95 theses (give or take a few)

I feel great today. So good, in fact, that I will put several of my own pet theories on the chopping block for the benefit of my readership. Happy hunting?
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It seemed pretty natural to wonder why I was not enjoying the situation as I sat stopped on 35 southbound. I was really pissed about not having taken the smart way, West River Parkway to Minnehaha Parkway, even though it really wouldn't have cut that much off the trip. But, at least I would have been moving the whole time, and that would have somehow been way better.

Postulate #1: We hate being stuck in traffic for the same reason we want more money.

So what I decided was that the universal hatred of being caught in bumper-to-bumper traffic is not because it makes people late but because it makes us feel powerless. You can't go forward, you can't go back, you can't change lanes, you just have to sit there until a gap opens up. There is, as far as I can tell, nothing you can do from the inside of your auto to make the cars in front of you move (and if there is a way, please share this knowledge with the rest of us). And because of that, you lack the freedom to go where you want to go and do what you want to do. And the freedom to do what you want to do is exactly the reason why you want more money than you have. So maybe the greedy among us really just appreciate personal freedom to a larger degree, or maybe people that take the roundabout way are also, in general, greedier than average, or maybe I'm just off base.
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Not to brag, but I'm pretty sure I have the spiritual gift of Tetris. If there was a Tetris section on the SAT, I probably would have gotten a free ride to Stanford. So, of course, I play a lot of it, and I've observed that when I do, the most comfortable position to put my legs in seems to be with my left ankle on top of my right knee. This is weird, because in almost every other situation, I prefer the mirror image of that position, with my right foot on my left knee. Why?

Postulate #2: The right hemisphere of the brain handles tetris, and increased activity in the right brain causes the left side of the body to be used preferentially.

We know that we all have our wires crossed when it comes to motor functions. The right side of your brain controls the muscles on the left side of your body. This is why when people flash a fake smile at you, the left corner of their mouth often goes higher than the right. Faking a smile is mostly taken care of by the right half of the brain. So it would make sense that the spatial abstraction required of my right brain by tetris "overrides" my default left-brain dominance, causing me to change the way I sit.
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Who was this Valentine dude? The patron saint of corporate pawns?

Postulate #3: A rose by any other name would still be a ripoff.

Sweet lemons? Yeah, maybe. But I still think it's true.
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Have you ever noticed that the vast majority of the memories you have from high school were from 11th and 12th grade? I realize that the contained events of the last half of high school happened more recently, so they should be fresher in your head, but still, there has to be something else going on here.

Postulate #4: The improved recollection of your junior and senior years of high school is caused largely by being able to legally operate a car for their duration.

Sometimes, you forget stuff because it's just not worth remembering. And it's amazing how much more interesting stuff I did once I didn't have to run it by my parents.
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Ice-cream headaches, or brain freeze, or whatever you want to call it is caused by constriction in the blood vessels in your throat. The heat contained in your neck is transferred to the cold matter sliding down your esophagus as a consequence of thermodynamics, and as the temperature in your arteries decreases, they contract ever so slightly. This means less blood gets to your brain, so it complains.

Postulate #5: Wrapping a warm, wet towel around your neck will enable you to slam your milkshake as fast as you want.

This is actually verifiable by experiment, and I would have tried it already but I never have any ice cream around. A dollar to the first person to test this.