As I was walking through town today a woman with a clipboard resolutely ignored my lack of eye contact with her and asked me if I could answer three questions. I thought that actually three questions would be OK, so I agreed. She asked me "If I could do any job, what would I do?" (she sneaked in a supplementary question by then asking "Is that what you do now?"), "What would you most like to change about yourself?" and "If you could own anything in the world, what would you like?". Now call me weird, but this last one really stumped me. There I lots of things that I see in shops that I think I'd like to own, like books or DVDs or some clothes, and sometimes I see a sports car and think "I want one of those", but when it comes down to it there's nothing that I really desperately want, certainly not in a "more than anything else in the world" sense. The way she phrased the question kind of excluded metaphysical answers like "What I want most is world peace" or "God's Kingdom to come", and I ended up walking away feeling slightly odd about my lack of participation in the consumerist ethos.
Mind you, I'm having an introspective and unsettled day anyway. Maybe if she'd caught me at a different time I wouldn't have given it a second thought.
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