Men can be defined in more ways than having a penis. We like our sports, whether we’re playing them or watching them. We fart in our sleep even if we swear up and down that we don’t. And we love to give directions.
Men will even compete over who has the best directions. There are two categories for this: The Shortest Route and The Quickest Route. They aren’t always the same.
The Shortest Route is the one with the best trip odometer reading. Trip odometers were created by men, for men, just so we could settle arguments over how far it is to some place. Any place. A tenth of a mile only makes a difference to a man with a beer bet on the line.
The Quickest Route is the one that takes the least amount of time. This includes stop lights, left turns into traffic and wide open 35 mph zones.
The Shortest Route can never be argued. Ten and a half miles is ten and a half miles, no matter what you do differently. Cutting through a parking lot and hugging corners doesn’t change much.
But the Quickest Route can always be disputed.
Driving 180 miles to the beach in the middle of the night makes a difference over leaving during the day. At night, some stop lights in small towns turn into caution lights. There’s usually so little traffic on the road it’s negligible. And there’s less stopping (for the woman’s bathroom breaks) because nothing’s open.
And you can speed.
What time of day you drive can alter “time distances” so much that a 180-mile country road route through ten small towns can be quicker than a 200-mile straight-there highway stretch.
But regardless of whichever argument a man sides with on any given trip, men like to be right about their directions. We must be right.
And we need to be praised on our directional capabilities by our women and the society we live in. Because above all else, besides his penis, a man is defined by how he gets there from here.