361–370 of 1001 posts
I thought colorblindness tests were designed to be tricky and subtle, so I always passed them through very close inspection. I'm just colorblind.
Monopoly. If the player elects not to buy the property he lands on, it gets auctioned to the other players. This oft unfollowed rule makes the game 100x more fun when followed.
I apparently hold chopsticks incorrectly. I am a white guy so it’s not like this is my culture—I just started holding them the way I do as a kid in sushi restaurants and no one ever corrected me. I found out when I married my wife, who is from Taiwan. Here’s the kicker though: I’m more dexterous with chopsticks than even she is. I can pick and place a single grain of rice, or hold the most slippery noodles with ease.…
Do you hold the moving one like a pencil and let the other one rest on your ring finger? I had always done this and was eventually told that you're really supposed to use only three fingers. But after trying it that way for a while, I found it limited my dexterity quite a bit, and went back to the pencil method. Surprisingly, I did it in China for a month-long work trip and nobody batted an eye.
Now I work hard on being friendly, curious and kind towards others.
Peeling bananas. I used to open them from the hard stem bit which was not always successful, but it turns out that if you pinch them at the other end, they open up much easier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8svUCSuMS4
Not using an electric toothbrush. First time I used one it felt like I'd had a proper dental cleaning. An extremely half-assed effort with that kind of brush beats a thorough one with a manual brush. I thought they were a gimmick, but no, they're amazing.
On a similar dental hygiene note, I was told I should brush before having breakfast, coffee etc. It always stood to reason to me that it makes more sense to just eat my first meal and drink, then brush, to keep a cleaner state of my teeth for longer but supposedly according to a few dentists I spoke with, the protection you get from the first brush is more significant than removing those first food particles. Chances…
My father said to me: "I like a shower better than a bath, but ugh, that first blast of cold water when you turn it on is always a bit shocking." Me: "Why don't you turn on the shower, wait for it to get warm, then get in?" Him, realizing he'd been using a shower wrong for over 6 decades: "... huh."
Related: you can buy "hot water recirculation systems" to keep the water hot in your shower. When the water in your hot water pipes gets cold, it dumps it into your cold water pipes. Therefore the water isn't wasted. This can save a lot of water if you're the type to let your shower run until it is warm. So some jurisdictions encourage their installation.
Worrying and arguing about things in the future. I wasted so much time and energy on this but as I get older I've realised there is so little of what we can actually control vs what we think we can do. Most of the time just saying Yes and waiting for things to actually happen is so much easier. A lot of time what you worry about never happens and if it does it isn't always as bad as you make things out to be in your…
I feel this strongly, but it's very hard for me to stop worrying anyways. Any specific tips?