I love to plan. My fiancé finds this trait to be one of the more tedious aspects of my personality. When I plan, I hone in on the most insignificant detail and conjecture about how to turn that detail into a reality. For example, my fiancé is considering going to law school and two of the several law schools on her list are located in New York. I told her that if we go to New York, we can sell my car and keep hers. She drives a mini-cooper and thus reducing the size of our vehicles to fit the urban life style. Of course, New York is one of five cities where she could be going to school, and she hasn’t even taken the LSAT yet. But for some reason my brain thinks of the not the next step but the fifteenth step down the line. Unlike a chess player, who mapped out each step in between, I thought of the fifteenth and zero steps inbetween.
I realize this trait comes from my family. My parents called to talk about our wedding the other day (October is the possible date). As I spoke with my mom about locations, I mentioned that we are thinking about a back yard wedding. She mused about space heaters and how we can use them effectively to heat an outdoor event. My reaction thought went exactly like this, “I don’t know if we are even going to have a backyard wedding yet so I don’t need to think…. oh, this is how my fiancé feels.”
My father, in a separate incident of planning, constructed solid ground work for moving a piano into the back of a trailer. My parents wanted to give the family piano to my brother because he has two daughters and the only grandchildren in the family. However they live in Texas so we needed to figure out how to move said piano across state lines. My father was very proud of operation piano move (he did give my fiancé a complete overview of the plan weeks before the move date). I’m a sure generals feel the same way when they move little plastic tanks over maps.
However, the plan only went as far as the house to the trailer. Once we arrived in Houston, we then had to figure out how to move something that weighed about as much as the cast of The Biggest Loser on day one, through a door large enough for a cat. Which is how my family generally works, we think about details, but only a random selection of them. Thus leaving the rest of details open for comedy to ensue. We eventually found a method to put the piano into my brothers house, my niece took an immediate knack for creating two year old symphonies (bang, bang, chuuung!), and no one lost a limp in the process.
Luckily enough my fiancé is a loving person and understands that my family means well. Should we need space heaters at our wedding, that’s one thing she won’t have to worry about. Leaving her open to plan the important things, like whether or not to hire Martin Short. Which is why I think I should start my own consulting business, Ideas for the Remote Possibilities of Life. People will pay me to think of things they might not think about. Let’s say a customer is having a baby. I will figure out how they could organize their bottles so the child could have Mickey Mondays. Then as a bonus I will plan out the day they will purchase a bike for the child. But my service doesn’t stop there. I will tell them where to buy cheap violins in Portland, Oregon, in case they ever move to Portland and their kid plays violin. People will be so thankful that they have their options open, they will hire a lawyer to send me a thank you letter. The letter will say something about Fraud, which we all know is French for fantastic!
Time Burrito 