dumbest questions to ask someone — a list i drafted at a wedding — 1 brief investigation

tom got married and i drafted dumbest questions to ask someone in the venue bathroom on a paper towel. the doctor was a guest. the supermarket incident came up at the toast, somehow. ignorance, in this case, is financial therapy. tom is not in the room as i write this. tom is married now.

writing this from the desk on a thursday at 11:47am. carla is on the third floor in an annual planning meeting that is rumored to involve donuts, which means a long one.

this is, before we begin, an investigation into what dumb actually is and why it is gentler than people think, in list form, with the wedding venue still ringing softly in the back of my head. tom’s reception was the working room. the paper towel was the working pad. the bartender, when i asked him for a pen, gave me three. apparently i looked like a man who needed three.

i have approximately the rest of the morning. that should be enough. these are my notes, cleaned up, with the dishwasher and the seventh microwave looking on from the kitchen cabinet of memory.

1. dumbest questions to ask someone, the working set

before the list. a frame. the dumbest questions to ask someone are not the questions that show ignorance. ignorance is a fine thing to show. ignorance, in the financial sense, has been a consistent therapy for me — the bank app i refuse to open is my best therapist. no, the dumbest questions to ask someone are the ones whose answers the asker already has. they are filler with a question mark.

i should also note, to be specific about this thread, that i was at the reception alone. tom invited me alone. tom married a woman who knows my name and not much else, which is, by some standards, a kindness. “dumb and dumber”, the 1994 film, was on a television above the bar at the venue, with the sound off. i took it as a sign. i took notes.

the eleven questions follow. each one earned its place by being asked, in my hearing, by an actual person, on the night. some of them by me. i will not specify which.

2. items one through three, drafted at the reception

item one — “is this seat taken?” the seat was clearly empty. the chair had been pulled out. my jacket was on the next chair, not on this one. the asker was a man with a glass of red wine and a name tag that said “groom’s side”. he sat down before i answered. the dumbest questions to ask someone, you will notice, often come pre-answered. this is a feature.

item two — “are you here with anyone?” the venue had a long table for the singles. i was at it. there were eight chairs. seven of us were in them, holding flutes, doing the small talk arithmetic. the asker was the bartender. he meant well. i told him i was with myself, which is technically accurate and gets a small laugh roughly half the time. it got half the laugh. fair.

item three — “do you know the bride?” i knew the groom. i had known the groom since university. the woman asking me had also known the groom since university because she had told me so two minutes earlier and had listed three classes they had taken together. i said, honestly, “not as well as you do”, which she took as a compliment. it was not. it was an observation. observations get mistaken for compliments at weddings. that is a separate post i will write someday from this same desk.

3. items four through six, the doctor-themed batch

tom’s wife’s brother is a doctor. a man with a job. he was at table seven and he had three questions queued up at the bar that i’d like to enter into the record.

item four — “how have you been feeling?” we had not met. he did not know my baseline. there was no baseline to compare against. it is, structurally, the same as asking a stranger if their tomatoes are riper than usual. you cannot diagnose drift without a starting point. i told him “consistent”, which is the only honest answer i have ever given a doctor. he wrote nothing down. he did not have a pen. he was at a wedding.

item five — “any aches or pains?” i am thirty-seven. of course there are. the question presumes a binary that the body does not honor. i told him my left shoulder makes a sound when i raise it past my ear and that the third yoga mat, which i bought to address that, is still sitting in a state of presumed evolution. he laughed politely. politeness is what doctors do at weddings instead of medicine.

item six — “are you sleeping?” i sleep. the sleep, however, is in nine-minute increments because my alarm is set on snooze and my snooze cycle is now a spiritual practice. i told him about the morning i hit snooze for eighty-one minutes of silence and he said, with a face i recognized, “you should see someone about that.” i was, at that moment, seeing someone about that. he was that someone. the dumbest questions to ask someone are sometimes, also, the ones that answer themselves out loud.

DOCTORS. AT WEDDINGS. ARE GUESTS.

4. items seven through nine, the supermarket-themed batch

at the cake, somehow, the supermarket came up. i had told the woman next to me, who was on the bride’s side and had a small notebook, about the tuesday i went for milk and came home with batteries of the wrong size, a magazine about boats, and a bag of nutritional yeast i still do not understand. she asked me three things i would like to log here.

item seven — “did you make a list?” the answer was technically yes. the list said “milk”. the list was correct. the list and the trolley had a private disagreement on the way to checkout. the trolley won. lists are, in my experience, descriptive of what i meant to want, not what i ended up wanting. i told her this. she wrote it in the small notebook. she may use it. that is fine. i license dumb at zero cost.

item eight — “do you go when you’re hungry?” i go when the apartment runs out of bread. that is a different signal from hunger. hunger is a body. bread-out is an apartment. the signals are not the same. she had not considered this, which surprised me, because she ran what she described as “a tight ship at home” and i don’t run a ship at all, i live on what is essentially a raft of expired condiments and assumptions. the dumbest questions to ask someone, on this evidence, are sometimes the ones that assume your kitchen is run like theirs.

item nine — “have you tried meal planning?” i have. the meal i planned for thursday last week was eaten on tuesday. the meal i planned for tuesday was the dishwasher’s leftovers, which is not a meal so much as a forensic exercise. the dishwasher, i should add, is a cabinet i do not consult. i do not trust it. it is honest about what it is, which is more than i can say for most appliances. i told the bride’s-side woman this. she laughed. her notebook is, presumably, a danger.

5. items ten and eleven, the financial-therapy batch

by the financial therapy section i was, for context, on my third glass and a piece of cake. the woman across the table — i never got her name — asked me two things in succession and then, mercifully, went to dance.

item ten — “do you have a budget?” i have a bank app. i do not open it. the bank app, on the days i don’t open it, costs me nothing. on the days i do, it costs me, on average, the rest of the morning. the budget, in this sense, is a behavior, not a spreadsheet. i told her i operate on the principle that ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. she said i was being dumb again. i said, “noted.” dumb is, on this front, the cheapest therapist in the building.

item eleven — “have you started saving?” i have not started. i have, to be specific, paused in the act of starting on six separate occasions over four years. that is not the same as never starting. that is starting in a way that respects momentum. a savings account is what wealthy people pretend is a hobby is something a friend of mine said once and i have nodded along to since. that friend is not at this wedding. that friend is mike, who has not filed taxes in years and lives, in some sense, more honestly than the rest of us. the dumbest questions to ask someone, by item eleven, were beginning to feel like a national survey.

6. closing pulpit, the dumbest is also the most honest

here is what i landed on, between the cake and the cab. the dumbest questions to ask someone are also, surprisingly, the most honest. they admit that the asker has nothing to ask and is asking anyway. that is, on a long enough wedding, a kind of bravery. the truly clever person stays silent at the table. the dumb person asks if the chair is taken. the dumb person, in this view, is the one keeping the room functional.

tom, who married up by every measurable axis, asked me at the bar if i was “doing okay these days”. i said yes. it was a dumb question. he did not, by any reasonable definition, want a real answer. i did not, by any reasonable definition, want to give one. we both did the dumb thing. we both got what we wanted. tom went back to his wife. i went back to my paper towel. for the broader argument about why dumb is the more honest cousin in the family, the same investigation continues over in the long hallway between dumb and stupid, where stupid lives in the second bedroom and dumb pays the rent on the whole apartment.

and yes — somewhere in this i should note the obvious patron-saint hot take. ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy. i hold it. i mean it. i drafted the eleven items above with the bank app closed and the wedding bartender pouring freely. by the third pour i had stopped pretending the questions were dumb. i had started suspecting they were the only ones still doing work.

carla just walked past the desk on her way to the printer. the elevator pinged. i have eleven minutes left, by the count i keep running, before the meeting upstairs lets out.

the seventh microwave will arrive next thursday. i will, presumably, ask it a dumb question on day one. it will, presumably, answer.

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