Open Questions

Here's some stuff that's been zinging around in my head lately. It's all things I wonder about, and unfortunately they're all the sort of inquiries Google's little help with.

1. What will be different for us because Veda's a girl? So far the main distinction I've noticed is that Penny seems positively gigantic. Seriously, after giving little V a bath and putting her to bed, one look at a pythonic Lope leg or arm sticking out from under the covers is enough to make me do a doubletake.

Preliminary Guess: I'll be more protective of her than I would if she were, say, Victor instead of Veda, but I'll probably, and ironically, end up urging her into sports and leadership and other "boy" activities more rigorously than I would if she were an actual fella.

2. Do some people inherently find a career and stick with it and like it indefinitely, while others tend toward cycles of fascination, immersion, mastery and restlessness? Is it that the F.I.M.R.s just haven't found the right career for them yet? Or are they just innately restless?

Preliminary Guess: Some folks *are* innately restless, and it may be something you can overcome, or alternately that you can parlay into a strength, like Steve Jobs. Or perhaps the true task is just to find new ways to challenge yourself in whatever career you're in, speaking of Mr. Jobs...

3. In ten years, what will I regret most about how we're living circa 2009?

Preliminary Guesses: Not traveling enough, not visiting friends enough, not leaving the house enough, not taking up heroin (just checking to see if you're still reading)

4. Will we ever again get enough sleep?

5. When my radically conservative relatives forward me emails about the sky falling and the president converting us into a Socialist republic, are they envisioning, like, Russia? Or is it something more like Sweden, where the standard of living is actually higher than ours? OR, are they just being, well, conservative, and resisting the idea of our society changing at all?

Postscript Subquestion: Is it true what the radio guy said this afternoon, and that the European models of nationalized health care and fiscal oversight won't work for the United States because Europe is a declining society and ours is still growing?

6. What does it do to my life to have it be sort of an "open book," as it were? Between this site and Flickr and Facebook (and Google, come to think of it), pretty much anybody could find out more about how I and my family are living than I know about some of my closest friends. It's become this way over a course of several years, and I never gave it much thought or conscious decision, so I'm suddenly mildly concerned what the effects are/will be.

Preliminary Guess: It's no biggie, just a handy way to chronicle what happens in this life we're leading, and makes it easier for friends and relatives to keep tabs on us. Still, someday I imagine I'll run into an old classmate or someone I've not spoken to in years, and they'll say something mildly offputting like, "Hey! You cut your hair!"

7. And what about all those pictures I take? Do they enrich life or distract from it? Would a cherished handful of family portraits actually mean more to me than the 100 gigabytes of pixels stashed on the hard drive downstairs? Goodness knows I'd probably look at them more often...

Preliminary Guess: The only pictures that will endure and ever get viewed, beyond a half-hearted flip-through several years down the road (when I'll likely have to cobble together some wires and vacuum tubes to even view the archaic "Jpeg" format on some moldering antique firewire disks) will be the ones I've posted here or on Flickr, or the Holga pics.

8. What's the best way to raise a strong, good person and answer your kid's inevitable Big Questions if you don't want to tell them the same stuff you heard in church as a kid?

Preliminary Guess: I got nothing here, people. But I'm working on it.

8. Do all people secretly wonder about stuff like this, or are some folks just blessedly, blissfully simple-minded? If so, where do I sign up to be in that category?

BONUS QUESTION
(For our older readers) Which came out first - Neil Diamond's 1972 hit "Song Sung Blue" or the anti-dandruff shampoo "Selsun Blue"? I'd really like to know, and the internet is mum on this matter so far. Veda and I looked into the matter already.