Several times this week male-pattern blindness has been brought to my attention, first by my friend, Donna, who raised the issue of men’s refrigerator myopia. She wondered what prevents males from finding whatever we’re looking for.
Husband: “Darling, what in the bloody hell did you do with the mayonnaise?”
Wife: “I don’t know, Honey, I haven’t used it lately.”
Husband: “Well, when you take it out of the fridge and don’t put it back, we will all get botulism and die.”
Wife: “Isn’t that it, a couple of inches from your hand in the door shelf where we always keep it?”
Husband: “Oh. Well, it was hidden behind the tube of wasabi.”
This has been an ongoing issue in my own home since a couple of years ago when my wife escalated to the insidious practice of hiding my things where I put them. There are few things more annoying than, after a prolonged fruitless search, having someone else find the missing object where I set it.
Take yesterday. My calculator. She obviously took it off my office desk to work on her taxes, leaving it god-only-knows-where in the labyrinth of our home. Useless to ask her, since she would feel guilty immediately and deny it. Lucky for her I found it close to its usual spot where someone had put it while reorganizing my papers.
Particularly in my home, I am vexed by a perverse intergalactic cloaking device that assiduously conceals the very object of my current desire. My wife, however, has an intuitive grasp of object locations. I suspect this is part and parcel of a primordial nesting instinct. She can find things with the subtle, fractally inspired template that she carries in her amygdala, the almond-shaped limbic mass that’s also loaded with crystal-clear emotional memories of my misplays since we met in the ’70s, e.g., “This is just like the time you told the Clarks we’d bring chicken salad without consulting me.”
I don’t remember the incident, don’t care for chicken salad, and who are the Clarks?
Lately, I have come to feel this location phenomenon is inversely related to the asking-for-directions issue. Let me elucidate, since I am quite comfortable in that arena. There are hundreds of good reasons never to ask for directions. It must be here somewhere or else why am I driving on this street?
Those people don’t know. They’ll spout gibberish and I’ll get farther afield trying to follow their instructions. Conceptually, there is no such thing as “lost” when one is going someplace. We have left X and are in transit to Y. Some prefer Euclid. I prefer Chaos Theory. I am here. It is there. With cheerful persistence, sooner or later we will both be there. Case closed. Everyone knows the straightest distance between two points on the globe is a circle.
As several philosophers have expounded, a problem is only a problem if one considers it so. I don’t conceive wandering toward a destination as a problem. Rather, it is an opportunity. Fraught with the bloom of potential. Only the narrow-minded would toss an expeditious-arrival into the equation. And speaking of equation, Einstein pointed out space and time are relative. Thus, no matter how you slice it, X to Y is an adventure based on perception.
As Heisenberg postulated, we can never conclusively know what we are and where we are at the same time. In this instance, it is imminently clear what we are: a couple arguing in the front seat of an automobile. Therefore, where we are becomes impossible to establish. If I knew where we were in space, I would simultaneously lose my identity. And since Zeno conclusively proved we can’t get there anyway, what use could inquiring about directions possibly serve?
Most reasonable people will conclude that asking for directions obscures a destination and prolongs a journey.
And conversely, asking my wife where she put the clothing/utensil/document that I was working with a few minutes ago allows me to find it immediately. Who actually placed what, where, is immaterial and assessing blame will be difficult now that I have disarmed the video cameras.
According to my Wikipedia Research, Isaac Newton rather closed the book on this subject with his first two laws.
An object at rest will be in the wrong place. An object in motion will be moving in the wrong direction.
Thank you for allowing me to clear that up.
Respectfully submitted,
Your Positional Logician, Charles Price
Charlie Price divides his time betweem homes in Redding and Dunsmuir. He’s a business coach, consultant, writer and author of “Dead Connection” and “Lizard People.”
