here are two things I can’t work out in sixty two years of life. I just don’t understand them.

Oh, there are lots of things I don’t understand in our world. Wives confuse me. The inability of people to respond/confirm in this interconnected world (or even to be on time) throw me off. Simplistic political statements baffle me (why would you go on record posting anything like that?). The fact that people show what good drivers they are by driving badly. The world is a confusing place.

But here, I’m talking about two things that are binary simplicities that I simply have not been able to cope with. I should be able to come up with a way of always dealing with these but I fail.

The first is in model railroading. When we run trains under prototype operations (i.e. running like a real railroad) occasionally I have to back onto a siding and drop a car off. After reversing into position, I need to (A) uncouple the car from the engine and (B) reverse directions and roll away. But many, many times I’ll back up, reverse, uncouple, re-reverse, and back into the car again, recoupling. Or I decide that I’ll reverse after I uncouple but then think I’ve already reversed, so I don’t have to reverse, so I back into the car and – click – I’m coupled again. Really, I’ve been running trains since I was five years old and have not, in all that time, developed a methodology of how to do this. Drives me bugpoop crazy!

The second is, when done reading for the night, I always mean to put the bookmark facing the page I was currently reading. Makes sense. That way, I pick the book up later and, hey, at least I know roughly where I was. But no, either I forget to place the bookmark correctly and end up either reading what has already been read or I jump ahead and feel like the story just stuttered. It comes down to the fact that I don’t do it the same every time (I mean to, but those are just good intentions). And that means I spend a minute or two looking for where I was when I cut off. Frustrating.

I offer no suggestions to any of these. I’ve made countless resolutions to approach these simple tasks the same every time but have failed on roughly half my attempts. God knows why I do that. And now, after posting this, I gotta go look for my car keys (a close third place on this posting).

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