the struggle is real

[marcicat]

As someone who STILL cannot remember the mnemonic about how many days each month has (luckily a small child taught me how to count them out on my knuckles instead), I was so excited that I finally memorized “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.” (It, uh, still took a long time.)

Here’s the thing, though: they rhyme is So Much Less Helpful than one might think. There I was, staring at the cap for the oil tank in my car, and it’s got the little grippy handle, and it just happens to be that the handle is straight across the middle (9:00 to 3:00 if the cap was a clock face).

And I’m telling myself, ‘righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.’ And I’m making the L-shape with my thumb and finger, reminding myself which side is the left (also not as helpful as one would like, but I write with my right hand, and that’s useful). And I CANNOT FIGURE OUT which way to turn the cap. Because my brain turned “left” and “right” into sides, rather than directions, so either way I twist the cap, half of the handle is getting closer to the right, and half of it is getting closer to the left.

It was a problem. Why, oh why, couldn’t the rhyme have been about clockwise and counter-clockwise???

[Note: I did, eventually, figure it out. As one does.]

Mirrored from The Marci Rating System.