Right or wrong, perfect sense or nonsense, I often do things a certain way simply because that’s the way I’ve always done them.  A prime example is my method for tying shoes.  I remember attempting to learn the whole bunny goes round the tree and jumps in the hole spiel on a wooden practice shoe back in elementary school.  I’d memorized the story line, but my bunny wanted nothing to do with that stinkin’ tree and my index finger kept messing up the loop-around (I blame it on my big hands).  Honestly, I didn’t see what the big deal was.  For weeks I’d been using my own method (the make-two-bunny-ears-then-crisscross-then-fold-one-under-and-pull-to-tighten approach) and my shoes were staying on just fine.

I have a lot of these little quirks, especially in the kitchen, where it’s well established that my knife skills border on horrifying (trust me, you’d shudder if you saw me chop an onion), but hey, I get the job done.  Even though I’ve nearly severed several fingers over the years, not to mention the time I impaled my pinky with a steak knife while slicing a bagel, I’d never really given much thought to the dangerous method I employed to halve a spaghetti squash.  I always proceeded in cutting a spaghetti squash as if it were a giant rock-hard avocado—with a knife painstakingly seesawing around the perimeter of the squash.  I’m not sure what events occurred that caused my subconscious to one day realize this was a horrible HORRIBLE idea.  I’m just thankful it did before I’d involuntarily amputated something.