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.

For Those Of You Who Call Me Lazy

For the last two weeks, I've been wearing a pair of cargo pants with the important button missing. Actually, the button isn't even missing, it's sitting right in front of me, next to my laptop; I can just reach it if I slide my left pinkie off the keyboard. The fly zipper is fine so I don't have to devote one hand to a full-time task of preventing indecent exposure, but a zipper can only do so much and every thirty seconds of walking results in a need for readjustment. You would think it'd be tempting to just go and sew the button back on, an enterprise that would take all of two minutes, but then you'd be forgetting how manly, patient and just plain hardworking I am. I am so uncompromisingly hardworking and NOT lazy that I am willing to lift my pants up and rezip the zipper ninety-six times a day just to avoid those easy cop-out two minutes of sewing. This little piggy takes the hard road.

I have strong precedents in this direction. When I still had my previous laptop, an ancient pre-Internet dinosaur that ran on ant and squirrel power and majored in freezing, there was one time when the keyboard really tested my patience. A bunch of keys didn't work no matter what gauge finger you hit them with. The offenders included four letters, among them 's' and 't,' the left Shift key, Backspace, and most irritatingly - the Esc key. The problem was obviously the nuts and bagel bites and milk and cereal that slowly accumulated under the keys after weeks of use. The most popular solution is to do some cleaning, but instead of being the typical lazybones and buying a can of air and a straw and a slave to press the button and two more slaves to aim the nozzle, I put in some extra effort. I held the four letters in the clipboard - pasting and deleting the ones I didn't need, I slowly taught my right pinkie to use the right Shift key, I highlighted and used the Del key instead of Backspace, and God knows what I did for the Esc key. Probably just restarted my computer. When you're in that kind of situation and you're in dire need of the Esc key, it's like living in that silly quote from Windows hell "Press any key to quit or any other key to continue." Except none of my keys worked.

Anyway, this went on for two months. Finally, when I felt I had mastered patience, I ordered my dad to clean the keyboard for me. He did (instantly, of course), and I was back to appearing normal.

This strategy applies to most situations in life. People love saying "Why put off till tomorrow what you can do today?" or sometimes the exact opposite, but they never think "Why don't I just suck it up, and stop making things easy for myself? Why don't I not pay these taxes, and see what happens?" When I see a button missing on my pants, I don't think "eh, I'll fix it later," nor do I think "I better go fix this right now." I don't try to save myself work either way. I think "hey, a button's missing. Let me just pull the old pants up a bit and zip up...there we go, that'll hold for another ten seconds."

If we always do things the easy way, by doing them at the right time, we miss out so much invaluable suffering. And the density of life lessons in suffering exceeds that of in joy by far. If I go and fix my pants right now, I'll learn absolutely nothing from this incident, and I'm not one to waste opportunities to learn.

More examples from my wonderful dictionary:

邮件 - mail

警方一直截查我的邮件。
The police had been intercepting my mails.

我打开了邮件，惊讶地发现了一个打碎的花瓶。
I opened my mail and was surprised to see a broken vase.

一起 - together

那个妓女和逃犯一起被杀死了。
The harlot was killed together with the fugitive.

擅长 - to be good at

他擅长绘画。
He excels in painting.

她擅长绘画。
She is clever at painting.