birth of a detective — part 2

As I was saying earlier, Sherlock Holmes really influenced the way I conducted my childhood.

The first thing I did was to attempt to apply his logic on my mundane daily happenings. I tried to ‘deduce’ which side my father had shaved with his left hand (based on where he shaved worst); where the light was with respect to my mom as she baked the cake (based on how the icing was crooked); or try to guess which mud came from which garden; and, because there were no murder mysteries to be found in my neighborhood, who stole my coins.

All my deductions were wrong, obviously. My faculty of logic sucked. I could never be a detective and solve mysteries, surely.

But what did happen was even better. My insistence on ‘deduction’ meant I had to keep my eyes open all the time. And by looking at people’s hands, feet, noses, eyes, and mouths, I learned to guess small useless facts about them.

For example, you can tell if someone is left handed or not simply by looking for a small callous on the middle finger (where the pencil is held). And, here’s a bonus to you, dear readers: You can even guess, if you’re Lebanese, whether they did their High School or French Baccalaureate. How? The bigger the callous, the bigger the chances they did the French Bacc. Why? Because that kind of system is based on writing, and writing, and writing, which makes the callous bigger.

Of course, these are all generalizations, so don’t go upsetting your friends and colleagues with wrong guesses. But hey, nobody hated me for it, and my accuracy rate improved with time. I wasn’t just guessing left-handedness, ok?

So, again, I didn’t become a detective, but I learned to look, to make connections between the superficial (callous, for example) and the second layer of information (left-handed, French Bacc.). This isn’t a skill, or a talent.  Heaven forbid I should step forward to Arabs Got Talent with it. It’s just a hobby. A hobby that leads to tweets with questionable origins. Tweets that I’m proud of sometimes, sometimes ashamed of, but always happy to tweet.

Thanks for reading this. I was just ranting. That’s what this blog is about. Come often. There’s always some coffee or tea around. We can talk, and I can look at your hands and face and maybe guess what you do for a living :)

Or we can make random connections. Try this: What connects an ant with an airplane?

(Try something more creative than “there’s an ant on a plane”)