Random Question

Rob here. Thanks for dropping in.

Before I get into the titular thrust of this entry, I want to kick things off by illustrating for you, the reader, just how cloying my relationship with my friend Sara can be. To outside eyes, I mean. Not to mine. For me it’s an absolute dream. I’m being serious.

Okay. So, two days ago, Sara and I were chatting online about children. I was saying how I hate them and she, having three kids of her own, was being her usual magnanimous self. Taking nothing personally. Hearing me out. Letting me vent about an obnoxious four-year-old I wanted to stuff in a sack and heave into a river. Anyway, at some point we agreed that it might be fun to capture our chats in a more permanent forum, if for no other reason than to remember them later ourselves, and thus began the process of launching this masterwork you see before you. Which brings me back to cloying.

Jesus Christ, you should have seen us. Or, more accurately, read us. Sara’s near Seattle and I’m in Los Angeles, but we might as well have been holding hands and skipping gaily round a maypole, the way we were expressing our bold-faced, excessively capitalized delight. And don’t even get me started on our use of exclamation points.

But we were. We were excited. We are, I daresay, excitable. So we flapped our hands over fonts and background photos; we tittered about our display name. We must have been the giddiest people on the planet to embark on a literary endeavor with such massively limited potential for readership and none whatsoever for cash.

You get it, though, don’t you, reader? The saccharine celebrations tell you all you need to know. Our puppy faces are dead giveaways. Sara and I are doing this, writing this, strictly for love.

And hate. Of children. But that’s me, not her. And I’m getting ahead of myself. There was a question. Oh, yes! The random question!

Here’s what happens. You set up a blog with Blogger, and in the Profile Edit page, down at the very bottom, Blogger poses a random question, the answer to which you’re meant to clack out in a box, using no more than 1,200 characters. The ostensible purpose of this exercise is to help readers of your blog gain a clearer understanding of who you are. Like, as a person. Based on how you’d respond to finding yourself sitting in your jammies at the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner. Or some such silly conceit.

In any event, Sara and I were game. We want you to know us. Really know us. So we agreed to tackle Blogger’s hard-hitting random question, and pass our responses on to you. (Also, by the way, please leave your own response to this question in the comments section. I know it’ll help us know you better. Which is a lie on my part.) And the question is:

Which is more important to you and why: flexibility or expandability?

Right. This question makes me think instantly about my dick. Sorry for that, but it’s true. Honest admission: I sometimes wonder whether I have Tourette’s Syndrome. The most recent manifestation of this dread disorder would have been yesterday, during the hyper-happy process of naming this blog, when I suggested to Sara, only half-jokingly, that we might want to call it “Single Fuck Married Chick Ass Cock Olympics.” But I digress.

Expandability is more important to me than flexibility, of course. No guy I know has any desire to fuck a twisty straw, and neither do I. I think that statement will stand on its own. And powerfully.

Fair enough. That’s my answer and my first entry. I welcome you, the reader, and my writing partner, Sara. Here she is now.
_____________

Ah, Rob. You charm me to bits.

So. Reader. You know now about our motivations, such as they are, for the blog. (I suppose I’m going to have to get over my aversion to that word now. Not only does it make me think of the Borg when I write it, but because it’s short for “weblog” it makes me feel like someone who calls pizza “za.”)

Rob wasn’t overstating our giddiness at setting up this little project. I don’t know if I can quite convey the feeling, but I can hope that you’ve had it yourself, in which case all I need to do is remind you of it. Did you ever get a glowy, melty mass at your core, spreading just behind your breastbone, in anticipation of a grand adventure? That’s what I feel when I see the image Rob picked for our site. Taking off into the great unknown.

The not-knowing is the key. We have some pretty fundamental differences, Rob and I, so it’s fascinating (to us) to see what the other thinks about the questions we hold in common. How do we see the answers differently, and where do we converge? That’s how our conversations began (“What do you think about this?”), and the reason we’ve maintained them is because the answers have been pretty interesting.

I hope you find the same.

To answer the question at hand today, I actually came to the same conclusion as Rob, but for somewhat different reasons. Heh. “Somewhat.”

Surprisingly enough, I didn’t think of genitalia when I read the question. The concept of expandability actually gets right to the quick of a pretty important, basic tenet of my approach to life.

I mean, flexibility makes your life pleasant. It smooths the waters around you when you can bend enough to see someone else’s point of view and allow them to maintain it without a fight. And the ability to roll with whatever is happening around you makes for a more contented mind. People who are thrown by change end up disoriented and unsettled for much of life…because as we know, the one constant in life is change.

Forced to choose, though, I’d have to say that expandability is more important. And here’s why:

We honestly could die at any moment. The plane I’m on right now could crash. My brain could spout an aneurysm. My heart could seize. I could slip down the stairs and break my neck.

I don’t mean to be morbid—just realistic. Our days are numbered, and that number could be anywhere from 3,000 to just one.

And holy shit, what a world we get to participate in for however many days we have! There are so many places to see, languages to learn, books to read, instruments to play. I still would like to learn to crochet, surf, do a great butterfly stroke. My Spanish is spotty at best, and that needs to be remedied. I haven’t spun under the rain in a while, and my library queue is backing up. I hear the Mediterranean is beautiful, and I’m incredibly ignorant about Asia. (What a huge area of the globe to be ignorant of. Need to fix that.) Indian cookery! Why don’t I have a go-to Indian recipe yet? I did learn two new constellations this summer, but can’t recall them right now. (A couple of c-somethings, below Cassiopeia. One of them is a square.) Unacceptable.

So much to do.

So, although I know life is more pleasant when I can bend enough to get along with the people around me, and can flip-turn when life calls for it (knocked that one off the list last year, btw), I could live life as an inflexible asshole if I had to. I can’t imagine, however, living a life with static horizons. Without expanding your mind, your skills, your experiences, you might as well breathe from a stale paper bag for 80 years.

And that ain’t living.