Whole Fun

Dear Dr,

I find myself connecting the ideas of whole toys and whole games with whole foods, which unexpectedly informs the idea of whole fun. It speaks to nourishment, substance, resource. Now I wonder, does that exclude frivolity? I don't know. Whole might take fun beyond the shallow or superficial.

Now I see there is even the possibility for deep fun -- I think I enjoy that! I certainly don't want to waste my time with partial fun.

I suspect the Oaqui* culture supports a vocabulary replete with funny adjectives and distinctions. For example, what is lateral, as opposed to vertical, fun? Or for that matter co-lateral fun? Is there such a thing as independent fun, or is that simply a funtasy?

Please let me know if there is an appropriate glossary. As discerning person, I need to know not only if I am having fun, but if so, what kind.

Thank you.

Dear CRNewham,

You're welcome.

According to the Oaqui, (c.f.: Creation and the not-yet-fun, and On Laughter), originally, before it all got started, before the big banged, everything was, in its total entirety, dimensionlessly and unadjectivably fun. Hence, any attempt to distinguish one form or dimension of fun from another invariably leads to excessive silliness, like the following.

But, that's neither here nor there.

In answer to your question, yes. The Oaqui currently distinguish/es between 613 different kinds of fun, Interestingly enough, Partial fun is considered a kind of fun (#417), even though it can never be as Total or Complete or Entire as Whole fun (#423), synonymously speaking.

There is Loving fun. One of my favorites, you know -- the fun of loving, the fun love makes of the world. Which, corollarily means that there is also the Fun of Hating. And you know what that makes of the world. There's Good fun, which is nice, and Bad fun, which isn't nice, and yet is just as much fun.

Don’t let me forget Deep Fun, for gosh sake, or, in a connected or perhaps the same vein, Shallow Fun. I suppose there is such a thing as Vertical Fun, the conceptual mirror of the more widely known Horizontal Fun.

This is all apparently rife with implications beyond the scope of this medium. And yet, somehow, not. Vertical or Horizontal, Deep or Shallow, it's the fun of it all that we should probably pay closest attention to: That it’s fun at all. That it’s all fun. That all these different kinds of fun, regardless of how much we hope to embrace or avoid them, are fun. They all do the same thing for us. They bring us life.

More than the different kinds of fun, it's the different ways of having it. More than the best kind of fun, or the kind of fun you are best at having, it's how many ways you have to have it.

Once you experience what and how whole fun is, you basically know what to do with the rest of your life.

Your mission:

As long as you are in it.

Whole fun.

In as many ways as you possibly can.

According, at least, to the Oaqui.

Which reminds us of a query from a fellow employee who, while engaged in a particularly silly game, discovered that she "laughed so hard I cried," asking, "What, apparently, is the connection? And why does one evidently lead to the other but rarely vice versa?"

The question profoundly struck our authorial plurality as something we should be writing about, so we posed this very conundrum to the Oaqui. The response was something like this:

"As soon as it was certain that the Big was about to go Bang, I/we, immediately set about to capture the essence and wholeness of Original Fun.

"Which is why today, at no additional cost to you, you can read the ultimate answers to such questions as the mysterious oneness of laughing and crying and the true nature of the Allfunness, written in easy-to-read DNA (you have to remember this was before there was such a thing as paper, or eyeballs), right there, always handy, printed on your very genes."