20 Questions - 1

Hi, I'm back-ish.  Everything's fine - I've been occupied with a little bit of work, a little bit of personal, a little bit of miscellaneous, but nothing crisis-like or even particularly unpleasant.  (Alana: Thanks for the greetings and concern!)

Anyhow, Wende's request for 20 Questions has been fulfilled, and we're answering in sets of five.  For simplicity, I've chosen to write my answers before reading the ones already posted by others.

Lauralynne
Would you rather eat Reese's Cups or Peppermint Patties?
Peppermint Patties.  I'm rather picky about what can adulterate my chocolate, and coffee and mint are the only flavors that get full permissions.  Reese's Cups are fine, but they're pretty much the only concession I'll make to peanut butter.

Would you rather never listen to music again or lose your TV?
Lose the TV.  I do watch it but it wouldn't be a very significant loss.

If you could visit any one time period in history, when would it be?
I really don't know.  Most periods in history suffer from the absence of indoor plumbing (and attendant advances in basic sanitation).  And, as hard as it is to spend time somewhere without indoor plumbing, imagine how much worse it would be if nobody else in the world had even heard of such a thing.  If there's one thing that we inhabitants of the modern west are accustomed to, it's not being able to smell each other.

Also, it's hard to make that sort of judgment on the basis of distilled history.  No matter how many exciting things happened during a given stretch of time, you have to remember that pretty much every day for pretty much every person was pretty mundane.

Plus, I've always thought that answers to this question tend to betray an idealized conception of the period under discussion.  And it would be totally humiliating to discover you'd gone all the way back in time in search of a fantasy.

If I try very hard to ignore all of that and pretend I have an ounce of romanticism in my being, I guess I'd go for the U.S. in the postwar period, because I'd really like to see whether or not everyone was really as earnest as we portray them.

Would you rather die peacefully, but unexpectedly in your sleep at age 60 or die at 90 after suffering for years from disease?
I know this will sound grim to people, but let's say 60.  Suffering is unpleasant, and, after allowing for all the necessary theological issues, it doesn't seem to me as though a person could really mind having died once it's happened.

Not that I'd like it if my parents felt that way.


Lynn
Do you think that questions such as "what's your favourite colour/ice cream/album of all time" help you get to know another person?

By themselves, no, of course not.  In fact, they're completely useless things to know about someone about whom you know nothing else.  But they can be both pleasant and useful things to know about anyone with whom you have an actual relationship at any level.  And perhaps the actual conversation and interactions that result in gaining the trivial knowledge have some relational purpose beyond conveying unimportant information.