So I was looking through my drafts folder for a post to finalize and schedule for tomorrow morning, and nothing was really doing it for me. I have dozens of drafts in there, but I'm not in mood for any of them. You know how it is.
“What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.”
— Gurney Halleck
Yes, thank you, Gurney. Not what I was going for, but that quote is one of my favorites from Dune—I seem to highlight it in every copy of the book I buy—so it is always quick to jump into my head.
Anyway. None of my drafts doing it for me, I went to browse Hive to do some commenting and curation. And I came across 
Galen always posts great questions. I am often busy on the weekend so I haven't yet been able to participate in his community, but I like to read through what people post there. Totally recommended for you guys if you have more time than me on weekends. Check it out.
I'm not going to post this there because, well, it's not the weekend. It'll be Tuesday morning when I schedule it to go off. My musings on these questions are reflections of a sort, eh? So maybe this will work in that community. Ah, I'll think about where to post this as I write. But like I said, I like the questions and I was inspired by Caroline's post, so we're running with it. I'm not going to answer all the questions, because I'm already long-winded sometimes and I don't want this post to go on forever.
Where you live: If you could choose between a small shack on an idyllic beach or a cabin in the woods which would you choose and why?
Image by Valentin from Pixabay Absolutely the latter. With my head full of passages from Walden, I'd leap into that head first. ...and probably fail spectacularly, but I like the idea of a cabin there. A cabin close to the city would be great, so that like Thoreau I could cheat and walk to town often instead of roughing it alone all day.
I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.
— ThoreauI mean, c'mon, my head is full of these. How could I pick anything other than a cabin? Maybe I'd write my own book of profound sounding thoughts that will frustrate English students for the next century and a half.
Japan has a lot of monkeys and boars in the woods. I wouldn't really want to run into either of those. Actually I have run into both before, but only from afar so I wasn't in any danger. So there would be a steep learning curve I think if I was living in a cabin in the woods here, but I'd still pick that one.
I do love the ocean, though, so either option would be fine. Is that cheating to say that?
Automated or manual: If you could choose to have an autonomous vehicle or one you had to drive yourself which would you choose?
Image by Pexels from Pixabay I misread this at first as "automatic or manual" as in referring to the transmission. In that case I'd absolutely pick manual. Driving with a stickshift is more fun. Sometimes challenging and stressful when hills are involved, but overall more fun. That's an option that seems to be disappearing more and more every year. Can you even buy cars with a stickshift off the lot anymore? I think you have to have them special ordered.
Anyway, but automated car? Well, within my lifetime I don't think we're going to have a choice. As soon as automated cars become good enough, laws will be passed to require them. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if this is within the next 20 years. That may sound pretty optimistic, but I think we are at the bottom of a big S curve here and technology is going to really leap so much in the next few years that we can't even picture what it will look like.
Looking at the stats that already show automated cars as having a lower accident percentage and seeing all the idiot drivers on the road (seriously, don't browse r/idiotsincars if you want to keep the fantasy that most people are good drivers) I can't honestly say this will be a bad thing when it happens.
But I digress. Back to the question. I enjoy driving when I do, so as long as the option is available to me, I would choose manual driving over automated.
Then again, I already take the train like 99% of the time, so in a sense don't I already do the automated thing...?
Your secrets: Assuming one of the following things had to happen, would you prefer to have someone read your secret diary, go through the photos on your phone, or check your computer's browser history?
Image by Sam Williams from Pixabay I'm pretty much an open book and don't keep secrets. Well besides those little white lies, such as when someone is so fat their shadow must weigh at least as much as I do but for politeness sake I tell them they look lovely.
Maybe that comes with blogging for so long. I started my first blog in 1996, shortly after entering university. We didn't call them blogs back then, nor did we have CMSes (like Wordpress) so I updated the main page by hand every time I posted something new. In all that time I've pretty much been open about everything with the world at large. Which I suppose could have a dark side... If anyone wants to train an AI bot on a real guy I've left plenty of writing for them to use. Then again, maybe they already have. Maybe I'm not the real David! bwah hah hah hahahaha! Wait—no, I mean I'm totally the real David. No worries here, fellow human.
I do keep a journal. I've always encouraged my wife to read it if she wants. I leave it out on my desk and don't lock it away. I work out problems it in, record ideas, explore many many haiku, most of them terrible I'm sure. Most of it is probably terribly boring to other people. My son was actually trying to read it the other day. I say trying because he can't yet read cursive very well. He thinks it's cool though so I'm slowly teaching him one letter at a time.
My photos are all either of my kids or from my photowalks. My wife and I don't do secret sex videos or anything like that (unfortunate as that may be), so nothing of that nature to be found. And my browsing history is mostly Hive, haiku articles, and English grammar stuff that I'm looking up for my school. (I'm fairly well educated and have been teaching for 25 years, but sometimes I like to just double check more complicated grammatical structures. I also get lazy and borrow other people's example sentences rather than use my own.) I guess the lesson here is that I'm boring 😅
Got to die somehow: Assuming you had to choose between the following three ways of dying... would you rather get eaten by a shark, fall out of a plane without a parachute, or trampled by a herd of elephants?
Image by Pexels from Pixabay 😂 I love this question.
Definitely falling out of a plane. I'd probably pass out from the panic and fall so I wouldn't even know when I died, but even if I didn't, that sudden stop would probably end things pretty quickly so there wouldn't be a lot of pain.
Then again, would it be good to die unaware? Some Buddhist sects claim that being unaware of our own death leads to confusion in the afterlife and an attachment to this life. That's one way they explain ghosts. But y'know, that's a big if on the afterlife question.
But I digress. Again.
I think that's what most of us fear most about death, right? The pain, I mean. It's not the dying that we necessarily mind, it's the idea of all the pain that may come with it. I think pretty much the biggest wish I see from people is to die painlessly in their sleep.
Life is a dance. Eventually the music will end and it'll be curtains for us. Hmm... I'm mixing my metaphors. Or am I? Dances can have curtains, can't they? Ah well, either way that works too, and puts that famous line from the Bard into my head:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.Might as well have a spectacular end rather than a dull one. Like the moth that goes into the flame for a magnificent and dazzling POOF as it is vaporized rather than a quiet and quite boring death.
That said, personally I am planning on living until at least 206, so I won't have to worry about this problem for awhile.
Good looking but no sex: You can be good-looking but never have sex ever again, or ugly and have plenty of sex. Which would you choose and why?
C'mon, is this really challenging? Ugly and with plenty of sex, duh. I mean, like now 😜
Fun questions. Let me know the answers you may have to these if you are brave enough.
❦
| David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. |