Ryan and I used to have phases of playing a game called "would you rather...". Initially it started as my attempt to get into his then somewhere-around-age-nine mind. He's the kid who'd come home from school and when you asked what went on, the answer was an invariable "nothing", or if you asked what he thought of something, he'd say "I don't know". Stuff that can drive a nosy mother batty. So I started this game to try and make it fun for him to let me continue to stay in touch with him. It was anywhere from simple stuff like "if you could only choose one, would you rather play hockey or ski?" (hockey); golf or baseball? (golf); etc. But I'd throw in more interesting ones too. "If you had to hold hands with a girl, would you rather with Bonita* or Brigita*?" (names have been changed to protect the identity of said girls, and so that my son doesn't die of embarrassment should he ever read this). The game was a great conversation starter.
Which is why, I'm discovering, there are a plethora of commercially-marketed games of this nature that you can buy in a box from a store. I bought a fun-looking adult version of such a game called If You Could Choose or If You Had to Choose (something like that), thinking it might be fun dinner-party material, but it turned out to have some of the dumbest most redundant, repetitive questions I've ever read. And I'm pretty sure it was written by a bunch of stoned sixteen-year-old boys. The odd semi-interesting question is thrown in there, but mostly it's stuff like "...would you rather be fat and extremely wealthy, or fit and extremely poor". "...would you rather be fat and have a gorgeous head of hair, or fit but bald?" "...would you rather be fat and find true love, or be fit and never find your soul mate". They weren't all "fat or fit" questions, but there were at least a dozen such redundant questions for each category of comparison. The first few questions we pulled out of the box were kind of funny, but once you got much further than that, there was too much of "didn't we have that question already?" to make it worth continuing to play.
But tonight having dinner with friends, they pulled out another such game that was, although also possibly written by stoned sixteen-year-old boys, at least more original with its repetitive questions. For example, there were a lot of questions I could categorize under the broad theme of "...would you rather eat this quantity of this bug/animal part or eat this other quantity of some kind of hairball/hair sandwich". But for some reason this one was way funnier. This one was definitely a good game for the child and pre-teen crowd, because there were a lot of "gross" factor questions that are always a hit with that age group. Then again, my friend and I were cracking ourselves up pretty good over some of the questions too, and we are obviously well beyond the pre-teen category. Well maybe my boobs aren't, but the rest of me is.
It sure was fun though, sitting around with the kids and having a laugh-till-you-cry evening of silly, pointless, never-gonna-happen what-if scenarios that grossed us out of our ever-lovin' minds. And I'd rather do that than be "fat but rich" any day of the week. :-)
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