Dave T's Pros and Cons of Stuff Everyone Has: Options

Big Wheel Blog: 

Chocolate or vanilla.

Chicken or fish.

Red or white.

Peanut butter and jelly or Nutella and marshmallow fluff.

Smoking or non-smoking.

Fake goatee or hula hoop.

Falcon Crest reruns or closed-circuit footage of your cousin grooming a cat.

These are OPTIONS.

Don’t know what they are?

Options are choices.

For the purposes of this blog entry, let’s suppose that all our choices were made for us. Either there is only one kind of something, so you have to pick it, or there are many kinds of something but you’re only allowed to have one.

It doesn’t matter who is making the choices for us or limiting our options. Could be some kind of divinity, could be nature, whatever floats your theoretical boat.

Pros:

• If you have no options, you could be stuck with one terrible thing:

“This is your wife: She farts when she’s happy. She smells like train tracks. She’s allergic to hugs. She can’t cook and won’t clean. She’s a white supremacist, but she’s Korean. She considers eye contact to be a sign of aggression. The only comedian she’s ever laughed at is Gallagher. When she can’t think of the word for something, she faints. The inside of her vagina is filled with tiny bayonets and grenades. She’s got bird feet like a griffin. This is the only woman you’ll ever be with. Enjoy.”

“This is your job: You have to make all two thousand of these six year olds cry by convincing them one at a time that their mother drowned their father in a tub filled with Strawberry Quik, and that now they’re going to have to live in a foster home haunted by poltergeists. You collect the children’s tears in small cups. When you have a gallon of tears, you dump the tears into the pipe in the center of the room. It will be used to make a delicious blue drink that we’ll sell back to these same children at a ridiculous price. You do this Monday through Friday. You get paid in used toilet paper. Have fun.”

“This is your president: Sarah Palin. Good luck and Godspeed.”

• What if your only option for food is pizza, but you’re allergic to cheese? You’d die of not eating pizza!

What if your only option is dating a guy, but you’re a total lesbo? You’d be stuck trying to find a guy with no body hair and a high-pitched voice!

What if your only option is calling them “in-line skates,” but you want to call them “rollerblades?” You’d be sh*t out of luck!

• No options means no freedom. Lack of choice is slavery on a philosophical and spiritual level. It is being shackled to your fate. The scariest part is this may be our actual reality. I consider this to be one of the creepiest and most depressing bullet points of this entire blog.

• Without options, there could be no swinger parties. For many married people, this is the only thrill they have in life. (If HBO's Real Sex series is accurate, most swingers are not particularly attractive. Just sayin.)

Total Pros: 4

Cons:

• So many lives would be saved if there were only one wire to cut on a bomb.

By extension, if a villain made an evil clone of your partner and the two identical men stood in front of you and you had to shoot one, you wouldn’t have to agonize over it. You have to shoot the one on the left. Whether or not that was actually the evil clone is beside the point; it was a coin toss either way.

• Making decisions sometimes means having to draw up decision trees at work. This is one of the most boring tasks ever invented. It’s so boring I sometimes look at actual trees and grimace.

• Relationships would be so much happier if people didn’t have the option to cheat. You would never think to yourself, “Am I with the right person?” because there wouldn’t be any other person for you. You would just be happy that you were chosen to have a mate.

And if you were single, you wouldn’t ever think, “I wonder if I’d be happier if I were with someone.” That wouldn’t be an option, because there’d be no options. Instead, you’d think to yourself, “It’s cool that I can bang other single people whenever I want, and I don’t have to buy jewelry for someone three times a year.”

• Without options, conservatives would not be able to use the ludicrous argument that a person can choose to be gay.

• Multiple choice tests would be really easy because they would be single choice tests. The answer is always A! I could become an airline pilot, assuming there's only a written single choice test!

Total Cons: 5

So, 4 Pros, 5 Cons. Doesn’t matter. I am not going to be a philosophical and spiritual slave! Options forever and ever and ever!

‘Til next time, Ciao!

Dave T

P.S. I’ve decided to end the Pros and Cons blog at 30 entries. This is entry 29.