I sometimes imagine that right before the noses, eyes, breasts and biceps are passed out among the born-to-be souls, some God’s assistant, who looks remarkably like Anne of Green Gables, asks: “Which would you rather be: divinely beautiful, dazzlingly clever, or angelically good?”

Tough choice.

I don’t think I would have been granted divine beauty, even if I’d asked for it. All divine beauties have shapely noses, and I’m part Filipino, so the laws of genetics dictate that I have no nose. It’s true. I read a strange little Filipino folk tale once about the giving out of gifts by the creators to the newly created creatures of the earth—wings for the birds, tails for the monkeys, hooves for the bison, etc. According to the tale, the Filipinos were so slow to get in line for the gift of noses that by the time they made it to the front, the only noses they could get were made of soft mud. Hence, the mushy bridgeless noses. I kid you not. I truly wish that I could find that tale online so I could link to it, but I haven’t been able to find even a hint of it on the web.

Now dazzling cleverness is something I might have been able to pull off, if I weren’t such an airhead sometimes. I’ve mentioned before how clever H.E. can be, but half the time his jokes simply fly over my head because I just don’t get them. If I were dazzlingly clever, I would never hear H.E. laughingly tell me, “Why don’t you call 1-800-explain-a-joke?” And if I were dazzlingly clever, I would never forget to post an entry on those days that I’m supposed to. So I think it’s safe to assume that I was not awarded the dazzling cleverness gift right before I was born—which of course happened yesterday.

And I don’t think I would ever have chosen to be angelically good because being angelically good is rather boring. It means never being angry or impatient, never being frustrated, never complaining about or getting exasperated over the incompetence and ignorance of idiotic fools. Angelically good people are always forgiving liars, thieves, and murderers, even when the forgiveness doesn’t do them any good and in fact only encourages the bad behavior, because to the angelically good people everyone else is also angelically good… though they’ll admit that some may have made some merely “bad judgment calls.” Angelically good people also don’t ever eat junk food. Ever. And that’s just a crying shame.

So… being part-Filipina, I can only guess that I was late to the line of gifts and was asked quite another question altogether: “Which would you rather be: passingly cute in a mushy nose way, clever at times while airheaded most of the time, or impatiently whiny for such a goodie-two-shoes?”

I’m still wondering what choice I made.

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