"Eleven dollars and 50 cents."
" . . . shut up."
I'll give Chris credit. He's an annoyingly good guesser. Without question, he is better as guessing than anyone else I know.
It's part and parcel of his neurosis, of course. The one where he mouths all my words as I'm saying them. The one where he doesn't listen or pay attention in the moment because he is too busy trying to figure out what will happen next. Where he doesn't actually read your emails as much as guesses what they are going to say based on the first four words.
Chris's brain must be an absolutely exhausting place. I personally have enough trouble just listening and formulating a response, let alone trying to figure out what you're going to say before you say it. I imagine I'll figure out what you are saying in another second and a half when you actually say it.
But not Chris!
Chris is proud of how often he accurately guesses the time in the middle of the night. But, jesus, just think about that. He woke up, started computing all available incoming matrices of information, made a guess, then read the clock to see how far off he was.
OR YOU COULD HAVE JUST READ THE CLOCK AND GONE BACK TO SLEEP YOU WEIRDO NO OFFENSE.
So when I say he's an Olympic guesser, I mean he's also trained like an Olympian - every waking (and sleeping) moment.
But, and I may have mentioned this, it is still annoying.
It's genuinely deflating, when you're all, "guess how much?" and he gets it exactly. There's just nowhere to go from there. It's a conversation-ender.
And it totally derails the story flow when you say, "guess who I saw today" and he knows on the first try.
Pro-tip: when I ask you to guess who called, just say, "who" and let me move on with my story.
Here's a classic Living with Chris Logic conversation:
We've been tracking Sam weight for a few weeks (on the sly! He still just thinks we are letting him play with the scale. And then we do discuss how to eat healthy food, etc, etc, etc. I just want to stipulate that we are doing this only because childhood obesity is a real problem and we don't want his weight to get out of control because we weren't paying attention).
After a week at basketball camp, I said "guess what Sam's weight was this week."
"Um. Up two pounds."
"No, he was down .3 lbs."
"Really? I would have guessed it would be lower."
"You literally wouldn't."
"What?"
"You just guessed he was up two pounds."
"Oh, that was just my guess, not what I actually thought."
"Seriously, that makes no sense."
"See, when someone else asks me to guess, I have to take into account their motivation for asking me to guess, and what they probably guessed, before I make my guess."
"Chris, you do know that the goal here is just conversation. There is no actual prize for getting it right."
"You just say that because you always lose at guessing."
