08. Dear Hank & John. 010. When Your Friend Likes Ayn Rand... Part 3/6
• [Question 4]
John: We're gonna go with this question from Jessica.
Jessica writes, "Dear John and Hank. My boyfriend of three years and I had a very serious conversation recently, during which we articulated a dilemma that we both suspected. He really wants children and I really don't. He said that at age 20, we are too young to break up because of a potential future issue, but it's making it hard to picture a future with him. Do we break up now because of this difference or wait to see if one of us changes our mind?" Well, first off, Jessica, please bear in mind that all of our advice is dubious. Hank: Yes.
John: So do not make decisions based on our dubious advice.
However, I have lots of dubious advice to dispense on this question, but I'm gonna let you start, Hank. Hank: Oh wow.
Well, I would just say that, like, it's about this person that you have in your life and this relationship and whether or not you want to work on it. You know, and part of working on that relationship is coming to agreements about disagreements, coming to, and if you don't feel like you can do that, then that's... John: Well, but this is a big disagreement.
Hank: Yeah, right, if you don't feel like you can come to an agreement on the disagreement, then, you know, it does indeed, would likely lead to a lot of unpleasantness in the future.
John: Yeah, but they're only 20, to be fair.
I feel like at 20, you don't have to make a decision for the rest of your life about having kids. Hank: Agree.
John: Either way.
Hank: Yes.
John: Unless you are actually pregnant or have a child.
Hank, if I may tell another really long tangential story? When Sarah and I got engaged, before we got married, we got married in a Catholic church, so we had to go to this thing, the Catholic Engaged Encounter, which was a weekend-long, like, marriage counseling thing. Now, I wanted to run screaming from this monastery place where we had the Catholic Engaged Encounter the moment we drove up, and there were many weird and terrible things about it, but it was really useful and a lot of the things that, like, people talked about that weekend are stuff, are things that Sarah and I still talk about, but anyway, at one point during the Engaged Encounter, there were like, eight or nine engaged couples, and we had to stand back to back, and then they said raise your hand if you want children, and then you turned around and you saw if your partner had their hand raised, right? Sarah and I were the only couple that had even discussed this and so there were three or four really intense fights that happened in public immediately after this turnaround, where one person would say to the other, what do you mean, you don't want to have children? Hank: Wow.
John: And I was like, you guys really probably should have discussed this before your Catholic Engaged Encounter.
So, in a way, I'm happy, Jessica, that you're talking about it now, because I do think that it's an important thing and it certainly, if you're gonna spend your life together or have a long term partnership that goes through your child raising, likely child raising years then it's important, but like, I don't think that you have to come to any consensus when you're 20, and I don't think that you should be holding yourself to decisions that you make when you're 20, if you don't have to. I feel the same way about being 37, by the way. I feel like you should be allowed to change your mind in life, and one of the things that, in a partnership, in a marriage, is like Hank said, like, figuring out how to navigate disagreements, figuring out how to navigate different worldviews and different priorities that will inevitably come up in a marriage, so I wouldn't worry yet. That's my opinion. But I would worry before your Catholic Engaged Encounter, I'm assuming that you're Catholic. Hank: I, yeah, I mean, there's much life ahead of you and it does...
John: Hopefully.
Maybe not, Jessica. Hank: Oh, my God.
Oh my God.
John: It's all fleeting.
Hank: Oh my God.
John: You could be at the end.
You think you're at the beginning, but you could be in the second half. Hank: So now we know how John's mind always and continually operates.
John: It always returns to the darkness, Hank.
To the yawning darkness that lasts forever that awaits all of us. Thanks for coming to Dear Hank and John, a comedy podcast sponsored by our friends at Death. Death. Defining the human experience for 250,000 years. Death. What would life be without it? Hank: This podcast, John, I wanna say is also brought to you, the listeners, by Marzipan, the product of food that people sometimes shape into other food type products, and also, according to the one time that I Googled Marzipan in order to have a picture of Marzipan from Homestar Runner, into little tiny babies, which is extremely, extremely creepy and there's a whole thing on Marzipan Babies that I don't know if that got shared on Facebook or something, but when you Google Marzipan, there's lots of tiny babies the size of your hand and it's really terrifying.
John: I guess my concern with the Marzipan sponsorship is that I just don't see how it's ever going to be actually enacted, whereas the Death sponsorship seems to me totally doable.
Should we answer another question? Hank: I think we should answer another question.
• [Question 5]
Hank: This is from Rachel, and you used this world earlier in the podcast, and I think that Rachel and everyone needs some clarity from specifically John Green.
So Rachel asks, "Dear Hank and John. Can you please explain the proper use of nausea, nauseated and nauseous? John: Sure, I will explain it.
Nausea is a noun, like, the nausea that one feels when one is on a boat in Sweden is the proper use of nausea. And then nauseated and nauseous are synonyms that people act like aren't synonyms because they want to impose rules of grammar that are ridiculous. Hank: Ah!
John: Is that fair, Hank?
Hank: I have no idea.
I had been told that there was some difference between those two, and by apparently these prescriptivist d-bags. John: Yeah, I mean, why be prescriptivist, we all know what nauseous means, we all know what nauseated means, technically nauseous, you know, ought to mean, you know, a thing that makes you feel nauseated, like, you know, the ocean is nauseous when you are on a sailboat and it makes you feel nauseated, but that's ludicrous.
We all know what nauseous means, like, if something makes you feel nauseous, you're... It's fine. It's fine. Nothing is going, nothing fundamental about the language is going to be deeply affected by us just accepting nauseous also meaning nauseated. For me, like, language exists to communicate and it should be as clear as possible and when ambiguity is introduced from, in language, we need to find ways to make it clear, but like, you know, all the time we use language in ways that are far more confusing than nauseous and nauseated, and somehow, we get by. Like, when I say, like, "Hank, there is a bear and it is going to kill us." You don't like, pause, and say, "But John, do you mean, like, a bare person, like, do you mean a naked person, do you mean a weight that we must bear that's going to kill us?" No, you just, you understand from context that I'm referring to a large mammal that is going to kill us, and so there's perfect clarity in that sentence, so I just, I feel like we need to just let language be unless we're introducing problematic ambiguities. Hank: You have it, there you have it, directly from a person who makes words for a living, so we can have that.
John: I try very hard not to make words.
I try to use existing ones. I'm not Shakespeare. Hank: You make some words.
John: I do occasionally make a word when I have to.
Hank: Have you ever coined a word that has become, you know, used in broader English?
Bufriedo? John: Uh, bufriedo maybe, although I didn't coin that, it comes from my actual high school, like most of Looking for Alaska.
I guess the word that I created that is most often seen as a typo and people e-mail me all the time and say, "There is a typo in your book Looking for Alaska" is suident, which refers to a death that is possibly a suicide and possibly an accident. But that hasn't really caught on, except that people think it's a typo.
