Just like when my dad reads an entire karaoke notebook cover to cover to find the song he wants

Are you sitting down? You might want to in preparation for what I’m about to tell you. Internets, I actually miss the nablopomo challenge. Yep. I said it. Even after posts like this, this, or this, there’s something about the regular posting that was comforting to me.

I made this admission to AP earlier this week—let it be known that I also would grumble to her on multiple occasions during the challenge because sometimes I just didn’t know what to write about. She gave me the same advice this week as she did when I would whine: I don’t need to put so much pressure on myself to come up with the wittiest topic. Just write. And it’s true, sometimes the forced wittiness backfires and the real witty finds its way out organically when I least expect it.

When I reflect back on that advice, I think it’s something that could be more broadly applied to my life than just in rambling on my blog. Take for instance EVERYTHING I DO. This may come as a surprise to you, but I can tend to be a little on the intense and serious side of things when it comes to EVERYTHING I DO. I know, right? I hope you all were still sitting down for that shocker. But seriously, a few weeks ago I ran a program at work and had a group of volunteers help out with the delivery. To show them my gratitude, I put together little gifts of gourmet salted chocolates and fancy hand soaps accompanied with a little note: You’re sweet to get your hands dirty with us! Totally adorable, right? And picking out the perfectly right soaps was the absolute most critically important thing I could ever do in my life, well in that moment anyway. Perfectly right meant that each soap was different, and in order to pick out the perfectly right ones it required me to smell every single offering the small store had to offer. This might actually be a bad example, because I deeply enjoyed the meticulous rigor to which I took to those soaps. But it is a good example in that some people who aren’t me might have walked into that same store and picked out the first bottle of soap they saw and grabbed six of them without—horror of all horrors—smelling it at all. True, they would have not spent the 45 minutes in the store that I did, but I made sure that each of those soaps were darn good smelling soaps. And they were perfectly right. And it made me perfectly happy.

I’ve always been that way, about almost everything. Control freak? Maybe, but I think it’s more about wanting to ensure I do, or choose, or say, or make, or whatever the perfectly right thing. And hey, Commish, I think this totally explains why I’m dragging my feet on jumping on the self-serve frozen yogurt train (well, this and the fact that I don’t really like frozen yogurt): too many options. Multiple flavors of fro-yo, that I dispense myself meaning I get to choose just how much I want and then an entire wall of toppings—candy, fruit, baked goods, syrups, even cereal. It’s just too much. The stress of finding perfectly right is overwhelming. First you have to pick out the perfectly right flavor—or flavors—of fro-yo, then the perfectly right toppings—really the combination of toppings—and don’t even get me started on the ratio of yogurt to toppings. And some people, who are not me, probably LOVE the freedom to make whatever they want. As for me, I’d prefer to have a minimal number of options—options that are already defined and appropriately rationed by a trained professional (or in their absence a high-school student making minimum wage)—so that I just have to make one decision.

This also explains why I tend to order the same things at restaurants. If the menu is a tome, and if I’ve been there before and I’ve had something I liked, something that’s perfectly okay, then I’ll just stick with it.  When there are too many options, my brain gets dangerously close to exploding. Note to self: when facing the struggle between perfectly okay and brain explosion, perfectly okay is perfectly right.

Oh.

Could this also explain why I might still be single? Maybe that’s some food for thought, but don’t forget that I like, nay love, smelling all the soap. And when we’re talking about “as long as we both shall live,” being perfectly right is the only way I'd like to be.