Like a duck in a pen

"Everyone knows the Fredericksburg Road Donut/Taco House," I said, "but only the strong actually eat there. My father one day decided to treat me to lunch, so we go there, and I order a guacamole salad, and Pop orders menudo--"

"Interesting how neither of you got a donut or a taco," said my roommate Chana. "You should have gone to Los Barrios, if he wanted menudo--you mean the soup, not the band, I guess--"

"Any fool can go to Los Barrios," I said. "We went here, and the food's not terrible, but we've had better. Dad says to the waiter, `How much is this gonna set us back?' and the waiter says, `Thirty thousand dollars.'"

"And your dad pulled out his .38 and put some lead in his stomach?" asked Ginger, my other right arm.

"No," I said, "because it wasn't the waiter's fault. Now, what do we do? The food's sitting there, we're hungry, and it's not like it's going to kill us to eat it. We could go somewhere else, but that would take time, to say nothing of gas--"

"So you ask for another bowl of hot sauce," said Ginger, "and you eat."

"We take the meal sitting down, as it were," I said, "but we take it--"

"Like a man," said Ginger. "People forget what that means."

"I don't know what it means," said Chana. "I'm not sure I want to take anything `like a man.'"

"It has nothing to do with being male," I said. "The phrase has a dead-white-man connotation that it doesn't deserve. I plan on reappropriating the idea for my own evil purposes, and I am obviously female. Let me explain."

Restaurant parables aside, what exactly does this "taking it like a man" involve? Will "it" give you the same indigestion that the Green Sauce at Torres' Taco does? I told Ginger and Chana this morning that I was writing my column on "How to Fail Really Well," and we agreed that if the worst failure ever to befall us involved a bad lunch in the dining hall or a bad grade, we would have no trouble more painful than heartburn. Heartache, however, is brought on by difficulties that our fathers and our friends can't resolve, even with a .38.

Lady Macbeth, on her own interpretation of what it is first to try, and then to fail, like a man ("Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts,/Unsex me here..."), died young from the side effects of her technique.

What my mother would call the "macha," as opposed to macho, approach, in which we try to get the better of what ails us simply by suppressing it, is appealing in the short run but dangerous in the long. Even if, as Lady M. would say, "things without all remedy/Should be without regard," (italics mine) they seldom are that way.

The conventional wisdom implies that the responsible alternative to running away from a problem is necessarily staying to solve it. If there were always solutions to be found, we would all apply our transferable skills to the search, and there would be no further distress. There are times, however, when the effort required to struggle against a misfortune is better used not to flee from it, but instead to continue in spite of it. It is one thing to learn to succeed gracefully, and Yale will certainly give us room to practice, but formal education also teaches us to fail well, to resign ourselves to something far less than ideal while neither accepting it nor allowing it to defeat us. Resignation, far from being passive or cowardly, may, in certain limited circumstances where our strength temporarily fails us, be wiser and more productive than flight or resistance. It also gives us time to plot our return to the fight.

Taking something "like a man" does not mean drowning one's sorrows in hot sauce while plotting revenge on the chef. I mean it instead as an alternative to "like a Vulcan." The better humans, male or female, can eat what is served them in peace and enjoy the meal without forgetting to check the addition on the tab.