Amy had a work dinner last week and asked me an interesting question when she got home.
"Would you rather be a vampire, a pirate or a merman?"
Apparently it was a question someone threw out during the dinner.
As she works in the financial world, it was easy to predict the majority of her co-workers chose pirate. A pirate, at least in the romanticized views of Hollywood, leads a very exciting life of adventure. Who wouldn't want to chase after gold, drink rum until you can't see straight and socialize with women of ill repute? But pirate life was not what Captain Jack Sparrow (or even Treasure Island) portray it to be.
The fact is, being a pirate was a pretty nasty existence. You were poor. Like, real poor. You did bad things. Like, REAL bad things. (There are stories of pirates torturing governors of cities while his family looked on; and also torturing the family while the governor looked on.) But even if one decided to be a "good" pirate, you were still stealing from others. Maybe you could try to justify it by saying it is just like Robin Hood, but in a different location, but I could retort that it's just like the Taliban, but in a different location. And even if you were the only pirate on the boat who did not pillage and kill, your closest associates WOULD pillage and kill, making you an accessory to their crimes! (I guess if you did not pillage and kill, you could someday have a Gilbert and Sullivan play written about your life as a pirate king, but that would be a long shot.) So being a pirate generally meant you were going to be a bad person, or, at the very least, be associated with very bad people.
Being a vampire would be just as bad, probably worse, than being a pirate. Vampires are, literally, monsters. Piracy, on the other hand, is a merely profession, albeit a pretty nasty profession. Being a vampire may sound appealing (if you're a 14-year-old girl), but living forever really would be depressing. Sure, you could learn to play every single instrument in an orchestra, and learn every language in the world, and read the entire Library of Congress, but every single person you meet will die, even you are not the one to kill them. Not surprising, my wife and the only other female at that dinner chose vampire as their answers.
Me, I did not hesitate to say merman. Unlike the other two, being a merman or mermaid does not come with inherent evil issues (steal, torture, kill, drink blood, glitter in sunlight, etc.). A mer-creature is just another living being. You can choose to be good or bad. A mer-creature is not weighed down with the urge to drink blood, or sworn to burn down an entire seaport. As a merman, I could swim to a my mer-job, make my mer-money, and go home to my mer-family. What's not to like about that?
No comments:
Post a Comment