I lost my headphones. It was on a Thursday, I came home, parked my bike, climbed up the stairs, came through the doors and went into the apartment. Some time between the parking of the bike and being inside the apartment I took of my headphones, which I use almost all day every day - listening to podcasts to keep my brain entertained, and later that day I could not find them. I got puzzled, I usually put them in my pocket or on my nightstand stand-in (which is a chair), but now they were nowhere to be found. I found it odd, so I searched the apartment - nothing. I asked the kids if they had scrounged them but they flatly denied it. Strange. I searched all the clothes I had been wearing - nothing. Not around my bike or in the stairwell. Over the coming two weeks I went through my behavior, I analyzed my movements and tried to find clues and hints. I started to get a sensation that I had put them on a hook, thinking that - yea, this is not my usual place to put them but I will remember cause this is a hook (or something). But it was not a real memory, just a hint of a memory. So I searched all the hooks in the apartment, not once but several times over the following days. Finally I said to myself that - to heck with it I'll accept my loss and get on with my life. Which of course I could not, not for the monetary setback (they are nothing fancy, just little better than what you get with your phone) but for the reason that - If I can loose something like that in such a well declared space I must truly be loosing my mind. I knew I had them when I parked my bike, I took them of before I showered a few minutes after coming home and that night they were gone. So I kept looking. Two weeks after the incident I was standing in the kitchen and one of my sons was out on the balcony and he asked me something and I happened to turn my head just right and There, on a hook next to the balcony door on which we hang kitchen towels and oven mitts, there they were. Right in the open but a totally illogical place to hang them on. My mind is calm now. I have not lost it.
So what does that have to do with House? I don't know if you too see the parallel, but maybe you do: There is an episode in which he gets a water leak in his apartment. The repair guy tells him that this must come from someone pulling on the pipes and House retorts that No, why would I do that? Who pulls on pipes? My memory is vague here but I have it in my mind that he goes through all possible scenarios in his mind the following couple of days, he tries to analyze what might have caused the leak and he can not come up with anything. But then, then he takes a bath, and to get out of the bath he uses his cane to pull himself up, he uses it by hooking it over a pipe and then we see the light bulb turning on inside his head, he can now see the answer, he now know he is not crazy.
It is sometimes hard to analyze even yourself.
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Another short note on the same theme..
Back in eight grade I sometimes found that my fingernails on my right hand were partially white. I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on. I put my brain on the task but to no avail. It scraped off, so it was some kind of paint I supposed, but why would I have paint on my fingernails? Then one day I walked down the corridor in the school and I realized what I was doing - I was letting my right hands fingers touch the wall as I was walking along, rasping along on the corrugated wallpaper, picking up small amounts of paint as they did...
