Jack of all trades...

I love Batman.

I was thinking of just leaving this post as that one sentence but then I thought that might be a little weird, so let me explain why.

Cruising through the series of tubes that make up the Interweb, I came across a list of 75 things every man should be able to do and I felt a strange combination of fascination and resentment. But I couldn't stop reading it.

Because a small part of me felt that this list might know something I didn't know about being a man. I wanted to size myself up against the list to see just how manly I was.

And then I realized I was being a complete tool.

There's a lack of zen in North America causing the youth to believe they have to be the best at everything and I blame me. I mean the media. So... me.

Anyway, being constantly bombarded by information in today's wacky world of infotainment there's an endless variety of figures to look up to and it's hard to choose just one. Sports figures, intellectuals, inventors, musicians. The list is endless, but it's also inevitably hopeless.

The giant list of potential heroes creates a giant bubble of confusion in young minds. No one knows who to look up to. Ask someone who their hero is. ONE hero and I bet you'll get a blank stare for one of two reasons:

They either can't filter through the grotesque, Facebook-sized list of names in their heads,

Or the names got lost in the database somewhere and the person has no one they really look up to and identify with.

Another alienating effect of having too many heroes or no heroes at all is being over or underwhelmed by the many facets of life. With too many heroes it's easy to have the need to be the best at everything to keep up with and compare yourself to the heroic figures in your head and with no heroes at all, well, that's just disasterous.

No one is going to be the best at everything, no matter how hard they try and the more people I see trying to be the best at everything, the more frustrated I get with a society that breeds sterility.

This is the same reason why I hate Superman.

He's the most boring character ever created and he only perpetuates the myth that people should try to be great at everything. He's the strongest, fastest, invulnerableist AND the bastard has laser eyes. Just in case.

Choose one thing you're good at and become awesome at it. Don't set your sights so high that they're unachievable. I want to live in a world where people specialize in different skills and don't try to know everything about everything.

But isn't Batman just the opposite of what I described? Kind of, but not really. He's a tricky third option for people with no real-life heroes to relate to.

In every Batman story I've ever read he gets the shit kicked out of him to the point where he's near death but somehow manages to squeeze through. He doesn't always save the day. He's not always right. He's just a guy with a neurosis and a boat-load of cash doing whatever it is he does.

His great skill is adapting, and that's made him a perfect for today's world of information bombardment.

In the comic world super-powers mirror the people with great abilities in our world. Batman has had to contend against superheroes with nothing more than his ingenuity and he's done it successfully.

Batman doesn't have a list of 75 things he needs to know about being Batman. He started by just beating the snot out of criminals and it all snowballed from there.

I don't need to know how to "recite one poem from memory" or "be brand loyal to at least one product" to be a man. I'm just going to focus at being the best at beating up criminals and I'll deal with the rest as it comes.