Becky Interviews Me

Becky from Searching for Oz recently put out a challenge for interviewees, and I accepted. Here are her questions for me:

1. Do you believe in the theory that there is only one right person out there for each of us?

I don't believe too much in the "pebbles in the stream" theory, that if a person's life is going on in one direction and if you toss a "pebble" into that stream (even a very large one), their life would keep going on in the same way, seeing little effect from the pebble. Meaning if a man and woman are supposed to be together, they will be. There are any number of possible choices both I or my wife could have made in our youth and college lives that would have meant we'd never meet - it's a very happy set of coincidences: 1) I changed majors at UT, necessitating a 5th year. That's the year we met. 2) She stayed instate for her undergraduate degree (Lambuth University in Jackson, TN) and didn't go somewhere else like Syracuse - who knows who she might've met away from home. 3) She happened to choose UT as a grad school. Not a huge leap as she's from Jackson, TN but still. 4) She decided to join Chamber Singers (of which I was already a member) and also start going to the Wesley Foundation Methodist Student Center (of which I was also a member). 5) Through a strange series of circumstances, I started going to Wesley myself a couple of years earlier. 6) I decided not to go to grad school and stayed in town.

Any one of those details or decisions, had they been different, might've meant we would never have met or necessitated breaking up early. So I don't believe "destiny" takes a special hand.

Now maybe it was God's Plan for us to be together. I believe we each have free will to pick and choose who we want to be with and fall in love with, but who would I be to argue with the possibility God didn't throw some roadblocks or open some doors that might've steered us in the right direction? :)


2. Assuming money were no object, where's the one place in the U.S. that you haven't visited that you would most like to?

I'd say probably Hawaii - interesting answer, since it's former Hawaii resident Becky asking the question. Since all my beach visits have been on the East Coast/Gulf Coast/Caribbean, it'd be interesting to experience an entirely different area of sand and surf. Not that it'd be particular different, it'd just be different for its own sake.


3. What do you and Laura usually do to celebrate your anniversary?

For our 10th anniversary, we took a 10-day Carnival cruise. For our 15th, this October, we're flying down to Orlando and park-hop for a week. Some years, we take family vacations around the anniversary date. Other than that, not a whole lot. It'd be nice to take a weekend every year and just get away but it's not very feasible.


4. Do you have a nickname that you haven't told us about?

Heh. Heh heh. Heh heh heh heh.....

No.

UPDATE: Ok. Just one.

Mad Dog.

That's all I'm gonna say.


5. Do you tend to follow the rules are are you an "ends justifies the means" kind of person?

I am very much a rule-follower in the more ordinary aspects of life. Not so much a rule-follower but a status-quo-keeper.

Case in point: We rented bikes to ride around on while on vacation on Edisto Island in South Carolina. Laura and the kids had already picked theirs up when I arrived late last Monday afternoon, so we drove down to the rental shop to pick up mine, which had already been reserved. I went in to show the guy the receipt and pick up the bike, and he said that they couldn't release any more bikes that day after 4:30 (it was 5pm) and they were all locked up. Knowing we didn't have any particular plans to use the bikes that evening, I shrugged and said okay, we'd pick it up tomorrow morning. When I went back and told Laura we couldn't get it this evening she went back inside and talked the guy into letting us have it. To me, if they set the rules to say they close the bikes up at 4:30, who am I to buck their rules? I can live within other peoples' boundaries. She's not like that, though, and is willing to stand up for what she perceives is not right and fixes them. Sometimes it causes friction but most of the time our two points of view complement each other.