As I'm sure anyone using Blogger as a platform knows, the "Extended Info" portion of your profile offers several questions that, while not vital to one's function as a blogger, nonetheless bear some relevancy. What are your favourite books? Movies? Music? Good things to tell the internet, right? Actual, conversation starter-ish things!
Imagine, then, my bemusement upon discovering that beneath those lurks the answer to a mystery which has plagued me since precisely never. Namely, what happens when the oh-so-hilariously-out of the blue mainstay of tenth grade humour, "don't make me release the flying monkeys!", grows up and gets a job. Fool that I am, what little thought I'd paid the question assumed that it went quietly to its grave along with Hot Topic pants and the deep-seated conviction that you're always right.
Newsflash: you aren't. Especially if you're me. Especially if you're me, and thence were, until this very morning, blithely certain that people - mature, adult people! People who design major blogging platforms! - outgrow the "randomness is hilarious" delusion.
There it lurks, at the bottom of Extended Info, the box labeled "Random Question." A side note tells you you must save your profile to get a new question (you'd think they'd have some sort of widget to let it know if you haven't had any question before, and adjust the wording accordingly, perhaps with disproportionate excitement,) and you have to click a little check-box underneath, before saving, to tell it that you really do want to generate a new question. Or a first question, as the case may be. They make you work for your arbitrary nonsense.
Being a responsible, grown human being who practices what he preaches, I thenceforward ignored "Random Question" and its attendant little clicky-box. Of course. Because (of course) I'm above the universal human compulsion to click on little clicky-boxes.
HAH.
HAHAHAHAHA.
Hah.
Nope.
I clicked the clicky-box, saved my profile, and, stomach aflutter with flocks of severely inconvenienced butterflies, scrolled down to Random Question. Morbid curiosity is a force to be reckoned with.
The first question lived right down to expectatons. Behold:
"What would you name your ballet inspired by the sight of children leaping through a garden sprinkler?"
What would I name my wait what? Inspired by...huh? Is ballet-writing a trendy hobby right now? How did I miss this? Why didn't anyone tell me!? And...children leaping through a garden sprinkler? Last I'd checked (which, admittedly, was not a recent occurence) ballets usually found their basis in folklore, not daily suburban life. Should my next ballet draw its creative force from the graceful arc of severed grass away from the weed-whacker's string? How do I go about writing a ballet? Is "write" even the correct term? Heaven help me, I'm lost!
Okay. Next question! Three cheers for intellectual masochism!
"All of the phone numbers have fallen out of your address book. Whose number do you look for first and why?"
Not so bad, I thought, at first blush. Unlike the previous, the answer to this could actually tell the reader something about my life, my priorities, how I make my decisions - kind of gimmicky, sure, but I can work with that, or at least I could if my literalist tendencies hadn't tripped over "fallen out of your address book" and landed facefirst in a cackling heap on the floor.
Could it be that Blogger's designers are actually from the past? Well, I mean, we're all from the past, but you know what I'm aiming for here! Maybe they woke up the morning before engineering the Extended Info section in 1998, and upon stumbling out of their morning shower were shocked to find themselves in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Then, valiantly overcoming their intial terror and confusion, they sat down to work.
Let's go with that. It's certainly far more credible and sympathetic than the theory that professional web designers think the phone numbers are capable of falling out of your cell phone. I keep imagining that; you go to dial your cell phone, you pick it up, you unlock it, and you open your address book when suddenly, horror of horrors, numbers cascade out in a chaos of loose digits, leaving your social and professional life in shambles. To add insult to injury, you have to spend twenty minutes vacuuming up all the little loose sevens and threes and so on. The dustpan just never suffices.
You might think, at this point, that I'd give up, but no, not I - I am a valiant, perseverent soul, determined to find the best in the world. Well, no. Mostly I'm just stubborn, and don't like even numbers, so of course I gave it a third and final try.
"When you've got water stuck in your ear, how do you get it out?"
What? Who asks that? Who wonders that? It's not that it's a gross question (though it is, if only very slightly.) It's not that it's a personal question (once more, it is, but to a mind-bogglingly insignificant degree.) It's just that it's the most inane, humdrum, pointless question I could imagine.
Scratch that. I couldn't imagine that. If required to compile a list of random questions to ask a total stranger, with the stipulation that they be completely unrelated to anything that might possibly spark a conversation, I still wouldn't think to ask how they get water out of their ear. However, I can think of a purpose for it; if anyone ever asks you to provide a definitive example of "irrelevancy," trot out that question.
Thank you, Random Question function! I knew I'd find a use for you.
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