BEDA 3: Tuning out.

The human brain is exceptionally adept at tuning stuff out. I bring this up because it seems like the last couple of days have been conspiring to remind me of this at every opportunity.

Like, did you know that every login page on my uni's website is presented as a little speech bubble with a person next to it? Who is this girl? How long has she been there? How does she feel about being seen by thousands of people every single day? And more importantly, how does she feel about being ignored by thousands of people every day, who just skim straight to the username/password boxes?

(This is not a desperate plea for you to consider the plight of login-page-girl. I'm sure she's totally fine.)

Or that for the last several hours, my next door neighbour has been using a leaf-blower to clean up her yard. Do you know how I noticed this? It's because of the sudden, deafening silence which I got a couple of minutes ago when she turned it off. And I mean literally deafening. Like I was afraid that I'd suddenly gone deaf.

Or the fact that we have curtains. I mean honest-to-god, seven-foot-tall lacy doilies, just hanging from the windows. If you asked me what was on the windows in the living room, I'd have said 'blinds'. Because that's what we open and close. The curtains just sit there and... well, get ignored, pretty much. And suddenly when my friends come over, I notice that they exist, probably for the first time in a decade.

(This is not a desperate plea for you to consider the plight of my curtains, either. They too, are totally fine.)

It's a pet peeve of mine when people take something small like this and try to blow it up or generalise it into some kind of life lesson, like "Oh, we should take a moment out of our day every day to appreciate the majesty of the cosmos". I mean, yeah, sure. That's great. I am all for appreciating the majesty of the cosmos. But if you appreciate it every day, then what's to stop the majesty of the cosmos becoming leaf-blower-and-login-page-grade background noise?

I'm not even going to make the "golly, we should all really notice our surroundings more and appreciate every snowflake, ain't modern society awful" call, because I honestly don't think this is a problem*.  You just don't have the mental capacity to notice all the things all the time, so you filter. It's just that... well, like a lot of the weird, rough edges of the human mind, when you run up against them, it's jarring, and a little bit surprising . Possibly even 'huh, I never noticed that login page girl before'-level surprising.**

(You should be so lucky.)

*I think modern society categorising random chunks of human psychology as a problem probably is a problem, but that's neither here nor there.
**Okay yes, I just spun an off-the-cuff observation about how I've never noticed the layout of my login page into a 500-word-long armchair psychology rant. WOO BEDA, QUALITY OVER QUANTITY AMIRITE?