Mysterious Team vs. Plan Team

I don't buy into most binary systems, but this one seems pretty solid. Everyone on Earth is a member of either Mysterious Team or Plan Team. At Evan's preschool, where this dialectic originated, it was purely a matter of gender. If you were a boy, you were on Mysterious Team. Girl, Plan Team. In the adult world, it's more complicated. It's entirely possible to be a woman and be on Mysterious Team, although men remain disproportionately represented there. Some of my grownup writer friends and I have chosen sides, and have spent a lot of time debating the merits of each. After several good-natured but slightly barbed exchanges, my friend Jason (a Man on Plan) pointed out that the two terms were being used as shorthand for "You guys are really boring" and "You guys are really flaky." The realities of Mysterious Team and Plan Team are, of course, infinitely more nuanced than that. In his poem "Under Which Lyre," W.H. Auden traces the lineage of both teams back to the Greek Gods:

The sons of Hermes love to play
And only do their best when they
Are told they oughtn’t;
Apollo’s children never shrink
From boring jobs but have to think
Their work important.

Related by antithesis,
A compromise between us is
Impossible;
Respect perhaps but friendship never:
Falstaff the fool confronts forever
The prig Prince Hal.

If he would leave the self alone,
Apollo’s welcome to the throne,
Fasces and falcons;
He loves to rule, has always done it;
The earth would soon, did Hermes run it,
Be like the Balkans.

But jealous of our god of dreams,
His common-sense in secret schemes
To rule the heart;
Unable to invent the lyre,
Creates with simulated fire
Official art.

And when he occupies a college,
Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge;
He pays particular
Attention to Commercial Thought,
Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport,
In his curricula.

For my part, I think I've come up with even better team mascots than Hermes and Apollo, or even Falstaff and Hal:

Mysterious Team = Ernie
Plan Team = Bert

You can perhaps guess which team I'm on, and where my sympathies lie. Evan recently explained to us that Mysterious Team members *do* make plans. They just make mysterious plans. He added that "girls can be invited to be on Mysterious Team, and boys can be invited to be on Plan Team." However, he said, he would always be on Mysterious Team, and Sage, when she came of age, was going to be on Plan Team. This struck us as appropriate, since Sage was, well, planned, and Evan was a surprise (if not exactly a mystery).