Murphy's Law
BY KARDELEN KALA (TRIN/PREP)
kala@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Sometimes life simply decides to mess with us. If you remember my last article (but then again, why would you? It suddenly seems vain to assume anyone would), I love my birthday and it's really important for me to spend it well. Incidentally, it was last week, the second day school was canceled because it suddenly started to snow so much in the middle of March, and it was nearly impossible to reach anywhere. This was Wednesday. The situation was so scary that they also canceled Thursday, also known as Kardelen's 20th birthday. And then of course, the sun was shining all day and not a single snowflake was to be found. I woke up in the morning in an extremely bad mood which only became worse with each minute. Since the invention of Facebook, a simple online message is all anyone can get from most of her friends. I was accused of listening to music too loudly by the cleaning lady on my floor (I still can't figure out what she meant as I was watching an episode of House. It hardly seems possible that it was too loud.). I put on makeup at 11 am just to feel a little better. I went to Real and basically wandered around for hours, hoping to run across someone I know so I would get to spend my birthday in someone's company. All in all, it was not a good way to spend an important day.
This experience made me think about all the things in life that can and do go wrong. How it always starts to rain as soon as you leave the hair salon, how the longest line at the supermarket is also the quickest, how toast always falls on the buttered side: in short, all the clichéd things we keep repeating because they really do happen. These form a humorous little "law" called Murphy's Law, which can be summarized with the epigram "If anything can go wrong, it will." Murphy's Law, supposedly named after an engineer called Captain Edward A. Murphy, helps us explain all the little (and sometimes bigger) misfortunes and annoyances in daily life. Because, well, almost anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Have you taken your mother's favorite shirt without telling her? Of course you are going to spill tomato sauce on it before the end of the day. Or maybe you have borrowed a really valuable book from someone; beware, because you are bound to drop it on the floor and damage it in some way. The store is always out of your favorite ice-cream flavor, especially if you are having a bad day. Someone always coughs or a mobile phone is left turned on during a listening exam (a slight bias towards language students here, I'm sorry!). If it is raining, you have neither a hat nor an umbrella; if it is really cold, your gloves go missing. The mp3 player never has battery during long journeys, and of course the zipper of your suitcase burst on your way to the station!
I know these situations sound familiar to everyone, because they happen all the time. Sometimes I wonder how we can ever feel happy with so many "little" things going wrong all at the same time. We have our selective memory to thank for that. If we remembered every broken strap, every torn bag, and every near-back injury, we would dread the idea of ever going grocery shopping! But sometimes everything comes at the same time and we remember every little detail, like happened to me yesterday. Then how did I find enough strength to write about this in a light-hearted way? Well, I should thank my amazing roommate and her equally amazing boyfriend for that, because they took me out for dinner, got me a cake, and an amazing present. I can say that they saved my birthday, because as annoyed as I still am about having had to spend two thirds of my birthday pathetically alone and depressed, they saved the last third of it from going down the drain. The selective memory, which saves us from the cruelty of Murphy's Law, is at work again. Thank God for that!