Some of life's choices aren't as easy as they seem

By Deborah Taylor-Hollis

Growing up means making choices--some good, some bad and a few of which you will never know the outcome. We make the most important ones without a great deal of thought, long before we really know enough.

Take the first choice you ever truly make in your life: chocolate or vanilla. This will profoundly affect everything you do for the rest of your days, and yet you are forced to make this decision when you're barely old enough to think, let alone speak. Chocolate or vanilla is the beginning of decision-making.

Now, we all know that you will have lots of ice cream choices at ice cream places. The infamous chocolate or vanilla choice is probably the only ice cream choice at restaurants that have stars in the Michelin guide, as opposed to on their drive-up window. Chocolate or vanilla is also the "cake choice" most frequently presented, and is like the Mason-Dixon line of desserts.

Yet this most profound of decisions is literally left in the hands of babes. Whatever ice cream you first throw a fit for is the one your family will label you with for several generations. It is guaranteed to be the only decision you mother remembers and abides by throughout your teenage years.

Your next most important choice, and one that will also haunt you long past when you thought you outgrew it, is that of colors.

"What's your favorite color?" is the question every 7-year-old asks his fellow kids. It covers everything from balloon choices and gift bikes through teenage bedroom paint and prom flowers. You pick this color sometime between ages 2 and 5, usually in preschool. Most often it is based upon the ideal that "it's not a boy color" if you are a girl, or "it's not a sissy color" if you are a boy.

The sudden sexism of 4-year-olds propels them into dismissing half of the spectrum of color and usually picking from "their half" of one of the eight basic Crayola colors. The limitations already placed on their entire future, from the color car a man gets to how a woman decorates an apartment, are frequently based on nothing more than idle crayon colors just before naptime.

People are also forced--against their will, at times--into choosing whether they are "dog people" or "cat people" long before they have all the facts. Kids make this choice based on such interesting events as "does mom like to drive with the window rolled down?" and "daddy has allergies to fur but not hair."

By the time a boy is old enough to pedal his bike up and down the backwoods hills he has already been informed that he is a "cat person" and as such will never have Spot running gleefully behind him as in that advertisement.

According to the news as I have seen it lately, cat people tend to speak as though only a cat would understand their statements; apparently like to sit in window seats with flavored coffees; and speak in soft whispers.

Dog people, however, frequently fall in with the outdoor/sporting/physically active folks, who would like to have their dog on the ski lift with them rather than chasing it up the hill below. People with both dogs and cats are either veterinarians or elderly ladies with piles of unread newspapers clogging the hallways of their homes.

Last in the choices-of-childhood vein is that perennial favorite--left side or right side. I am not quite sure how we end up taking sides on this issue, but the fact remains that, by age 18, almost every adult in America has not only a preference, but a vehement need to sleep on one or the other side of a double bed when the opportunity presents itself. It makes for several interesting dilemmas. When considering where the bed will go in any room, you have to take into account where you will get out of it, and face it accordingly. Feng shui does not work if you sleep on the right and that is the wall.

Side sleeping is also the quickest way to get divorce, if you get so far as to marry someone and then find out that he of she likes the same side as you. No two people can sleep on the same side, and "trading off" is useless for a good night's sleep half of the time, so you need to make it clear to potential mates which side of the bed you prefer.

If you are old enough to read this, then you have already committed to these decisions and cannot change your choices. If you have, or know of young people who are grappling with these weighty issues, you might remind them that, no matter how they feel on any of the above, 8-track is wrong, just wrong.

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Deborah Taylor-Hollis: Some of life's choices aren't as easy as they seem

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