Hard Choices

Paula Poundstone (NPR, "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell me") was talking about hard choices....like the, shall we say hypothetical? dilemma of choosing between two equally unthinkable presidential candidates, let's call them Crump and Trooz. "What if you HAD to choose one of them?" someone on the show asked someone else on the show....

Paula and her sister, when they were little, spent hours poring over the big thick Sears catalog.  They played a game together that I used to play by myself: "If you had to choose one thing on each page, what would it be?"  They'd go for pages like that, always able to pick something.

Then, at the tender ages they must have been, they came across the embarrassing pages of men's underwear. "EUYOOOO!" they said, in unison.  They looked closely, then they looked at each other, mystified or mortified or both,  and finally one of them would say, "Yeah, but if you HAD to choose....?"

My mother remembers when the Sears catalog was toilet paper in the outhouse.  Maybe that's where we should put some of our choice sources today?

Our younger Sears Catalog selves would have been amazed at the infinite choices our present selves have to make, what with the Internet and all.  Lately, I've found myself perusing ETSY a lot--a site of handmade items from all over the world, everything from mosaic art pieces to quilts to jewelry and more.  I usually fall asleep without ordering anything, but I'm inspired by all the creative objects people make.

I'm also a recent convert to Facebook.  I've had a sleeping account for a while, but I've taken to perusing Facebook and looking at and re-posting videos I find on my friends' pages.  There's one of a mother and her quadruplet sons, tiny babies on the bed with her, all laughing such contagious laughs you want to watch it over and over.

Maybe when we get too mired in political hard choices, we should just watch babies laughing!