(First posted here.)

From Ding and Ferdinand Lancaster’s Search for the Great Uncanny, the hugely popular life blog maintained by Keebs, sidekick and partner-in-crime to trail-blazer and all-around it-man Danilo Bustamante, posted March 20, 2008:

This is why strange girls rock. (cue in: kickass guitar riffs)

Dude #1 (big man on campus) spends the two-hour break before Law convincing me that Action Done to Change K’s Fate was an honorable, noble thing to do.

I tell him I’m not sure, K should have been able to make that choice herself.

Dude #1 tells me he did nothing wrong, he just pushed K in the proper direction. Granted, he did not really do anything except intercept her on her way to lunch and tell her to think about getting interviewed by the Guy Smiley dude.

I said it felt like cheating, this acting on behalf of a dubious agency that gave him freak powers to virtually see the future.

Dude #1 says everybody has a choice.

And so by the end of the day, all arguments turn philosophical. In the beginning it was all about whether meddling in other people’s lives was right or wrong. When the girl-dude was retrieved from an aimless meeting on Operations Management, she questioned the very basis of our verbal ping-pongs.

She said, and picture a bald elfin girl putting on lip balm while you do, “Who gets to decide what’s good or bad?”

Which leaves us in a very tough position, having spent the better half of the afternoon tackling the correctness of Dude #1’s actions to reconfigure certain life paths based on knowledge he otherwise would not have been privy to.

“Is death always bad?” she said. “Is an improved life status always good? If I tell you I have an unparalleled predilection for pain, how do you think will I perceive bodily harm? Who are you to make these decisions for me? Or to question my assumptions?”

She’s right, you know, but in a way that just messes up this whole thinking about this thing more and more. That’s what girls do, really, they find two easy-going dudes fighting the black and white of a known issue and they sit there, looking all harmless and unaffected, and they topple your statements with offhand declarations like, “What if I like pain?”

Only a girl (or a girl like this) can pull off a stunt like that unscathed. I’m not sure, as the universe has always known that Dude #1 has always been a little in love with this pretty little bald little girl.