I broke up with my most recent ex- largely because of the ferocity of the arguments we got into. Among the topics (bear in mind that these have all resulted in Screaming Matches, not just arguments or heated debates):
-Whether my way of making mix CDs (pick a bunch of songs I like from various genres, randomly distribute them among various CDs so as to have a random sampling of music) is acceptable
-Whether it’s faster to get from Palo Alto onto 280 south by taking Page Mill or San Antonio/El Monte
-Whether air conditioning refrigerant is the same thing as engine coolant
-Whether, by responding with a flip answer to a posed Zen Koan (ie, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”), I was disrespecting her Pagan beliefs
-Whether or not atheism is a religion
-Various incidents related to games of Scrabble
-Whether the fact that I remember these past arguments, and occasionally cite them, means that I’m just a bitter man who can never let anything drop, and who still holds grudges about everything that ever happened to me dating back to the birth canal. (Yes, I’m aware of the meta-irony of me mentioning this here
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The biggest fight we ever had, however, concerned the following question from an online IQ test:
I maintain that the “best” answer is coconut, but that it’s a horribly phrased question. She claims, and the test agrees with her, that the best answer is grape, and furthermore she claims that this is evidence of her superior intellect.