Thoughtful Thursday: Planet

There’s a meeting that I go to once a month with people who work at all different places. There’s one guy at the meetings who looks like he should be in The Octagon rather than a conference table. Very tall, very muscular, shaved head, menacing goatee. Stoic expression all the time.

One day we went around and said our hometowns. He joked, “Earth.” Another member of the meeting said, “I would have guessed the planet Krypton.”

The big guy said, “Actually, it’s more like Vulcan.”

He goes through life looking like an enforcer, when inside he’s really a brainiac.

My husband’s home planet is even harder to identify, because he’s full of complexity. Even when I first met him, I kept encountering more layers in the onion… and he’s gotten more and more interesting in the almost 20 years since. He’s smart and charming and athletic and warm and snarky. So, you’ll never guess the planet right because no one alien race suffices. Anyone first meeting him will get an accurate sense of him, yet they also have no idea how much more there is. Even our own children have no idea about certain facets of his personality. He’s quite chill with them, but every now and then they’ll get a glimpse of the manic whimsy often displays with me and his friends, and they look at him like he actually is an alien.

With me, I think what you see is pretty much what you get. I haven’t read/seen enough sci-fi to have found a planet of beings like me. Let’s call it Planet BabySmiling. For anyone who was familiar with this theoretical planet, they’d be able to peg me as a BabySmilingite instantly. I’m glad there is no such planet though… I don’t think I could handle more than one of me.

Do people get the wrong impression from the image you portray? Or is what you see what you get?