thisiswhatyoushalldo

1. Do you prefer to be the driver or passenger?
I don’t know if I have a hard fast rule on this. driving is great and for longer trips, I certainly enjoy some time behind the wheel. But it is kind of nice to just surrender all responsibility and hand the keys over to someone else and let them haul your ass around.

2. When you drive somewhere, do you prefer to take the long way or quickest route?
Work and errands, quickest route. Longer trips, I often prefer the longer scenic route.

3. Do you have road rage?
I used to but lately, I would say over the past couple ofyears, I no longer get in a hurry on the road. And as a result, the road rage passes. Take you time getting there eases up most of the competitive anger that driving the roads can bring out.

4. What is the longest road trip you have taken?
From Stuttgart, Germany to London, England.

5. What would your reaction be if you were driving and saw an animal run into the road?
Squeeze them brakes! Having had my customary Western Colorado run in with a deer, I am not keen on a reenactment.

1. If you owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?
I have this cookbook, called th Well-Filled Tortilla. It is based on these two ladies who have a restaurant in Berkely or someplace real California-ish. In this cookbook they offer tons and tons and tons of things to wrap up and smother inside a tortilla. Not your mama’s Mexican joint, this place offers Greek food, Indian food, All American stews. From ground beef to pate. I always thought it would be cool to open up a joint like that near some college town. If not that, a new trend is the cereal buffet parlors creeping up in college towns as well. How hard could an all you can eat breakfast buffet be as a business model?
2. If you owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?
A used book store. Man, I would be in hog heavan.
3. If you wrote a book, what genre would it be?
A mystery crime novel. I am tryng, rather painfully to write a non-cliche ridden crime novel as we speak. It shoudl be done when I am about 84-years old.
4. If you ran a school, what would you teach?
English. English grammar, writing and maybe some literature on the side.
5. If you recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?
Acoustic-steel guitar blues renditions of 1970s and 1980s punk and new-wave hits.

1. What was your high school stereotype, what group did you hang with?
I guess, if I had to define a group, in a high school of about 800 people, it would be band geek. Either that or speech and debate geek. I was not running with the wolves

2. If you could be one Disney character, what character would you be?
I have always identified with the so very dapper Jiminy Cricket.

3. Ever think about your own death? How do you suppose you will go? (This sounds like I am particularly fragile and depressed today! I am not, put the suicide hotline phone down.)
Hmmm. I think I want to go quickly, certainly and barring some bizarre unforeseen accident, I want to live into my 90s and beyond. I can’t wait to see what this centruy brings us. I don’t want to die with a warm beer and the remote control in my hand, this much I know.

4. Are you a Democrat? A Republican? A Libertarian? Green? Why?
I am registered as a Democrat. I think mainly because I am genuinely concerned about the other guy. My ‘defect’ of empathy and a sense of fair play feels more at home in the Democratic party’s philosophy rather than the ‘I got mine” mindest that I feel when confronting Republicans or Libertarians.

5. Do you feel like you look your age, or do you feel older or younger?
I feel I look younger than my age. Gray hair, yes. And a pot belly. But few wrinkles. I can still pull of ’35’ in a pinch. .

Thanks in part this week to an email by Thom that spurred this week’s questions.

1. What is your worst/baddest/weirdest roommate story.
My first college roommate, Dan, was such a nerdy, annoying putz. The arrangment only lasted about a semester when he eventually fled. He was an Air Force ROTC dweeb and worked at Target on weekends and had this odd propensity for a. Brining a lot of food – snakcks and soda from target – and cramming them in his closet and then counting them all the time whenever he returned to his room to make sure no ate anything. b. He was a tee-totaller, which in a dorm, in Boulder in 1982 was nearly hypocracy. Our floor mates despised, probably more than me. He would get physically angyr (shaking and sweating) at the smallest crack in his anally retentive protective bubble. I worry that if he stayed with the Air Force and indeed became an officer, his airmen would have killed him in combat. He was that bad. So very much on the edge.

2. How much is too much for a haircut? And how much is too little?
I am a hair cut cheap skate. Hell, I can’t even seem to get organized enough to get to the barber at least once a month. With that said, I woud say I generally pay about $12.00 for a haircut. $6.00 is too little. You will probably find yourself missing some ear.

3. When opening a bag of chips are you careful and precise or do you tear right into it. Are there any left to store for later?
I am fairly precise, opening along the top or using scissors. There are always some left and I end up sealing up the bag for more hot chip action later.

4. Ever take musical instrument lessons as a kid? What did you play? Still remember how? Should we get the band back together, man?
Lessons: The organ (??? Mom? What were you thinking?) In high school and middle school I played the saxaphone. I can still remember some keyboard chords and I think I could still play a basic scale on the sax.

5. What is your most memorable drunken experience?
Two words: Cruise Room – Ed can tell this story perhaps, although he was the drunk one and I was just batting clean up, literally. In the army, the best story was when me and my drunken cohorts (I always seem to travel in packs of drunken cohorts) got our CJ& Jeep stuck in the mud and had to use the phone and ended up crashing a very nice wedding as we wandered, drunk plastered in mud, through the reception to get to a phone on the other side of a lobby of this fancy Stuttgart hotel.