"How're you doin?"

The age old question. A lot of times, the person that asks it doesn't even care. They'd be better off saying, "Good morning," or maybe "Hi there." And if you give them an answer that isn't in the strict policy of normal answers, then they might ... MIGHT ... become interested.

In all my life, I've adopted "Pretty good," as my response to this question. I remember that back in the early Global days, Ben McCarty and I would sit out in the front room where everyone came in, and almost every person would say, "How're you doin?" We decided early on that we needed different answers. Thankfully, we both had a different go-to response. Mine: "Pretty good." Ben's: "Alright." Sometimes I'd throw "Alright" out first in an attempt to throw eveything off, and Ben usually would catch it and throw out my answer instead. He's a quick one.

Eventually as time trudged along, the somewhat upbeat response I'd give out turned into it's very close relative, yet not as upbeat cousin, "Not too bad."

And you know, "not too bad" is about as good as it got. I mean, the answer pretty much said it all. I wasn't sludging through the gutter, but I certainly wasn't soaring along in a land full of rainbows and lollipops. "Not too bad" became the person I was. Or maybe vice versa.

But now ... I say that to someone, and I think that perhaps I'm just defaulting to that answer inappropriately. So this morning when asked the age old "How's it going?" by a friend on MSN, I had to answer, "Things are really really awesome."

Because it's true.