Screw black holes and the holographic universe theory.
No one cares. What I really require is a detailed, scientific explanation for:
Why I have to spend my days trying to free up knots and kinks.
(Knot what I meant…)
Finally, the beautiful minds of the world unraveled mine by explaining why knot-unraveling is so not easy. You know what I mean – there are the Christmas lights (an obvious one). Or those headphones your put in your gym bag’s outer pocket for fifteen minutes tops (and then once parked at point B, your hafta spend the same length of time you did driving there, solving this Rubick’s cube level electrical spaghetti puzzle). Oh, and (the next two are for the ladies) if you’re a girl, jostled jewelry’s yet another dreaded task you’ll have to deal with – especially on travel. God bless you if you take a chained something-or-other that isn’t pinned down inside its box like a high school lab worm about to be dissected – ‘cause upon arrival, that thing will have morphed into an orgiastic wad of mating snakes made of metal. And finally: the delicates. Oh, lawdy. Particularly thongs. All I want for Christmas is a washing machine delicate cycle setting that doesn’t result in what looks like the discarded lingerie pile following a sorority scissor sister soiree.
Then, there’s our luscious locks.
(Toss and turn as much as I do and conditioner is your liquid equivalent to jaws of life each A.M.)
From wires and chains to tresses and crotch cloth, we spend too much time untying things.
What gives? Why must we live in this bondage?
Enter “Knot Theory”.
The answer’s so obvious it’s painful. According to science, it boils down to probability and motion. When it comes to a cord, there’s generally only one way for it to remain straight. However, there’s a miscellany of ways it could form knots because knots can form on top of preexisting knots. And those knots-on-knots can combine an infinite (yes infinite) number of ways. The possibilities are so endless, they say, that you might never see the same style of knot twice your whole life. Add in a few things like temperature changes while in storage (which can cause expansion and contraction) or movement as with headphones in a pocket (or with TSA taking turns competitively juggling my jewelry filled luggage – which I’m only twelve hundred percent positive they do) and boom. All you’re missing from this impromptu un-fun game is a screen with Jigsaw as your host.
But here in MAPSland, we’re all about finding treatments and cures for such diagnoses.
So, how do you undo a string of anything? Sadly, there’s no blanket answer.
For example – for plastic or thick prime-knot ties, they suggest not tugging, but first this:
(And then shove that twisted part back into the knot. The whole thing loosens.)
As for headphone cords?
Not terribly different from the above thing. Hold the free end in your right hand and the clusterfckk in the left, then slowly move the free end back into the mess. Sounds counter-intuitive, but once you do, you’ll see a loose loop in that ball of wire start to move. If you let go of the plug end and pull that loose bit, the plug will come through. Congratulations. You’ve officially conquered the first step in your Odyssey of de-knotting this monster. Keep repeating this process till everything’s unjumbled.
But for jewelry, I can’t say I like the suggestion:
There’s this whole multi-stepped process I glossed over it, so I may have it wrong – but I’m pretty sure they mentioned it involves baby oil, a needle, and then you have to summon that one mystical creature from Pan’s Labyrinth afterward to cast a spell that removes the oil. Instead, when it comes to jewelry, I find the same application helpful that works for my freshly washed nether garments. You see, Einstein once said you can’t solve a problem using the thinking that got you there. Lucky for us, these vexing threads can’t and don’t think. Which means we can solve the problem we’re presented with – using the means that caused it. One day, while looking at a spherical twine of Victoria’s secret (not dissimilar visually to one of those rubber band balls), I innately went for a new method. And it goes thusly:
1. Grab one loop of cloth with thumb and pointer of right hand.
2. Do the same with left hand, simultaneously.
3. Shake the whole thing like an unwelcome newborn on prom night till it starts to loosen.
4. Put down.
5. Repeat with two other areas of the ball.
6. The whole thing starts to come apart after doing this twice or thrice.
And just like that, the same jostling motion that caused the problem – fixes it.
See? There may be a science to why problems happen.
But sometimes it takes spastic, seemingly non-scientific measures like my tried, tied, untied, and true ones to fix them.
