Conflicting Values Can Be Amusing
On my old friend Chad’s blog I find a funny story from his wife, Tina, about some of the “home buyer” shows she’s seen on HGTV:
The wishes kill me…
- I want to live in the city, but I do not want the noise, I want to be away from the traffic.
- I want to live in the country, but do not want a big yard.
- I want to live in the suburbs, but I do not want to live close to other people
It cracks me up, too, Tina. I used to do something similar with the Personals ads in newspapers. (It isn’t as much fun on Web-based Personals sites because people have a lot of “room” to write. They get pretty elaborate about their conflicting desires. Newspaper ads were fun because they were terse.)
I guess people are taught to think in terms of black-and-white, on-and-off, digital and not analog. This is important to me, they think, so I have to have it. Weird.
Maybe we should have some sort of adulthood ritual, like “primitive” cultures do.