However, I feel that there is one thing worth being that a girl intrinsically can't be - an English gentleman. You see, my biology professor is an English gentleman. His name is Graham Bell, which means that all he's missing to perfection is an Alexander. He's an eminent researcher who treats his undergraduate students with a sort of dismissive distance. He's old. He has a sort of wavy British hairstyle, a khaki suit, and an air of intellectual respectability. He has a cynical sort of dry humour. He was presenting etymological diversity and noted that there were over 300,000 species of beetle in the world.
"Of course, one must question whether there is really a need for 300,000 species of beetle. And the answer of course is that there isn't a need, it just sort of happens that way."
I like that Professor Bell has no need to be accepted or liked by his students. His personality is staid and solid. His familial relations or financial situation could be a total wreck (and I certainly hope it isn't, because that would be a shame), and he would lecture on, unfrazzled and perhaps only slightly more brusque. It's the characteristic stiff upper lip and cynically amused stance towards the world that several of the older men I know posses, and I respect it mightily.
We of the fairer sex can't do the English gentleman thing. I'm currently not legal, let alone eminent, wise, and respectable, and I feel that even when I'm seventy and perhaps a researcher myself, I won't be able to wear a Donegal cap and khaki suit with impunity. It just doesn't fit. That doesn't mean that I can't have Professor Bell as a role model. We can all strive for stoicism, respectability, intellectual achievements, and a dryly good-natured life perspective. Pipe and tweed not required.
Incidentally, when the Germans were bombing the daylights out of London and the world was on the brink of utter destruction, another British gentleman I hold in great regard, Winston Churchill, put the following signs all around London:
Stiff upper lip indeed.
