Questions from here

1. If happiness was the national currency, what kind of work would make you rich?

This feels like a bit of a trick question. Because my answer is exactly the work I’m doing now. I love teaching music. I love watching a kid’s face light up when he/she gets it. I love the laughter and giggling that accompanies each and every lesson. I love knowing that I’m spreading one of my greatest joys to the rest of the world.

2. Are you doing what you believe in, or are you settling for what you are doing?

I don’t believe in settling. Life is too short and grand to settle for anything less than what I believe in. I sometimes think that somewhere along the way that the pursuit of happyness got changed to keeping up with the Joneses and we forgot that life should be enjoyed. If we’d worry about money a little less and about enjoying life a little more I think we might find that it would take less money to make us happy.

3. If the average human life span was 40 years, how would you live your life differently?

I don’t think I would. I would hope that we wouldn’t, as a society, spend over half of it in education. And yet, we can see historically that we didn’t. Teen marriages, lots of kids, way less education. These were born out of a shorter life span. If you were to tell me today that I had less than 14 years left of life though, I would keep living it exactly as I do now. To the fullest with the man I love.

4. To what degree have you actually controlled the course your life has taken?

Define control. I chose what college to go to and what subject to major in. At the end of grad school I chose what city and which friends to move in with when I couldn’t afford a place of my own. That choice and my inability to back out of plans with friends, is what led me to meeting B. And from there, I haven’t controlled a damn thing. That belonged solely in the realm of love and now the USAF. They control everything.

In all seriousness though, life is a series of choices and happenstances that lead to more choices and happenstances. But I made the choice to go dancing that night. It was happenstance that we met, right? Or was it not. B had only ended his long term, long distance relationship the weekend before. Happenstance or choices? B made the choice to text me the next day. We both knew he had less than a month in town. We were both just looking for a positive dating experience to kind of blow off the last bad relationship we’d each had. Neither one of us was looking for long distance or love. But was it happenstance or choice that we met? Honestly? I don’t care. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me, even if that means not having near as much control over my life as I did before.

5. Are you more worried about doing things right, or doing the right things?

Well, while I am one of those weird control freaks who has her dvd shelf organized alphabetically within genre, and her bookshelf alphabetically by author; I’d much rather do the right things than worry about doing things right. I guess I feel that there is leeway in how exactly to define something being done “right” and less so in what is actually right. Not that I really worry about either.

Anecdotally, when B and I moved in with each other before we were married it wasn’t the “right way” of doing things. Especially to my conservative Protestant parents and his conservative Catholic parents. When we got married ten days after getting engaged, at a court house with no one there but our witnesses, that wasn’t the “right way” to do it. And yet, it was the right decision to make both times.

~The Countess~