1. Would you rather die peacefully among friends at 50, or painfully and alone at 80? Assume that most of those thirty years would be “good” ones.

Personally I want to live longer than any of my Testerman ancestors which, despite a nearly genetic predisposition towards “too much of everything that’s bad for you”, is going to be pretty damn hard. My grandfather is closing in on 79 or 80 right now (60th wedding anniversary in two weeks!) and despite eating home-cooking-with-lard for half a century, smoking from age 15 to 55 and a triple bypass to celebrate his 55th birthday, he’s tooling along just fine. The only grandparent I’ve lost so far was was killed in a car accident — at the time of his death, he was 71 and still working a dairy farm full time — up at 4 am, etc. etc.

In my family, my eating habits make me something of a health nut (which is pretty damn sad), and yet I worry that the chain-smoking, lard-slurping octegenarians will be looking down and laughing when I kick the bucket before they do.

2. Your teen arrives home one night with a big dent in his car fender. You find out the next day there was a hit-and-run in the neighborhood. Would you try to find out if your kid was involved? If you found out s/he was, would you notify the authorities? What if there was a death from the hit-and-run?

Doing the right thing isn’t even a choice anymore, not with Justin and the things we’re trying to teach him.

Ugh. My friends’ kids are all pretty young — but this scenario is WAY too easy to imagine for my pre-teen, especially given his track-record for stupid attempts to cover up mistakes.

3. What would the title of your autobiography be (not including your name)?

Theory and Practice