1. You’re on a desert island. You look down at the parachute next to you. What color is it?
a) Bluish
b) Reddish
c) Greenish
d) None of the above
2. For years, you scoffed that skydiving was a generic way to have an adventure — as uninspired as bungee jumping or getting a tattoo during spring break in Daytona Beach. You insisted that people should make their own adventures, not just plunk down a few hundred bucks to spend a day in a Mountain Dew commercial. Yet you couldn’t think of what such an adventure would be. Every idea — road trips, ascents to peaks, backpacking through areas of higher and lower altitudes, journeys by sailboat, walking for weeks or months in a place that people don’t normally walk in, drugs, early/single parenthood — came from somewhere else. Not an original in the bunch. But you weren’t too worried about the adventure stuff. You had a life! Years went by. You laughed, you loved, you went on dates that made for good anecdotes, you did things that were really hard, you developed skills.
Little did you know that during that time, a tectonic shift was occurring in your thinking. And when you woke up on the morning of your 31st birthday, you realized you had been wrong about the skydiving and the bungee jumping and all the other unoriginal adventures. After all, what is life if not a pre-packaged adventure? Plus you wanted to go skydiving, OK? You just did. You always had. You’d wasted years keeping yourself and skydiving away from each other. It was time to let them meet.
So now you’re in the plane, and it’s really loud, whoa, and now you’re jumping, and it’s nuts! You’re falling! You aren’t really breathing! Space is the place! You pull the cord, and your parachute opens. What color is it?
a) Azure
b) Sunset
c) Mantis
d) B-vitamin
3. A man’s got to learn to stand on his own two feet. He’s got to learn to pull himself up by his bootstraps and then turn around and with those same bootstraps hang whoever tries to knock him off the ladder. He’s got to know how to spear a tricky fish, tie a double Windsor, gut a three-legged deer, throw a left hook, drink Scotch whiskey, make love to a red-headed woman, de-lather a black horse, and dominate a meeting using only his voice. He’s also got to know when to apologize, when to back down, and when to call animal control to come help him get that raccoon out from under the front porch. When animal control shows up, captures the raccoon, and says they’re going to go ‘release it into the wild’, a man’s got to know when to call bullshit.
a) Blue
b) Agree
c) Green
d) Disagree
4. What best describes you?
a) Blue parachute
b) Red parachute
c) Green parachute
d) Diamond wrapped in Wonder Bread
5. It’s midnight in Afghanistan, 2004. Last year at this time, you were a senior in high school, a middling athlete and lazy student who was about to get caught with an ounce of weed in your Grand Prix. Now you’re a paratrooper, because it was probation or Army, and the Grand Prix is parked at your mother’s house even though the transmission fell out and it’s not drivable, because she’s too sentimental to call the tow truck. You’re glad she’s keeping the car because you’re kind of superstitious, like if she gets it towed you might not come back from Afghanistan. What color is your parachute?
a) Aqua
b) Mud
c) Green
d) Sand
6. If your life were a parachute, it would be:
a) Powerful
b) Functional
c) Creative
d) Late-blooming
RESULTS:
Mostly A’s: Your parachute is blue. In some lights, it looks gray, and sometimes almost purple.
Mostly B’s: Your parachute is red. Kind of a bright, orangey red — think vermilion.
Mostly C’s: Your parachute is green. Green, green, green.
Mostly D’s: Your parachute, if you have one, is yellow.
