Correlated?

I do this silly online poll thing. It's completely random, but I enjoy it. The website is correlated.org, if you'd like to check it out. The premise is that they ask random questions and then draw correlations between what you've answered in the past and what you've answered to the current poll. The thing is fraught with interesting poll-taking issues, but it's never purported to be anything other than silly random fun.

Take today's poll for example:

In general, 41 percent of people say they'd rather have a flamingo than a giraffe as their wisecracking sidekick in an otherwise realistic movie about their life. But among those who dislike cotton candy, 55 percent would rather have a flamingo. Based on a survey of 111 people who don't like cotton candy and 364 people total.

I mean, yeah. Totally random. But silly and fun...

One of the other things they allow you to do - if you're a geek and have been around for a while doing these polls, like me - is figure out how contrarian you are. That is -your contrarian rank is based on the percentage of people who agree with your responses to poll questions. For each poll question you have answered, we determine the percentage of people who chose the same poll response as you. (The website) then averages those percentages and ranks them from highest (least contrarian) to lowest (most contrarian). I am apparently a little more contrarian than normal, but pretty close to average.

I have been thinking a lot about the chicanes and vicissitudes of life. Life is weird. And it's almost impossibly hard. Some people - perhaps those who are strongest amongst us - choose to isolate themselves in walls of security, emotionally, intellectually, etc. They don't need anyone because needing another causes pain. And pain is, well... painful. Life is painful enough without running the risk of allowing additional pain caused by those who purport to be our friends.

I can understand the desire for such defenses. It can feel very secure inside one's own fortress of solitude.

And yet....

This morning I saw the sun rise. It was glorious and beautiful, full of promise and purity and light. There were a couple of clouds, such as I've never seen except here in Texas, where the cloud was a narrow, vertical column of gray and white, reaching up to the heavens. The top was so high that there was rain falling out of it, rain you could see, all back-lit in hues of rose and gold and yellow, like fire in the sky. These great shafts of cloud, destroying themselves in precipitation even as they were being formed, were beautiful and terrifying at the same time.

And my first desire was to share that. What I was seeing was so beautiful, so glorious and lovely...

So it occurs to me that life is for sharing. I have gained infinitely more through my associations - even the painful ones - than I could have achieved by myself.

I hope I can always find a way to share.

And I hope I can always find someone to share with.