With great search engines and no shortage of expert bloggers out there, we have solved a lot of life’s little mysteries. You want to know about the tax code, there’s probably a couple dozen people on Reddit’s Explain it like I’m 5 threads who can explain it all to you. Or you can look it all up and read it yourself — why would you — but you could.
There are other little mysteries though, and I think they are better left as mysteries. Better left as mysteries because it is far more fun to speculate as to why they are the way they are, then it is too look up why and know the real answer. In this post, I shall explore some of those mysteries without looking up the real reason — because fun is fun, and people really need to learn to be ok with guessing.
Your Legs and Covers
Why does sticking one leg out of the covers make for the perfect temperature, but when I am cold I can’t just stick one leg in a warm room and warm myself up? I mean I can put my head under the covers and there’s not much effect to temperature, but it does get stanky. Too warm though? Move an arm out and you are warm still. Both arms out and you are still warm.
Uncover half the body, too cold. But stick that leg out, even a bit — perfection.
My best guess is that this is some sort of cruel joke by the bedding industry. They know you can only look like an idiot with your one leg out of the sheets, meanwhile ruining the perfect distribution of the sheets over each edge of the bed. It’s a cruel joke, that’s the only explanation.
And as for why you can’t just stick your leg in a warm room to warm up, my best guess is that this is the reason leg warmers were invented. Think about that…
Ketchup
You ever notice that you immediately put your ketchup away after you are done with dinner, because leaving it out all night would be gross. I mean you would have to throw that away the next morning if you saw that as the label clearly indicates “refrigerate after opening”. Then a few days later you walk into a diner and sit down to get some fries, you grab the warm bottle of ketchup and eat it with reckless abandon.
Why is it that ketchup at restaurants is totally ok to be left out for god knows how long, but my ketchup at home must be put away immediately?
One must assume that it is the glass bottles, and the new fancy red painted plastic bottles. Or perhaps it is just the cheesy clear plastic they give home users which degrades the ketchup this much faster. For the love of God, warm ketchup tastes so much better so why don’t we all just roll the dice and leave it out?
Either diners are rotating their ketchup back in the fridge right before it starts to go sideways, or they have clearly superior bottles of ketchup.
Grass
Why does my grass not stay green when I mow it? I mean here it is all perfectly green, but much too long. Ok, you mow it down and now it has turned to pissed off yellow green. As if the shock of having a whirring blade slice away it’s life somehow made it start to die in that instant.
This is absurd.
Now instead of my neighbors complaining of my grass being too long, but “at least it is green” — they complain that my lawn is dead. Work with me a little here grass.
The only hypothesis I have here is that the grass at the bottom, near the dirt, is a bunch of assholes and that’s why those blades of grass are not allowed to see the sun. And then when you expose them to the sun they are all happy and shit to finally see the sun and they start to turn green, but not before they get way too long and block out the sun for the other asshole blades of grass. It’s a really bad cycle of hate, is what I am saying.
Sweaters in Summer
It’s winter, I am wearing a sweater over my dress shirt and I am inside a conditioned space — it is 74° and I am a touch cold if I am honest — it is currently winter and pretty cold outside. Fast forward some months, and it is 74° outside, and 72° inside the conditioned space. I am wearing no sweater, just the dress shirt, and I am warm.
What the hell is that about?
And if I decide to wear a sweater when it is warm out, despite the space being provably colder than in the winter, I will be sweating like crazy. Why?
I can only assume this is some heating and fashion industry conspiracy to get us to buy more clothes — clothes for each season. Because otherwise, if it is a cooler temp in an indoor space than it previously was, I should be able to wear the same amount of clothing — if not more. By virtue of the fact I cannot wear the same amount of clothing all year round when the place I am working in is a consistent temperature just goes to tell you that summer clothes are made to be warmer and winter clothes are made to be cooler. I think I am going to try wearing my summer clothes in winter since I am always warm when I wear those.
Cats
Are cats in charge, or are humans in charge?
I know people say this about dogs all the time, but fuck dogs. They aren’t that smart and if that is part of their ruse then it’s a stupid fucking ruse. Cats though, they are smart and they are assholes. But we love them and care for them despite this.
We swerve the car to avoid hitting one, while potentially hitting people. We buy special places for them to poop and pee. We buy special fountain water bowls. Special beds. Special toys. We have weed for them. We have fake little trees for them to lay on and climb.
And we do all these things, and spend all this money, and when they bite us for daring to pet them, we are just like “oh, cats“. Who’s the stupid one? Us or the cats? I’m not sure which way I lean on this one, but with studies showing cats not to be domesticated animals, it sure seems like something fishy is going on.
Printing Labels
Avery 5124, looks around for the Template in Microsoft Word, fills in the labels.
Prints
Then begins the cussing, because no matter what you do they won’t print right. Here we have three perfectly manufactured things:
- Computer
- Printer
- Laser cut sheet of labels
Each with a known size of everything, and yet it is simply not possible to print out perfect labels on the first try. If you’ve managed to do it perfectly on the first try, then keep it to yourself because the rest of us are pretty sure it is a conspiracy to sell more labels and more printer ink.
Oh the printer ink.
And good luck if you are trying to print out return address labels, because those bastards are a new level of elite label printing. I understand why some people buy dedicated label printers and watch them spit out one label at a time — because printing on sheets of labels is maddening. My printer can print out an amazing looking photo with perfect color accuracy, but asking it to print out text on a label in a straight line is like asking a cat to not be an asshole.
Chickenpox
I got chickenpox once and I am basically immune for life now — pretty cool. Same is true for many particularly nasty diseases. And no, I’m not about to say the Flu or a cold, it makes sense they are slightly different every year because they feel like a different kind of bullshit each year. No I’m talking about my seasonal fucking allergies.
Why do I never become immune to them?
I don’t know, maybe I would rather be immune to allergies than I would be to chickenpox, is there some radio buttons I can click on and off to create the perfect cocktail of immunities for me? Because seasonal allergies are a bitch. I have to wear safety glasses, gloves, and a dust mask just to mow my lawn.
And it’s not like the flu or a cold where the bastards are changing every year. It’s the same evil pollen attacking me each year and making me look like a teenager going through his first break up — for months at a time.
So good job body, protecting me from a disease which is increasingly less common and instead kicking my ass with allergies every year.
Seeing the Obvious
I’ll notice that slightly askew picture on the wall two doors down, but completely not notice the color of the walls themselves. How the hell is that possible? I fancy myself a keen observer, but a lot of the obvious stuff can, and will, go missing with me.
There’s probably medical reasons why this is, about what the eye can and cannot focus on, but I much prefer to think we focus on what interests us. I find the skewed imperfect nature of buildings and decorations to be more interesting than the grander vision of wall colors. Whatever the reason, there is no getting around the fact that I am going to notice that cobweb, while completely not realizing that everyone else at the party is using a stylus with their phones — actually I’ll notice that — but I won’t notice what anybody is wearing.
Site Traffic
Why is my site traffic lower than ever, but RSS subscribers are higher than ever? Think about this: more people than ever are saying “this is a must read site for me” and yet fewer people are actually visiting the site.
I like to think people just never leave their RSS readers, but RSS readers are largely shitty places to read things so I have to question that assumption. My site design is much better looking, I mean right?
Even still, this is likely because I don’t have analytics anymore so every time I go to look at them it just shows 0. Zero people are visiting the site while 8,000+ are subscribing to RSS. It makes no sense at all — truthfully though, even before I stopped using analytics this was a very obvious trend.
I can’t wrap my head around it.
I know these are not mysteries in the sense that they are probably known by someone.
There are probably easily found out answers, which have all been well documented, but they are mysteries to me and I hope they are never solved in my own mind. They are far more interesting to try and solve myself than they are harmful to not know the answer.
I hope you have your own mysteries too, and I hope that you don’t attempt to solve those and instead revel in the mystery.