Boring Story.
This is a long boring story with a profound insight at the end. Bear with me.
So, one time back in high school I was out at a movie with this girl I liked. We were sitting in the theater talking during the ads when, after a particularly awkward pause, she came out with,
“Which celebrity would you most like to sleep with?”
I was literally dumbstruck. Then as now I paid little attention to celebrity culture, and I can honestly say that I was hard pressed to think of anyone at all whom one could plausibly call a celebrity. After what seemed like whole minutes of awkwardness, I finally answered Cheryl Crow – not because I am particularly attracted to her, and certainly not because she’d edged out any close competitors on some mental list of mine, but because that damn “Soak up the Sun” song had been stuck in my head for approximately three weeks.
I hear that’s how she snagged Lance Armstrong.
She, of course, had an answer all ready to go, but it is telling that while I remember what it was, I can’t think of his name. He’s the guy who played Spider Man, and who was in The Cider House Rules. You know the one.
You can imagine how the rest of the evening went.
Fast forward to just the other day, when I was in the grocery store, thinking about something completely different. Apropos of nothing, the correct answer to her question popped into my head:
“Why, you of course, your majesty!” (Followed by a kiss on the cheek or a punch on the arm, depending upon her immediate reaction.)
Now, obviously this would not have gotten me laid, but that’s not the point. The point is that that question has been floating around in my head, unbeknownst to me, for apparently the last seven years. All this time, while my conscious mind was working on other things – high school, college, several jobs – my subconscious was running a tiny background program called “Witty Comeback 1.0” – presumably when it should have been, say, remembering to pay the phone bill, or figuring out how to do calculus.
This was most disturbing. What else is in there, soaking up precious mental RAM? I have no idea, of course, and am not prepared to take the drugs necessary to find out, but the fact that my mind has a mind of its own, so to speak, makes me question myself just a little.
What’s going on in your brain that you’re not aware of? Would you sleep with someone who tried that line? Was “Signs” the worst movie of all time? You may not post a comment, but don’t be surprised if the answer comes to you in spite of yourself, perhaps many years hence.