People can spend their lives doing whatever they want. But when a woman decides to reject the mantle society tries to place on her – the ‘helpless’ or ‘weak’ person that needs to step aside to let the men work – I’m impressed. I’ve been lucky to grow up in a family that has so many capable women. I have my wife and mother and my sister and cousins and so many aunts and my grandmother, all of whom could just up and raise a barn if they felt like it. There are also so many men in my family that don’t feel the need to get in their way. We all work hard. If you shook our hands, you could tell.
I meet a few farmers, ranchers and business people here and there, men and women. There’s always the handshake, that brief skin to skin contact with a stranger that’s suppose to lay their personality before you to be judged. Fish handshake? Knuckle crusher? Firm yet gentle?
Commonly, I don’t shake hands until I’m leaving a job. By that point, we’ve had our interaction and I’ve categorized you neatly based entirely on your look, smell, comments, attitude, demands, and intelligence. Because that’s what we humans do. We take in all this information as a person and start figuring out where they fit within our world, and where exactly we should file them. At that point, the handshake is just ritual, just routine, just what we do so when somebody says, “This is Dave”, we have a physical follow-through instead of just staring at our shoes or walking away awkwardly. I mean…
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