Question for the Weekend

A few thoughts of mine have converged recently to form a question I'd like to pose to you, Ross Experience readers. It'll take a minute for me to get there, so please be patient...

Okay, for the last few years, when Mindy and I had on occasion caught a Seinfeld rerun on syndication during the dinner hour (by the way, this doesn't happen anymore since we purged our living room of a TV...how's that going you ask? swimmingly, we couldn't be happier...daily TV time has gone from 6+ hrs/day to <1 hr/day), I would marvel at her reactions to episodes she hadn't seen before. You see Mindy, apparently living in a cave during the'90s, didn't see every Seinfeld episode during its first run.

Next, every year around this time, I get those nostalgic feelings for that fall when I moved into the dorms at UC and first met Mindy. We're talking 11 years now. (Man, I'm getting old!) I can't help but think that right now, some 18-yr. old kid is putting off studying by watching Seinfeld reruns in his dorm. The scary thing is that Seinfeld went off the air when this hypothetical student was 8-yrs. old. So it's pretty much guaranteed that he's seeing the episode for the first time.

So the question to ponder over the weekend is this: if you could, would you rather 1) have your memory wiped clean of all Seinfeld episodes so you could experience every rerun as if you were watching it for the very 1st time or 2) retain those Seinfeld memories so you understood all the Seinfeld references made in day-to-day American life.

At first it seems tempting to choose option 1, how great would it be to commit to an entire episode then be floored when 3 seemingly unrelated story arcs converge in their utter Seinfeldian hilarity in the final 3 minutes? It's just not the same when you know it's coming.

However, you have to realize what you're giving up. Especially trying to exist in the corporate world, I'd miss countless jokes...essentially everyone between the age of 25 and 65 makes at least 1 Seinfeld reference per week in my day-to-day life. Just this week my boss had me put together a "Festivus List" to air all the grievances of this project we've been working on so we can assess where to head going forward.

It seems like a coin toss at that point. But what breaks the tie for me is the personal aspect. Losing my father in 1997, honestly some of the happiest memories I have are of the family together on Thursday evenings in the mid-'90s--my dad, my mom, my brother home from college on co-op, and me in high school. I still have vivid images in my mind of 9:28pm on some random Thursday even in the fall of '96, the 4 of us rolling on the floor laughing when Newman informs Jerry that "nobody's every cracked the 50% barrier".

So for me, it's option 2. I'm keeping the memories. But what do all of you think?