Monday, January 12, 2009

Mulder? Scully? A Little Help, Here.

I’ve noticed that my socks keep missing. Except that it’s only one sock. I have no rational explanation for this. I know that I put two socks in the laundry pile. I even know that I put two socks into the wash at the same time. Yet somewhere between the washer and dryer, one sock vanishes.

One sock vanishing in and of itself would not be a problem. The problem is that eventually the wayward sock will find its way home. And that messes with my mind. Given its fragile state, my mind is not a good thing to mess with.

There are explanations for all this. It could be that one of the machines eats the sock for a short period of time, then regurgitates it later, optimally timed to jack with my tiny little mind. There could be small elves in the house that take one sock and hide it, for the same reason. The little bastards also mess with my ballpoint pens, and from time to time steal one of the remotes for the tv or dvd player. If I manage to catch one, I will both prove the existence of malevolent supernatural beings, and create a moral dilemma for whatever taxidermist I take it to in order to have it stuffed.

A friend of mine once postulated that dimensional rifts appear around object from time to time, throwing that object into a parallel dimension. At what is probably only an instant in the parallel universe, several days or weeks might pass in ours. Then the dimensional rift will re-open, throwing the object back into our world, often at a slightly different point than where the object originally fell through the portal. This theory makes a lot of sense.

I have ruled out human error by a simple experiment. I have been throwing the orphan socks into a bucket. Every once in awhile, I add socks and check to see whether or not one of the new socks matches up with what I already have in the bucket. One night, I went through the bucket and sorted socks by type and color, getting the ones that were close together, and then matching them from there. On the first night, no matches. I then hid the bucket in the fireplace.

The very next night, without any additions on my part, I removed the bucket from its hiding spot in the fireplace and repeated the process. There were three matches. One match was for a set of socks that has been orphaned for at least a year.

This is not natural.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is one of the reasons why I love you sooo much!

Love always,
Pookey Bear*


* Actually 1/2 Radioactive Were-Koala and 1/2 Fiendish Dire Bear. I don't know where the Pookey comes from. :(

Home on the Range said...

Sounds like the work of Anoia -The minor goddess of Things That Stick in Drawers, Anoia is praised by rattling a drawer and crying "How can it close on the damned thing but not open with it? Who bought this? Do we ever use it?" She also eats corkscrews and is responsible for Things Down The Backs of Sofas, and is considering moving into stuck zips.

(first seen in Pratchett's Going Postal).

Kyle The Opinionated said...

I just got finished with THUD! and MAKING MONEY. I think I'm hooked on Prachett now. The best writer of his type since Douglas Adams left us.

All I know is there are supernatural forces at work. What I can't understand is why they are picking on my socks....Why can't they make it rain, end famine, or something useful like that?