This postFirst off, can I just say wow to the power of StumbleUpon? Yesterday’s post about square watermelons got over 14,000 views within 24 hours. That’s insane. If only my other posts were that popular… :P
Anyway, today’s post will be a hodgepodge miscellanea of assorted items.
1. Do you put staples in straight (parallel with the top or left edge of the paper) or at a 45 degree angle? I’ve always been a straighter, myself, but today I got to thinking about it and realized that the angled version probably introduces less stress on the paper. Interesting…
2. Walking through thick crowds is a lot like playing a video game. If you focus on any one person, you lose your perception of the whole, and it’s easy to then crash into someone and go down. But if you stop focusing on the individual people and instead focus on the spaces in between them, your peripheral vision picks up on each person — like radar — and you can successfully navigate your way. At least that’s how it works for me. :)
3. Speaking of walking, I’ve found that if I think about walking, my walk gets all awkward and gangly and too self-conscious to actually get anywhere. You have to do it without thinking about it. Sometimes I think relationships are the same way.
4. I’ve been falling asleep in meetings a lot lately. It’s not that I’m bored; I just can’t keep my eyes open. It’s always vaguely uncomfortable when you open your eyes to find someone looking at you. Did they notice you were sleeping, or did they just happen to look at you right as you opened them? Maybe you could pretend you were meditating, or perhaps it was just an extended blink. Riiiight. As long as your limbs don’t go a-flailing when you come to with a start.
5. Same sort of thing with members of the opposite gender. You see someone attractive, but as soon as they turn to look at you, your eyes bounce off in some other direction. And then they come back, and the other person’s bounce away, and so on. Not that it’s always like that, but it often ends up that way.
6. Why is the word “yawn” contagious? Is it the word itself, the phonological characteristics? Or is it the idea? (Does saying the equivalent of “yawn” in other languages produce the same yawning effect?) How many times have you yawned in reading this paragraph? (I’m up to two or three. Make that four.)
7. I used to dog-ear books a lot. (Fold the corners down to mark where I was.) I felt bad about it, of course, since it’s not exactly kosher — and no, I didn’t do it to library books — but it wasn’t until the last five or six years that I stopped. Now I use bookmarks. (Bookmarks of my own make, I might add. Of all the things I’ve made, those bookmarks have got to be the ones I use most often.) Every once in a while, though, I’ll fold a corner down, just for old times’ sake. Got to break that habit. (Along with nailbiting.)
