USDA Choice.

Choices. That seems to be the big word today. Not just the lie in the bed you chose to make choice, but the choices concerning what to do with the bed liar now kicking in screaming from the bundled sheet lying on the river bank. Those choices count too.

Choices. That's what other bloggers talked about this weekend. Me, sure I made choices over the weekend but they just didn't seem important enough to talk about at the time.

"Paper or plastic?"

"Paper."

"Paper parachute it is. Jump!"

That's the thing about choices. Most of them are reflex. We make them without thinking based on who we are and other choices we've made. This gives us freedom to cloud our heads with worry over irrelevant clutter: freedom to make easy choices difficult.

"What did you want on your fish?"

"uh what were my choices again?"

"Arsenic or Old Bay."

"We just had arsenic last week…"

"Well you did, yes. Do you want it again, then?"

The hardest thing about choices is living with them once they're made. Ok, that's a lie. Normally that's the easiest part. It's the part we choose to build up and fret over. A big "What if..?" balloon crowding all rational thought out our ears, leaving us with ineffective gas to fill the void.

I don't know, maybe I'm simple, living with a choice is easy. At least when the choice is your own. Living with somebody else's choice, well that's trickier. Still, the hardest part for me is making the decision. Each decision a possibility scrawled onto dry-erase board like a Numb3rs equation.

"Sir?"

"I'm thinking…"

"All I asked was if you wanted to Super Size your order."

"Wait. Rob's Theory of irrational consequence works perfectly here! Imagine a flock of seagulls. Each unique in their own way. What if they never formed a band? Carry the 3…then there's Men at Work, what if there were nobody from the land down under? Would women glow? Men plunder? Subtract X..."

"Next, please."

Everything is a big deal, relational charts mapping my walls with endless possibilities. Ask MyUnwife about buying a sofa. She'll tell you.

But once the decision is made, it's over. Right or wrong, it's done. There's nothing left to do but walk the path I've chosen. That's easy.

I was watching the news, there was a guy who the police were after. He'd chosen to kidnap his son. This wasn't his only choice. According to the cop giving the interview, the guy left his six month old son with a stranger to go kidnap the six year old boy.

"Even in LA abandoning one child to get another is a despicable action." That's what the cop said.

"Really?" That's what I said. I wasn't sure if I said it because the officer thought our depravity level was some kind of benchmark, or if it was the fact that the man had made a choice that didn't involve Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, or Lindsey Lohan? He'd failed to involve celebrities in his news. The lack of YouTube hubbub could create a void that all the LA pop tarts and their paparazzi platoons couldn't fill. What then? Real news? No, the public couldn't choose that.

No, say what you will, this guy made a choice. Let's face it, a guy who leaves an infant with a stranger shouldn't have an infant. Problem solved. Maybe he understood a six year old had a better chance of fending for himself against dad's bad decisions. I don't know what he thought the cards held for him. He clearly isn't choosing cards from a full deck.

If you ask him--even from a prison cell--I bet living with the decision is pretty easy. Some people need their decisions a little more structured. "Walk in the yard, or read in my cell" may be all he can handle. It's good to know that. We can make our choices about these people accordingly.

Choices. We make them and move on. They're not a point on a map that we can go back to and go, "Nevermind, I'll take option B." Once we've chosen A that's our path.

I watched people talk about choices this weekend. I made a few myself. My latest decision? I'm going to take a nap. I think I can live with the consequence.