Amy Adoyzie

Would Rather

From Razorcake #61, originally published March 2011.

Children, by the very nature of being children, have infinite amount of time ponder completely non-essential questions. They have the leisure to thoughtfully consider the great questions that have pestered people-kind for years upon years. These are the would you rather quandaries that have enflamed schoolyard disputes and blacktop banter.
If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, would you rather eat ice cream or pizza?

If you could only marry one of the Chipmunks, would you rather marry Alvin, Simon or Theodore?
If you had to had to switch your fingers and toes, would you rather have your fingers instead of toes (and still have your normal hand-fingers) or toes instead of fingers (and still have normal feet-toes)?

Unfortunately, children, by the vary nature of being children, lack the weight of experience that comes from decades of living—of waking up everyday for more years than you can count on your fingers (or toes) and trying to figure out what you were waking up for. Though they have the time to think through these questions, they are unable to fully grasp the implications of their decisions because they are still at an age where a game like tag is a valid form of interaction.

It’s obvious to us now, as adults—as world-wearied creatures with skin that loses elasticity everyday the sun beats down on us, what all of the correct choices are.
Pizza. Pizza is as delicious out-of-the-fridge-cold as it is straight from the oven. Pizza contains more food groups than ice cream. Pizza is also much more portable, wrapped in a piece of aluminum foil or a flat cardboard box, for those of us who are constantly on-the-go and can only eat one thing for the rest of our lives.

Simon. Although Alvin might seem like the obvious choice to marry because of his unabashed confidence, disarming chipmunk handsomeness, non-threatening mischievousness and he’s the lead in the band—but he is more of a casual fuck-buddy type of friend than marriage material. (Please don’t judge me for referring to a cartoon chipmunk as a fuck-buddy possibility, as if this is out the realm of your imagination and you’ve never though about making out with The Little Mermaid.) Simon’s a total geek, with his coke-bottle glasses and unassuming wit. He’s the one that’s going to be the founder of something like Facetweet and be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. He will start a foundation that trains young women from developing nations to become green engineers and win eight simeaultanous Nobel Peace Prizes and a trip to the moon, plus one.

Fingers instead of toes (and still have your normal hand-fingers).With this mutant disfiguration, one can conceivably change the dynamics and physicality of competitive gymnastics. Imagine the insane amounts of flipping, contortiony things that can be accomplished on the double bars or balance beam if the gymnast had fingers on their toes! The only negative I can think of is in the difficulty of purchasing shoes, as we are a majority feet-toes world—but that’s a small price to pay to be a multi-gold medaled Olympian.

Amidst the cacophony of nonsense and logic that goes behind discovering the right answer to the would you rathers, there was always one that I found to be unanswerable: would you rather be deaf or blind? Of the five senses that children learned that they are capable of sensing, the ability to see and hear were the most obvious to choose between. Smelling, tasting and touching were secondary to watching and listening to TV.

I was a teenager the last time I had seriously considered this. Teenagers, by the very nature of being teenagers, operate on binary: black or white, prep or punk, brooding angst or naïve joy, horny or bored. Normally, it was easy to choose between either/or, but I was in high school and felt like I was discovering lost artifacts when I listened to a band or read a zine for the first time. I could not choose between sight and sound—I was adamant about keeping both those senses intact. I was done with the would you rathers when I faced the fallacy of a game where the choices were both equally uncool and somewhat plausible. The options aren’t fun to choose between if they aren’t absurd, semi-fantastical situations—the lost of vision and hearing wounds mortals everyday. And isn’t it a privilege to have the choice of which sense we would begrudgingly allow to degrade as part of a game with a sole purpose to kill time and not necessarily answer tough questions about the human condition?

A couple weeks ago I was walking Jack around the neighborhood, it was late evening and I peered into every lit window as Jack pissed on every other shrub we passed. I watched him skip ahead of me, his small white body bouncing while his four lean legs fluttered beneath him. I looked up at the sky and found familiar constellations and a bright moon beaming down on rooftops and tall trees. And suddenly, without any prompting, a flood of visuals wound its way through my brain.

My mother’s face when I surprised her on Mother’s Day last year by showing up at the dim sum restaurant a thousand miles away from my apartment. The Tibetan grassland plains with low rolling hills of lush green, an ocean blue sky and the kinds of large downy white clouds we drew as children, around in 360 degrees for as far as the eye could make out existence. The way DanE’s hazel eyes become more emerald when he wears green t-shirts.

I thought about how we can’t hear smiles or the ridiculous faces we made during inappropriate times. I thought about Cindy Sherman, Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” and David Hockney. I thought about Mimi Nguyen’s “Evolution of a Race Riot” and every other zine I had ever read. I thought about books and the way type floated on its pages, how stoic text can turn my imagination loose.
And it was while walking Jack when I realized that—if I would rather—I choose sight. This may be an unpopular sentiment amongst Razorcake readers, and yes I would miss music and the way it can say things through words sung out loud that we are otherwise incapable of expressing. I would miss the sound of laughter, the power of a hearty rally cry and dancing my face off.
It isn’t often that I am reminded of and revisit childhood questions, but when this epiphany struck me, it felt definitive. It felt satisfying, as if I had wizened with age and was now capable of answering tough questions. But it makes me wonder whether I really choose sight, or if its just the act of choosing that I needed. That all these years of waking up every morning, and occasionally questioning why I was waking up every morning, had a purpose to it. So that one day I can wake up and be definitive about something—know something as completely as I could possibly know it.
Or maybe I chose sight because I’d really love to see a foot-fingered gymnast kill on the balance beam one day.

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