random thoughts and thoroughbred selections

Friday, August 27, 2004

Questions

In the book I�m currently reading, �Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs� by Chuck Klosterman, he�s got a section featuring 23 questions he would ask a prospective girlfriend to see if she was worth his time. A few of these were great, so I�m going to take a crack at a couple.

By the way, I don�t have the book in front of me, so you�re getting paraphrased questions:

If you could go back to when you were five years old with all the knowledge and life experience you have to this point in your life, and essentially live your life over again, how much earlier in life would you have lost your virginity?

That�s an easy one for me. It would be five years. I could easily have talked my way into it with my first girlfriend, as we dated long enough and had a pretty solid connection for kids that young. Unfortunately, if you�re doing the math, I just realized I just told a whole bunch of people that I lost my virginity when I was quite old. Comparatively. At minimum, I had a girlfriend freshman year of college that could/should have been the one, but we were both too chickenshit. Well, whatever. I still got mine eventually.

You meet a wizard. He tells you that he can make you more attractive if you pay him, and proves it by picking out a random passerby and tells you he�ll make that person $1 more attractive. You don�t notice any physical change, but you definitely feel that random person has become more attractive to you. The catch is that you can only pay the wizard once, so you must now decide how much money in one lump sum you are willing to give him. How much do you pay the wizard to become more attractive?

This one is difficult. First of all, yes, I�d absolutely pay the man to make me more attractive. But what�s difficult is judging what $20 versus $50 versus $1500 will get you. I mean, you�ve got to figure that at some point you�ll have tipped the scale so far that you�re David Cassidy circa 1976 with women screaming and chasing you everywhere, and you could possibly even overpay so badly that men would do the same. So basically, you have to try to figure out from his $1 example, what percentage more attractive did that random person become? One percent? Five percent? One quarter of one percent? Then you�d have to guesstimate from there. I�d pay the man enough money to guesstimate myself up 60%. I figure that�s plenty without being egregious.

Your best friend is sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor. For whatever reason, you know that your friend will die if you don�t kick him in the ribs as hard as you possibly can. However, your friend will immediately die if you tell him why you had to kick him in the ribs. Assuming you kick him with all your might, what excuse do you give him when he wakes up and wonders what happens?

It seems wildly insincere to blame it on something like sleepwalking or an epileptic seizure, and I don�t think going Gramatica to his sternum is what you�d do to chase a small animal away. I think you have to blame it on a big animal. A big, dangerous animal. �I�m sorry man, it was a rabid raccoon, and he was about ready to bite you only to move at the last second.�

A large Clydesdale horse has had all four hooves anchored to the ground, and its head fixed in one spot. The group responsible for this offers you this opportunity: If you can kick this horse to death in 25 minutes, every political prisoner in the world will be freed. Assuming they�ll let you wear steel toed boots, do you try to kick the horse to death?

I�d do it for Dairy Queen coupons.

You are offered the opportunity to be introduced to a woman that�s nearly absolutely perfect in every way. She�s beautiful, intelligent, driven, has a respectable career, and you�re guaranteed that the physical attraction is strong and mutual. Her only drawback is that she is obsessed with the Jim Henson Muppet goth movie �The Dark Crystal.� She watches the movie constantly (but doesn�t subject you to it), makes �DC� references while watching TV, reading the paper, in casual conversation, and at dinner parties. As a matter of fact, whenever you are looking for alone time, she retreats to the study to her life�s work, a multi-volume treatise dissecting �The Dark Crystal� on various social and economic levels. Do you take this woman to be your life�s partner knowing this coming in?

I know a girl who�s obsessed on this level with �Labyrinth.� Insulting David Bowie, or even paying him a backhanded compliment is grounds for a serious tongue lashing, and not in the pleasure-filled sort of way. She even has a book she�s writing about it. While I wouldn�t in a billion years date this girl, it�s because she�s not my type (and is really bizarre, not just about the movie), not because she likes the movie just a bit too much. I�d probably find this level of obsessive behavior kind of endearing. So long as I didn�t have to go to conventions or something. Hey, I�m a Lions fan, that�s its own level of obsessive, right?

More of these later�

[>>]posted at 5:25 PM by BG - click to email
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