"Criss Your Cross and Apple Your Sauce!"

I like science. Main reason I decided to stop pursuing science as soon as possible is that I am terrible at labs. In much the same way I'm terrible at cooking. And the two are probably related. I'm very bad at the process, largely due to my chronically shakey hands and my ability to stand around in crowded areas and look scared and useless, and then when I get to the results part, where I have to analyze whatever the experiment was about, I'm even worse. Because at least with cooking, the analysis is always the same. You eat it. Maybe you decide whether it was good or bad, I don't see why you need to stretch yourself that far. You made food. You ate the food. It's a beautiful holistic process.

But experiments are messy. You mix the chemicals and swirl the thing and look at the stuff and then something happened and at the end of any experiment in high school I'd always be left with this lost, empty, apathetic feeling. Which, if you really dug down deep was probably just me thinking, "I can't eat this."

Plus I was always the last one to finish so the whole class would be waiting on me and the teacher would get mad and then I'd be anxious and hungry and just fill in the conclusion with, "Nothing happened! We all just died a little bit!"

One thing I wish we'd been free to do more in my science classes is thought experiments. Thought experiments are all about things you could never actually do and in thought experiments I don't have to worry about my shakey brain-hands spilling hydrochloric acid on my face.

So I designed a thought experiment and I'd like to share it.

This thought experiment is intended to observe the effects of Me-Andy trying to help a group of three elderly women who are all joined at the neck on the body of a giant hound, like a cranky geriatric Cerberus, decide which v-neck t-shirt they should buy for their grandsons at Old Navy.

"I would get that one."

And then the Grandma-thing howls and covers me in flames and I stop-drop-and-roll until a Costumer Service lady comes over and helps me, but in a way that suggests she may be a tiny bit racist.

"Oh my gosh! Sir, do you need help? Quick, where's your white power now?!"

That was unnecessarily rude to a person in need of serious medical attention. This is not the time or place to be having this discussion.

And so, the conclusion of my thought experiment, the Andy Thought Experiment, is that all of this makes for a pretty poignant weekend.

In fact, from now on, this scenario will serve as a One on the Poignant scale. Which I just invented. You're welcome, Planet Earth!