A little less clueless

What I’m about to confess is not going to make me look like the next contestant on “Jeopardy!”

Thank goodness my car has internet maps and tells me where I’m headed. Before that, I couldn’t turn a paper map fast enough to figure out whether I was supposed to go right, left or straight. It’s hard to figure out where you’re going when you’re already turned around.

Speaking of things being turned around, a couple of weeks ago I became aggravated because the toilet paper was facing in the wrong direction. How did I know it was wrong? Because I had watched something about it on television.

When I asked BBB why he had put the roll on backward, he looked at me as though I had swallowed an extra dose of stupid pills.

“I just take off the empty roll, put on the new one and use what I need. I didn’t know there was a right or wrong way.”

It’s a quandary, my friends. I still can’t wrap my head around how a thermos knows whether it’s supposed to keep coffee hot or Coca-Cola cold. How do it know?

For years, my pea brain couldn’t understand the number of seconds in two minutes on a microwave. If I pressed 120, it counted down from 120 to 119, 118 and so on. But when it reached 100, instead of continuing to 99, it suddenly jumped to 59 seconds.

Let us all bow our heads and give thanks that I was not put in charge of designing airplane engines.

A gazillion years ago, I read a newspaper headline that said:

POLLS SAY KENNEDY TO BEAT NIXON BY X %.

I asked my mother why people made so many jokes about Polish people and yet relied on them to take the pulse of America. She looked at me sideways.

“They mean polls, as in Gallup polls.”

Oh.

I’ve come a long way since “Poles” and “polls,” but some things still do not compute. For example, how can a catering job take two solid hours to set up but only 20 minutes to break down?

I still believe in love at first sight. Ask BBB. Unfortunately, my other instincts tend to arrive about one minute too late, usually just after I’ve received a parking ticket.

Basically, if I’m given a 50-50 chance, I am guaranteed to get it 100% wrong.

I think it may be contagious. If I can’t find the paintbrush cleaner, I guarantee it will suddenly appear within 10 minutes of my returning from the hardware store with a brand-new bottle. The same rule applies to sunglasses, shoes, keys and computers.

I still can’t explain this one: I can be shopping in a mall when beautiful Italian music begins playing, and suddenly I’m capable of bursting into full Italian opera, or at least something once sung by Andrea Bocelli.

Apparently, this questionable musical wisdom came from my mother. When we were children, she would iron our school clothes late at night while I drifted off to sleep listening to Jerry Vale, “The Barber of Seville,” Puccini’s “La Bohème” or “The Marriage of Figaro.”

I may not always know which way the toilet paper goes, how long two minutes lasts or where I left my sunglasses.

But somewhere inside this slightly confused head of mine, an Italian opera has been playing perfectly for years.

Go figure.