someone else.  If this is true, then it follows that anyone who hopes to be successful in the future need not bother to learn these skills because one day, someone else will do these things for you.

BULL!  Make your damn bed.  Learn how to boil some pasta, for heaven’s sake.  Don’t know how?  Look it up on the computer; it’s a marvelous resource.  If you can learn how to construct a nuclear weapon on the internet, you can certainly find out how to complete a small household chore.  Besides, the theory is the easy part of the nuclear weapon thing.  Acquisition of that pesky radioactive material is the hard part!  But, anyway, do some toil aimed at self-sufficiency.  You’ll feel better about yourself and, as an added benefit, you’ll put more steps on your Fitbit.  As an exercise, pretend you live all by yourself with no one around for miles and you have to do everything for yourself.

Trust me, if anyone finds out you’ve been looking at that nuclear weapon information, you’ll likely have to get used to it.