One of the many flaws in my personality is that I am not spontaneous. I confess I am baffled by the entire concept.
First, how do you define spontaneity? Is it even a real thing, or just a superstition? Is spontaneity based on how far in advance you have an idea, or on how irrational the idea is, or some combination of the two?
If I think of doing something a week in advance, I know that’s not spontaneous. A day in advance probably doesn’t count either. I assume an hour isn’t enough. But how about, say, five minutes in advance? Is that still premeditated, or is it getting closer to being spontaneous?
Apparently there is something wrong with my brain, because I have this bad habit of knowing what I want to do before I do it. The phrase you are unlikely to hear from me is, “Why did I just do that?” If I see a cookie that looks tasty, I almost always know it will end up in my mouth before it happens. A truly spontaneous person, assuming such a creature exists, would often say, “What is this in my mouth? How did it get there?”
I have to think a spontaneous life is unsettling, and that’s just considering the stuff you discover in your mouth, to name one orifice.
As you know, you can fake most character traits if you need to. You can fake sincerity, kindness, compassion, optimism, and all sorts of things. But you can’t fake spontaneity. I know because I’ve tried, and it always comes out sounding crazy. I’ll blurt out something like “Let’s walk to Cuba,” and look at my wife to see if I nailed the spontaneous thing. So far, no luck. It’s an elusive concept.
I only know one group of people who are consistently spontaneous, and most of them are already in jail. The rest will follow. Women value spontaneity, so that probably explains why death row inmates get marriage proposals all the time. When you remove the part of a man’s mind that usually says, “Perhaps I should think about this before doing it,” that is pure hotness.
Speaking of hot, my new book, Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey-Brain! is a top five humor book on Amazon, if you subtract the books that are in the wrong category.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/4456/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_b_1_3/103-9776601-4063019 [no longer available]
I wasn’t planning to plug my book in this post, but it just happened. I think you will agree that’s totally hot.