If I Could Be A Good Sport…
Oh, for the love of all things malodorous! This really stinks. Psychotoddler, a swell dude whose blog I read daily, challenged me to one of these chain-reaction blog meme things. Why? ‘Cause some Nobel laureate challenged him. Why? ‘Cause some other rocket scientist… Well, you get the idea. Here’s the challenge. I have to pick five of these “If I could be …” to complete, then I have to challenge three other bloggers to do the same.

If I could be a scientist...If I could be a farmer...If I could be a musician...If I could be a doctor...If I could be a painter...If I could be a gardener...If I could be a missionary...If I could be a chef...If I could be an architect...If I could be a linguist...If I could be a psychologist...If I could be a librarian...If I could be an athlete...If I could be a lawyer...If I could be an inn-keeper...If I could be a professor...If I could be a writer...If I could be a llama-rider...If I could be a bonnie pirate...If I could be an astronaut...If I could be a world famous blogger...If I could be a justice on any one court in the world...If I could be married to any current famous political figure…

I guess I should explain my irritability. I'm sure many would be tickled to be tagged with such a challenge. The thing is, chain letters and emails really bug me. As far as I'm concerned, anything that says "send me along to 4 or 5 other people" is a virus that uses gullible human brains to replicate. I will not contribute to such tomfoolery. In fact, whenever I get emails like that (they're almost always about some outlandish scam) from a friend I usually write back and gently try to chide them into ceasing future chain-email forwarding. (I once totally humiliated myself doing this, but that's a post for another day. b&c makes fun of me to this day for that…)

So why am I even bothering? Well, just 'cause Psychotoddler is such a nice guy, and I don't want to be a total jerk. But I'm making it better by going into it with a horrible attitude.

Now before jumping right into the challenge, let's step back a step or two and think about it a little more generally. One fun thing I noticed is that you can play blog epidemiologist and trace this challenge back pretty far. You can go back half a dozen blogs in just a few minutes and realize how quickly this thing has traveled in a few days, and how by going from acquaintance to acquaintance you very quickly find yourself at blogs of people that you'll never know. Despite the fact that these people are only about 6 degrees of acquaintanceship from me, I found their blogs extraordinarily dull. I suspect they would say the same of mine. I wondered if you actually were doing a paper on this, if you could make a huge "infection tree" showing who challenged whom going way back. Then, maybe you could find the person who started this, Patient Zero, and shoot him.

The other thing that struck me about this was the wording of the sentences. Not "If I was…" but "If I could be…" implying that I'm not because I can't be. That's overly pessimistic, I think. For example, Psychotoddler is a doctor and a musician, and by all accounts is excellent at both. That suggests that he could be many of the other things on the list, but doesn't want to. Ball-and-chain has a Ph.D. in immunology, so she could be a scientist, but is a full-time mom. There are several things on the list that I couldn't be, like an athlete or an astronaut, just because I don't have the physical talent it would take to get through the training, but I have to think that most people could do many of the things on the list. (Extra points for guessing which one of the things I currently am, other than doctor.)

So with that fiendishly long and malignantly dull introduction, I will plunge into the challenges. I may have a little bit to say about each one, so I think I'll give each one its own post, so I can really blither at length. So I'll start now with the shortest. I'll try to do one a day.

If I could be married to any current famous political figure… I would leave her and beg ball-and-chain to take me back. - served up by Doctor Bean @ 10:22 PM