CHOICES

There are many interpretations to the concept of choice. One that is not mentioned in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is that choice often requires a decision to be made. decision: a determination after much consideration. Thus, I began to deliberate on the effects and reasons needed to consider when a choice is made. One must always remember that a decision/choice made should never be followed by the words, "I should have." 'Should have' may be used only in service of avoiding the same wrong choice in the future.

There are few un-ambivalent choices. There is usually a pro and a con to all. When I offer to do someone a favor, involving what I assume is merely a bit of my time, it never fails for that time to expand as soon as I agree. Murphy's law states, "Anything that can happen, will!" If you choose take someone to a doctor for a routine, 'brief appointment', you may quickly learn the doctor was bitten by a patient while examining her throat and is on his way for a tetanus or rabies shot. You are then told appointments are behind by an hour, and all the while you are seated in the only empty seat in the entire waiting room, next to a patient who is sneezing without a hanky, nose dripping, coughing all over the only magazine in the room you might have read. Even though you scheduled a brief trip, time flows into your committed time, on which your entire future depends on your being there on time.

Choice should be given as a course early in life. Wait a minute, it is!
Having, for years, fallen for the line, "This will only take a minute." I have come to know that these people are using a different clock...more like the one Christians use when they claim that the world was created in 8 days. I have chosen to divide my day up to things I have to do and things I'd like to do. Procrastination seems to straddle both. Then the war between the two factions starts. The only carrot that allows me to pay my bills on time (when I can find them) is that paying late fees and service charges equates to flushing my money down the toilet. I do not choose to do that.

Fixing someone's computer generally falls into a category of my choice gone wrong because anyone who would ask me must, by definition, know little about computers, what they are about, and how much time is involved in cleaning them out, updating stuff, and fixing minor problems. These are often the same people who insist they have brown thumbs and plants always die in their house. They somehow fail to understand that plants are living things that need to breathe, drink water, have enough space to live in, seek light as befitting their station in life, and occasionally get some food with the water. Why people insist on putting plants in direct sunlight whose natural habitat is on the floor of the rain forest, escapes me. More bad choices, also known as innocently uniformed. All people who choose to adopt plants should pass a horticultural competency test.

Choices come in two flavors: informed and uniformed. People who choose divorce as a first option to solving a problem seem to prefer the ' jump from the frying pan into the fire' method of problem solving. Those men who are in mid-life crisis and choose to marry a woman of childbearing years, start a new family, also fall in the poorly informed group since no man in that predicament would ever dare to tell another they had made a mistake. It is not a better experience the second time, especially when you overhear grandmothers wishing their husbands would push the little angel grandchildren like that one on a proud stroll.

So you see, we all make choices, some good and others not so good. It would be nice to think that those who chose to vote for Bush have now come to realize it was a bad choice. However, some do not even recognize a bad choice when they make a very obvious one. Apparently denial also makes one think they made a good choice when it was a bad choice. Those into projection make the bad choice YOUR bad choice, though you may not have had any part of it. Voting is a choice that more resembles gambling....but that is another long esssy.