Insanity...

...doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. I go nuts every time I loose the tweezers, a headband, a bottle of nail polish, a screwdriver, a certain color LED. I look in all the usual locations these things are found in. In the bathroom for the toiletries for example. I'll keep checking the same three drawers over and over, plus the makeup caddy. I'll keep going through each, getting more and more frustrated. Kyle is used to the "Have you seen my _____?", "Really, do you remember seeing it anywhere?". I start to curse myself and either find the damn thing on the TV stand in about 3 minutes, or I give up for the time being and said object becomes my next White Whale. 

Not what my drawer looks like img source The Organizing Boutique

More like mine but from The Organizing Boutique, maybe I should call them

I have absolutely no association with these guys, they just had good pics. I didn't want you guys to see my real draws. 

I was into orange then, give me a break.

The big item on the White Whale list is my "head tube", you know, one of those Buffwear things the contestants on Survivor got to identify teams by color. I use those things constantly. The bright multi-colored one has been missing nearly a year. Our house is pretty tidy, so I must have put it somewhere really good. I used to do little searches through the drawers, under the bed, under the spare room bed, like some tragic grieving person that can't give up the loss of a loved one. Why am I always surprised when people ask me "Are you making a joke? They aren't really dead are they?" I always wondered what sick and twisted individual would bother to play such a prank. 

For the screwdriver and LED's I check my tool box, my electronics box, the garage, and under the spare bed (I keep some haunt stuff under there like my Bucky skull, don't tell my mom, who uses that room when she stays). I'll just keep going through those spaces over and over, getting caught in a negative feedback loop of information that never gets better, but   somehow, by sheer will I can make the object appear. 

This makes me sound like a hell of an investigator right? Here is my reasoning for why it isn't all that bad: I'm a  well trained Archaeologist, my job is to find anomalies on or in the ground usually. Sometimes up in the air. What do I mean you wonder? Say I'm walking through the high Sierras in the old Gold Rush territory. An old overgrown scar on a tree, or several in most cases isn't how trees normally grow. Maybe they were put there on purpose to mark a trail. My eyes key into that. I scan the ground for miles looking at what most people see as dirt and rocks and plants and stuff. I can recognize a rock chip as garbage left over from the process of making an arrowhead. That clump of plants over there are not indigenous, but the early settlers brought them in and we might be in an old historic settlement. 

As a Medicolegal Death Investigator, the same skill often applies. That bruise has a shape to it, or a straight edge. Something might be amiss. There might be a bloody mangled dead body in the room, but that drawer looks like it was rummaged through. Why is the trash empty in the same unkempt house. I am trained to see if a body has been moved without my even touching it. I am well known for my first call as an investigator for having seen direct evidence of a crime that wasn't discovered until the next day. It just didn't add up. 

So back to my insanity at home. I look in a bathroom drawer full of a few years worth of hair, beauty, and other toiletries a woman may have and it all looks normal to me. 1 item out of 100 (I have cluttered drawers) of little silver colored clippers, tweezers, scissors, barrettes, stray jewelry, are all normal. Nothing stands out, so I have to keep revisiting and rifling though for an object so familiar to me that I might not even notice it missing at first, second, or third glance. 

Then the Archaeologist in me starts an excavation. At least there is method to my madness.

PS. I found the F*(%!^&! Tweezers within an hour of this post less than a foot away from my face last I was in the damn bathroom. Kyle said he didn't know I was missing them and saw them there the whole time. I told him I didn't ask because I didn't want to bother him with it. Shows me.