Get to Know Me Getting to Know Myself

I've posted "20 Questions" in the past for my wife, parents, siblings and in-laws (click on the "family" label at the bottom of this post if you're interested). Since then I've come up with new questions in the form of a forced choice survey. Who better to test them out on besides myself? Please feel free to leave comments with your answers or to debate my answers or to suggest different questions. Enjoy.

1. Beach or pool? Here's the long answer (actually, I plan to get long-winded for most of these simple questions). The summer before I started 5th grade, my family made a road trip to Disneyland. While there, my brothers and I saw the ocean for the first time. As we drove up to it, I noticed that sand had blown out over the intersecting streets and filled the gutters. Right then I grew suspicious of this "beach scene." Everything else seemed okay until we got in the water. First off, it had a mind of its own, which made it hard to walk or even stand up straight. Secondly, a wave came out of nowhere, crashed down on top of me and filled my mouth with what was one of the worst tastes I'd encountered thus far in my short life. After I escaped from the salt water's clutches, I became a glue stick for sand or seaweed or whatever else (use your imagination) was underneath my feet. My brothers seemed to agree with me about these harsh playtime conditions and we asked to go back to the hotel pool. So there's my answer, complete with chlorine, a diving board, and a hot tub nearby.

2. Beauty or truth? This is another way of asking if it's "better to be honest or nice?" My dad used to say that when you know something bad about someone, you should ask yourself two questions before sharing it with anyone else: 1) Do you know from direct experience that it's true? 2) Is it necessary for anyone else to know, for practical purposes or safety's sake? It should be obvious where I get my absolute, black-and-white sense of justice. As for beautiful lies versus the ugly truth, I guess I'm part of that generation that doesn't like things sugarcoated, the generation that was born after they started showing monks burning themselves on the nightly news. Flattery doesn't work on me because I can't take a compliment. I feel uncomfortable or automatically assume somebody wants something if they're TOO nice. I had a roommate who'd lived in France for a couple of years and he told me that Europeans hate American customer service because it's flat-out fake. He followed that by saying that once Europeans warm up to a person, they offer something far more pleasant than politeness.

3. Blind or deaf? I read a response to this where someone claimed being blind would enhance their other senses, whereas they would just rely on sight as much as a hearing person if they were deaf. That's great and all, but I'd rather be able to run across the street than listen to music, and I LOVE MUSIC. Beethoven worked off the vibrations after he went deaf. It's probably impossible to objectively compare languages, but learning to sign has got to be easier than learning Braille.

4. Body or face? I'm reminded of the Seinfeld quote where Jerry says, "A leg man? Why would I be a leg man? I don’t need legs. I have legs." Well, everybody has a body and everybody has a face, but if you wanna get Darwinian, for the sake of our offspring, I think we subconsciously look for mates that compensate for the physical traits we ourselves are lacking. Same goes for humor, smarts and wealth. Ergo, if I have flawless facial features but I also have cankles, I might be forgiving of paper baggers who happen to be foot models. Kidding! But seriously, opposites attract and that's as far as I'll take the Seinfeld quote. I know some of you are already getting defensive about all the couples you know who look like they could be siblings. I'll go with face, not because I have a great body but because I can get more specific about what kinds of faces I like: pointy eyebrows, big eyes, high cheekbones, button noses, narrow mouths and full lips. That doesn't mean I have a unibrow and can fit a wire hanger in my smile though. If you haven't pegged me as anal retentive yet, now's your chance.

5. Breakfast or dinner? Actually, I like breakfast for dinner and dinner for breakfast. Some types of cuisine taste better the next day after a zap in the microwave (pasta, pizza and steak for example) so why not first thing in the morning? I've had sushi for breakfast but that's good anytime. I can't eat as much rice at night. Nobody really wants beans or casseroles before bedtime. If I eat pancakes in the morning, I'm done for the day. Bacon and eggs make me less queasy later on. They say if you have to have sweets, it's better to eat them early so you still have time to burn them off. Is that the same as suggesting you eat cake, cookies and ice cream for breakfast? Much to my wife's consternation, I also prefer my Thanksgiving turkey and Christmas ham around lunchtime.

6. Call or text? Text, but I wouldn't even own a cell phone if not for my wife.

7. Cats or dogs? I like plants.

8. City or country? Both. I've always said I don't care about the size of a house, but it's got to have a big yard. Obviously, that's harder to come by in the city. Ideally, you want to live in the woods on the outskirts of a big city (suburbs are where you get into trouble) or in a city with woodlands nearby. There's something to be said for not commuting but I don't mind long drives through the country. When I was a kid, I used to bike or skate all day long, from one end of a small town to the other. Do kids still do that ANYWHERE - city or country? I'm going to have to pass on this question and admit I'll never see my ideal while living in San Diego, but the weather sure is nice.

9. Coke or Pepsi? It depends. Coke products (Barq's, Dr. Pepper/Mr. Pibb, Fanta, Fresca/Squirt and Sprite) are better in bottles and Pepsi products (Mountain Dew, Mug, Sierra Mist, Slice and Tropicana Twister) are better in cans. In general, Coke products don't as taste good without a lot of carbonation and bottles do better at maintaining that. Pepsi products seem to have more carbonation from the get-go and they don't taste as bad flat, so a can's not going to hurt. But it's more than that. The recipes for both seem to differ depending on the container. Either that or the plastic and aluminum react chemically with the sodas, changing the flavors during distribution. Moving on, Coca-Cola pairs better with lime while Pepsi cola pairs better with lemon. If you're adding grenadine, it's gotta be Coke because Pepsi's already too sweet. I haven't compared orange Crush to Sunkist, but if I had to cast an overall vote, it would be Coke because cherry Coke is my only vice (ha). I do miss Pepsi Holiday Spice, but not caffeine-free Crystal Pepsi.

10. Conservative or liberal? Conservative.

11. Discussion or lecture? The sad fact of the matter is that there are people who like the sound of their own voice (I have the gift of gab from my mom's side). I personally try not to give answers to questions that haven't been asked. On the other hand, I feel restricted by rituals like always answering "fine" to "how are you?" I restrict my comments in Sunday school to quotes that I can cite and stories from my own experience. I feel that opinions are outside the realm of spiritual edification, and besides that, everyone has one so there's not enough time. Speaking of church, one of my fellow attendees says he'd rather give a boring lecture than have to listen to one. Such is the danger of lectures. Both discussions and lectures can go over their allotted time, but you can get up and leave a discussion less conspicuously than a lecture, and you don't have to worry about directly offending anyone. Unless of course you're trying to offend someone, which is often the case during a discussion when a person won't shut up.

12. Do or see? I am a visual learner. Last week we were on vacation and each day I asked my wife what we had planned multiple times throughout the day. Had I seen a calendar I could've asked once at the beginning of the week and been done with it. When I put together a product out of a box, I have to know what the final stage looks like. I like graphs, lists, maps, tables and timelines. I enjoyed diagramming sentences in English class and I preferred geometry to algebra. I feel like seeing gets a bum rap next to doing because "doers" get things "done" while there's somehow laziness involved with only having "seen" something. Usually, these words are used together with relation to tourism. One side says, "if you've seen one museum you've seen them all." The other says, "if you would just stop and look around, you might not be so tired after your vacation." When I consider items for a bucket list, there's nothing I want to do like skydiving or a marathon, unless you count driving a car through a redwood tree, but mostly I just want to see a tree that big.

13. Indoors or outdoors? There's nothing I hate more than humidity except for maybe the wind. Ironically, when faced with humidity, there's nothing better than a breeze. I have to feel constant air movement. In that regard, I would choose the outdoors over staleness indoors. When I was a kid, I had a newspaper route and sometimes I had to ride my bike against the wind or try to toss papers into it. In those moments I chose the indoors over the outdoors, but my problem is with "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night," just the wind. Now for a somewhat unrelated tangent: When I lived in Brazil, my fellow Americans complained about how much they hated being served water without ice. They declared that boiling water to drink was a sign of a Third World country and that air conditioning paid respect to ancestors that had labored and sweated without for 6,000 years. I didn't know how to respond because at the time because I hadn't missed either of those "crowning achievements for civilization." It did get me to thinking about why people will spend their entire lives in bug-infested swamps and on bone-chilling plains.

14. Job or money? Technically, this is an abbreviated version of a job interview question to which there is no right answer. If you say "job," you might be offered a lower salary. If you say "money," you might not be offered the job at all because they'll think you're passing time till a better offer comes along. I say a job is half what you do and half who you do it with. You gotta say "the job" and then just work on your negotiating skills. The other loaded job interview question is "work alone or with others?" Either they'll think you're not a team player or you're incapable of producing on your own. If you love the work then you can say "it doesn't matter" and you're absolutely right.

15. Noise or silence? And by silence, I mean deafening silence. My answer is noise, no question about it. I once lived in the ghetto with music and screaming right outside my window all through the night and I've never slept sounder. The very next place I lived was in the middle of nowhere. All you could hear was crickets. No cars, no neighbors, and I used to lay in bed staring at the ceiling for hours. Want to know what the best music to fall to sleep is? Heavy metal, because classical or jazz changes tempos and volumes too much. Heavy metal just loudly drones. I'm trying not to fry my brain mulitasking as much anymore, so I turn off music when I read now. When I used to study for school, I had to have people talking around me or a TV going in the same room.

16. PC or Mac? My wife recently bought a Macbook. I keep meaning to play around with GarageBand, iMovie and Keynote, but I have yet to work with anything but PCs.

17. Salty or sweet? My sweet tooth will be the death of me.

18. Save or spend? Alas, I spend.

19. Shiver or sweat? The thing with being cold is that you can always put more clothes on. When you're hot and naked, you're screwed. You don't see me getting angry when I'm cold. I sleep better when I'm freezing. I can't sleep at all when I'm hot. I can't think. I can't breathe. There's a reason Hell is portrayed as hot.

20. Sunrise or sunset? Nothing to do with the sun, but my favorite time of day is dusk. It's not wet like dawn and there's no dread about school or work or the sun, for that matter. I don't have scientific proof in front of me, but I'm pretty sure that sunsets are consistently more colorful. I've got backup with this saying: "red sky at night, shepherds delight; red sky in the morning, shepherds warning." Thanks for reading.