I always lift the lid and check inside the toilet before I sit down, just in case there is a snake in the bowl. Why? Because I once read about a lady who found a snake in the toilet. It had somehow slithered up through the sewer pipe and into the toilet bowl, where it coiled itself for the evening. I vividly remember that story. I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but I remember some random story I read two decades ago about a stranger with a monster in the loo. It seared itself into the recesses of my mind, to be retrieved with each relieve.
Now, let's say on average, I've "gone" seven times a day from infancy to middle age. For 48 years, 3 months and 1 week, that's -- hold on, let me get the abacus -- 123,319 times, not counting leap years, when I've called nature. And not a one of them ever had me dialing up a snake in the bowl.
Do I focus on the 123,319 times when something went right rather than the one time that something went wrong -- to some other poor schmuck and not even to me? Nope. I still check. It seems to be working for me.
At Thanksgiving, my mother put cranberry sauce in one dish: a long, slender green dish with a small diamond pattern pressed into the glass. No other container was ever allowed to hold cranberry sauce, and, what's more, no other food was ever allowed in that dish. Why?
Because that was the cranberry sauce dish.
I now am the proud owner of one certain long, slender green dish with a small diamond pattern pressed into the glass, and I've yet to put anything in it other than cranberry sauce. Perhaps I should attach a note inside so, in case something happens to me, the next owner will know the protocol.
Let's face it, we humans do some pretty odd stuff and think it "normal." We set clocks ahead several minutes so we won't be late, only to subtract in our heads the number of minutes we added so we know how many minutes we still have to procrastinate. We keep expired food we won't eat and wouldn't eat if it hadn't expired, which is why it expired. In the early 2000s, I tossed an unopened jar of peanut butter with a "sell by" date of 1984 from my mother's kitchen. She didn't like peanut butter (obviously), but she dug it out of the trash and schooled me about waste. I threw it out again seven years later.
Trapper John will drive 10 minutes looking for the perfect parking spot as far as possible from our destination in order to "beat the crowds" and be the "first ones out," which never happens because we have to walk 82 miles from the building to the car. And I'm already three to seven minutes late, depending on which clock you read.
That's enough to make me flip my lid and have a hissing fit.