I'm obsessed with my cat but she is not my child. My mom actually told me once that she refused to consider my cat her grandchild or buy her presents. I completely endorsed that.

My mother-in-law once referred to our cat as "the grandcat".

Getting her to cut that out was not the reason we had a kid, but OMG was it a nice side bonus.

Calling people-milk "breastmilk." (As opposed to...milk that didn't come from breasts?)

The purpose of pleats on men's pants.

Why they keep letting M. Night Shyamalan make movies.

Trying to visualize in detail objects that are four(or more)-dimensional.

How people hope to practically implement libertarianism.

This is fun...I should stop before the list grows out of control. Life is full of mysteries!

Why they keep letting M. Night Shyamalan make movies.

OMG SUCH A GOOD QUESTION!!

People who pull up well past the stop line at a red light. How does this help? I was watching this one car "not" turning right on red which crept up to 45 degrees through the turn.

Buying a two-door version of a car which is otherwise identical to the four-door version, because it "looks sportier".

How one is expected to read inset boxes in a long article. (Guess what I'm doing.)

A lot about Boston driving habits confuses me too. Many locals apparently believe freeway lanes are for roughly dividing traffic into thirds, rather than dividing them by rates of travel. (If the flow of traffic is X in the rightmost lane, and people are parking in the far left lane doing X – 10, they're too clueless to drive.)

Why people pay money for water.

[Blah blah, primarily for store bottled water, in areas with local drinkable water, when said water is available. Yes, I've been told, repeatedly, plenty of reasons by people who do it, and I have done it myself from time to time. Nobody said I can't be stubborn and unreasonable here.] :)

Edited at 2009-06-08 05:12 pm (UTC)

Today's list:

• people who need to be partnered so much that they sacrifice all functionality except that which furthers that aim
  
• see previous re: breeding
  
• women who make extreme efforts to compete with or best the men, and then get disgruntled about not being treated like a delicate fairy princess in relationships with those same men
  
• software developers who don't actually use their own products or understand the needs of those who do, and the industry that thinks this is okay
  
• people with an ego-driven deep-seated need to be experts

I'm sure I have more (and a different list every day), but I try not to dwell on them. ;)

re: breeding, anyone who thinks they are having kids for fun and profit doesn't understand the sacrifice. On the other hand, some people truly find the massive sacrifices in time, social life, and money worth the outcome. You can have a much greater and longer impact on the world (good or bad) if you invest your energy in raising children. Plus, some people get a lot of good endorphins off it. Evolution has hard-wired plenty of us into viscerally wanting this.

It certainly isn't for everyone though, and I respect that.

Things that confuse me:
People who use a stroller for a four year old. How else do they plan on tiring out their kid?
People who drop their trash in the street and then walk past a trash can six feet away.
People who ride the escalator to the gym. Do they even remember why they're there?

I am wondering why we destroy fields of poppies in Afghanistan. They are one thing that grows well in that stony land and the world is full of pain that poppy produces could alleviate. Ditto coca leaf.

I get similarly confused, given that farming poppy for analgesic alkaloids is inherently legitimate*. (I'm not, however, in the mood to get in an argument with anyone about it right now. . . thus the anon. But I wanted to express some "you're not alone in that" support.)

*the last source I read (http://www.amazon.com/Opium-History-Martin-Booth/dp/0312206674) indicated that the opiate-derived drugs were still unsynthesizable, or maybe just not economic, so all? most? the world's production of the derivative analgesics comes from Australia (Tasmania).

I raised Georgie since he was 4 weeks old, so to him I am essentially his mom. It's not the same with the rest of the cats as much as I love them, though.

I am honestly confused by the arguments against gay marriage. They go in circles, and it always seems to boil down to "...just because." I can understand most other arguments for things I don't agree with (e.g. anti-abortion), but it kind of bothers me that I can't understand any of the reasons I've heard for being against gay marriage.

I suspect that the arguments against abortion that you think you understand are not the core reasons why there's an anti-abortion movement (that reason is: eww, sex! those who have it should suffer!). Neither of these are really reason-based, they're emotional/intuitive.