Where art thou B.O.B?
Everyone has a curly question up their sleeve. You know, those lateral brain-teaser/IQ questions. "There's a scale, 12 eggs, some are bad, some are good..." or "Using only two lines, divide a.... " Generally speaking I hate hearing those questions. Sure I feel great if I can get the answer, but most of the time all it does is gnaw my brain as I go into problem-solving overtime. Usually it doesn't take me very long before I let out a huge sigh and demand for the answer.I always want to know the answer.
It drives me completely up the wall when I know a problem and I don't know the answer. Like when the person who's asked the IQ question won't tell me, or says him/herself that he/she doesn't know. Or like now when I'm doing the past papers in preparation for my exams. They're all photocopied, passed down from one year to the next; thus many of them are answerless, as lazy people forget to photocopy the answers at the back of the stack to save them a few cents. So here I am, wondering if 1-2-3, 1-3, 2-4, 4 only, or all of them are correct (stupid K-code) and frantically looking through every single one of my textbooks in order to establish the correct answer with certainty.
At least with IQ questions and even clinical MCQs, there is ultimately an answer. If I dig hard enough, ask enough people, look through enough textbooks, I will finally know. There is such a cathartic sense of relief and calm from knowing the answer. Knowing that I am wrong is still a million times better than not knowing if I'm right or wrong.
But some things don't come with an answer. My tutor used to say when I wanted to know the answer of a 4u question, "Ask Bob". I'd go, "Who's Bob?" and he would go "Back of book... B.O.B! Hahaha" (to which I'd roll my eyes a lot). But sometimes Bob is nowhere to be found. It could be right, it could be wrong, it's all "contextual" (I hate that word). Ask 10 people and get 10 different answers. I don't know what's worse -- talking to myself and going looney in the process, or talking to other people and getting potential answers that I never even fathomed, thus leaving me with even more question marks than before.
I know I know, life is not black and white, it's all different shades of grey (and other miscellanous well-trodden cliches). That's what makes life a journey (okay I'll stop with the cliches here before I make you all sick). But interesting is also insanity-inducing.
And damnit, I just want to know.
posted by me. @ 10:34 AM
2 Comments:
hahaha... i so know what you mean... those twisted metal puzzle things are annoying too!! Especially when, after hours of finger-numbing articulation frustration, you still can't the two nails apart or whatever... grrr...
"finger-numbing articulation frustration?" i'd say that's pretty top-notch verbal acrobatics wouldn't you? =Þ
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