Notes from the Doghouse

Sam: Kermit, I have a favor to ask you. I know how you hate to crawl under my house because of the spiders and all, but I have another leaky faucet. Can you come over this weekend? It’s not too big a leak and can wait a few days.

Kermit: Well, my van is making a weird noise and I think it’s about ready to conk out on me. I’ll probably get stranded.

Sam: Why do you have to be so negative all the time? You’re the biggest pessimist I know.

Kermit: I expect bad things to happen because they almost always do. I don’t believe in being so naive that I’m not ready for emergencies.

Sam: But you’re always saying you think something is going to go wrong. Why can’t you be more positive?

Kermit: I’m positive something’s going to go wrong with my van and soon.

Sam: That’s not what I meant.

Kermit: I’d rather be a pessimist that an optimist.

Sam: Why’s that?

Kermit: It’s much more logical. And fun. There’s two things that can happen to both pessimists and optimists: either what they think what will happen does happen or it doesn’t, right?

Sam: Yes.

Kermit: So, a pessimist will be right if a bad thing happens or be pleasantly surprised if a good thing happens, while an optimist will be right if a good thing happens or unpleasantly surprised if a bad thing happens. As for me, I’d rather be right or pleasantly surprised than be right or unpleasantly surprised.

Sam: It sounds correct but something says there’s a flaw to your thinking.

Kermit: Please, go on.

Sam: I don’t know if I can explain it right or not but there was this time my rear patio roof was falling apart and the insurance company said it couldn’t pay for it because the company that built it was no longer in business. Remember?

Kermit: Yes, I do, and if you’d expected something to go wrong it wouldn’t have been a shock to you. You could be smug in the satisfaction that you were right. But as it is, you were really bummed out.

Sam: I was bummed out but kept a positive attitude about it, and the wind came up and blew it off and the house insurance had to pay to have it replaced. Isn’t that a time when being an optimist made me pleasantly surprised?

Kermit: Not at all. You were being hopeful that something good would come of it and it did, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. The surprise came in how it came about, not that something would.

Sam: But I wasn’t being a pessimist, I was being optimistic about the whole thing.

Kermit: You didn’t know how the

SAM ROBISON AND KERMIT HALE
Culture Writers

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