The Unquenchable Thirst For Idiocy

I was vacuuming downstairs today, a rare treat bestowed upon me by my loving mother, and I was cleaning out stuff from under the couch to avoid having to perform mouth to mouth on the vacuum cleaner. Couches are magical creatures, kind of like Asian people. There's some as of yet undiscovered law of physics along the lines of: "looking at a blanket strewn across a couch, it's impossible to tell whether or not there's an Asian person sleeping under it." I learned this one by experience - sitting down on innocent-looking couches only to receive a dragon kick to the head.

Anyway, couches also have a magical quality - the amount of space underneath a couch is greater than it appears, usually by a factor of 12. You can probably fit an entire apartment's worth of stuff under most couches. This is why when people want to clear up some space in their apartment, they go out and buy a couch or three.

So I was cleaning out the stuff from under the couch, and it was all Michelle's things that she hasn't used since she was in Mom's uterus. Being a natural born leader, I ordered Michelle to take it all down to the basement. Being a smart little Jewish girl, she negotiated me down to half of the items.

As I set up my vacuuming gear, I watched Michelle follow my orders. Trying to save time and effort in the very humanly unintuitive way, she was building a veritable tower of "STUFF" in her arms, balancing it like she was at a Cirque du Soleil audition. There was absolutely no way she could carry it all down in one trip, but this didn't phase her in the least.

Now, I'm an expert at this method of "saving time and effort." I've written books or at least this one blog entry about it. I sacrificed my first MP3 player to this technique back in 2002. And I'm proud/ashamed to say that I have learned absolutely nothing in terms of not repeating my mistakes. I am incurably optimistic. In her place, I would have been doing the exact same thing except perhaps with less grace. So naturally (I never miss an opportunity to be a hypocrite) I tried my best to make her feel like a complete idiot and unleashed torrents of derision as her leaning tower became a falling tower at every third step. With my encouragement and her innate talent for mulishness, the one-minute task stretched easily to ten.

I was thinking about why we're both such imbeciles in this respect, and I think the main problem here is the "but now I'll never know" factor, as in "but now I'll never know if I could have done it in one trip without smashing anything/everything into a million pieces." When you try and fail and it takes you ten minutes, you know for sure that you would have done it faster had you taken several trips. But when you do it in several trips, when you're done you're still in the dark. You don't know what would have been the best way. So really, it's the thirst for knowledge that's driving this idiocy, not laziness.

Phew, one more charge of laziness skirted.