Big Big Question

When was the last time that you found yourself having to do the equivalent of flipping a coin? How did you get there, and what did it come down to?

How do you break out of a funk? What are your favorite anti-rut tactics? When you feel creatively/emotionally stranded at point A and you know you’ve got to get your ass over to point B, what kind of vehicle do you buckle into?

If you were moving out on your own for the first time, what is the most important (or top five, or top ten) household item(s) you would purchase for your new home?

I am assuming you already have the most basic supplies, such a some food, a first-aid kit, and anything you would pack for vacation or expect your hotel to have, so toiletries, clothes, towels, toilet paper, soap, toothpaste/toothbrush, etc.

The booger retrieval and storage company is on line one. They have been keeping all those boogers you’ve picked over all these years, and want to know what form you want the mass pressed into for delivery and drop off in your driveway later this afternoon. What shall I tell them?

One of the unavoidable constants of growing older is looking back and realizing how wrong you were about some things when you were younger. Big things and little things; stances taken on ethics, aesthetics, and so on.

In that spirit, what are you doing now that your younger self was never going to do? Or what aren’t you doing that your younger self was never going to give up?

If you’ll allow an overwrought metaphor, the gap between idealism and pragmatism is often wide and littered with the broken, sun-bleached bones of righteous convictions.

What are the things that you feel like you should be doing but which you just aren’t, for whatever reasons? What’s the thing that bugs you most? What’s the thing that bugs you less than you reckon it should?

Would you spend a year locked in Wal*Mart for $2 million? Condition: you are alone, with no contact with outside world (including news), but you do get electricity and full reign over all the goods in the store.

If I offered you a million dollars (two million? three million? five thousand?) would you let me have sex with your wife? (Or husband?). Don’t answer that. That’s not my question. (Well, you can answer in email if you want, but I can actually only spare about sixty bucks right now.)

My question is the opposite. What acts would you refuse to do, no matter what I offered you?

To make this interesting, let’s set a few caveats: no acts that cause permanent physical damage. I hope you won’t let me cut off your leg, no matter how much I offer you. No selling children into slavery or anything like that. I’m mostly interested in emotional boundaries.

Would you strip in front of your friends for money? Would you spend two years in solitary confinement for money? Would you eat dirt for money?

What wouldn’t you do for money?

Contact with E.T.’s? An Old Testament sign from God? A woman president? Proof of what created the universe? Something else? What what you like to see happen before you discard your mortal coil?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m in my 40s, and there are tons of ways I wish my life were different: I wish I was richer for one thing, and if I’d taken a different career path in my 20s, I probably would be. But that doesn’t make me feel like I wasted my youth. Truth is, I don’t think about my youth much. I’m too caught up in the good and the bad of right now.

This week,. two twenty-somethings asked AskMe-relationship questions which took the form of, “I love my partner, but the relationship is dull, sexually. If I say with her, will I wind up regretting that I wasted my youth?”

I’m tempted to write, “It doesn’t work that way. When you’re 30, 40 and 50, you don’t look back and lament all the things you never did. You’re too busy being 45, fighting with your boss, kissing your kids, watching DVDs… whatever. You’re more worried about where you’ll be five years from now than where you were you were ten years ago.

“I would like to travel around the world, and I’ll probably never get to do it. I’m married, I have a job, etc. It makes me sad, but I think about it as ‘I’ll probably never get to do it.’ Which is upsetting. But I don’t think of it as ‘I squandered my chance,’ even if that is somehow true. The past is the past.

“And even things I did do in the past don’t thrill me all that much now. Yes, I drove across the country; yes, I went to Europe… So? That was fun at the time. What am I supposed to do about it now? Bask in the memories? They’re fading. They’re like chapters in a book that I’ve already read. They’re way less potent than stuff I’m doing now and stuff I’m worried about — or looking forward to — in the future.”

But I don’t write that, because maybe I’m just quirky this way. Maybe I just happen to dwell on the present (and the future). Maybe that’s just my temperament. Maybe other people are more nostalgic.

What do you think? What makes someone a past person, a present person, or a future person?

Have you made any attempts to change the environment for the better? If so, what have you done? Do you bring your own bags to the grocery store, or use CFLs? Do you find it easy to live a greener life?

Impossibly pat premise: the house is burning down.  Everyone is out and safe (pets included), and you know for an implausible fact that you can safely go back in for exactly one thing.

What do you save?

Pet animals have a degree of maintenance cost built in that their owners implicitly accept up front: food, shots, routine and incidental medical care.  But now and then a pet gets seriously injured, or seriously ill, and the cost becomes a serious and likely emotionally wrenching question:  how much is too much?

If you have pets, what’s your pet line?   Have you crossed it before?  Approached it?  Had to make the practical decision despite the pain?  Spent the money even if you didn’t have it?  What happened?

And if you don’t have (or haven’t had) pets, is this something you’ve factored into your thinking about a bepetted (or pet-free) future?

Is your pet line a cumulative total (x dollars ever), or a per-incident limit (y dollars per incident, regardless of past history)?

(Humongous sympathy and good thoughts to the close friends who’ve inspired this.)

Sure, you’re not going to murder anyone, or rob a bank, and set a house on fire.  But what about the little things?  What’s the least-bad thing you just fundamentally will not do?  Or what’s the worst thing you will do?  And in either case, why?
Have you ever stepped over what was at the time a clear line of transgression?  Did your ethical boundaries (or your resolve) change as a result?

Would you go on a mission to mars? What about if it was a one-way mission? And you were by yourself?

Blatant Plagiarism: Gizmodo

What thing should everyone own, but most people don’t?

For everything you’d like to do, there’re reasons you’re not doing it.  So what are your Some Day things, and what’s holding you back right now?

There are decisions and then there are decisions.  When faced with a touch choice, how do you go about deciding?

And how do you help yourself feel okay about the decision you’ve made?

Inefficiencies. Speed-bumps. Hurry-up-and-wait. What are the things that waste your time, at work, at home, out and about?

What are the longest delays you deal with? What are the little Death By A Thousand Cuts annoyances that stack up in the long run?

And what would you do — if you had your way, or if the technology existed — to improve the situation?

Would you spend the night in a haunted house? Let’s devise a scenario: the house is large, decadent, without electricity and notoriously thought of by the locals (none of whom live within three miles of the place) to be haunted. You can bring a flashlight and a sleeping bag but nothing else. I’d prefer you did it alone, but I suppose you can bring a friend if you’re really that big of a wimp. Would you do it on a dare or would it take the promise of a large sum of money? Or not at all?

Extra points: have you ever spent the night in a haunted house?

It’s an ages-old hypothetical, but one I have answered differently at various stages in life. Forced to choose, would you opt for blindness or deafness. And of course, why? Let’s open this up to all senses as well.