A Year In Pictures Following The Break-Up

I was recently reading my co-worker Mary's blog and noticed she ended an entry with the words, "My life is perfect." That sentence really struck me as a bold statement and something I could never imagine myself writing. Not that my life is bad, or even, frankly, that I think my life isn't as good as Mary's, just that a claim like that seems to be tempting fate a bit. It's the kind of thing someone would say in a movie trailer right before everything goes into slow motion, fades to black and is followed by the sound of something horrible in the dark.

Then again, Mary ended a different entry with "The shawl is perfect" and maybe I just have a problem with the whole concept. I remember playing a party game years ago where people would answer questions about themselves and everyone else would try to guess how they perceived themselves.

One of the questions was, "How good of a listener are you on a scale of 1 to 10?"

I considered the person who got this question a very good listener so I gave them an 8. Their answer: I'm a 10.

This blew my mind. A 10? What kind of maniac ranks himself as a 10 for anything? Is 10 even an attainable number? Most of all, if you consider yourself a perfect listener, you're probably not a good listener at all.

I know that this is really my own hang-up, and not necessarily a flaw in Mary's thinking or Listener 10 (although... 10?! that's clearly nuts, right?). Truth be told, perfection frightens me.

That said, my life is going pretty well. I'd give it an 8.

# posted by Arnie : 12:24 PM