Merde.

Do you sometimes get the feeling that stupid, idiotic, preventable disasters only happen to you? Well, you’re wrong. Stupid, idiotic, preventable disasters only happen to me.

Let’s take just now, for instance. Are you wondering why this post has no pictures? Imagine me, in front of a computer, in a room whose sole source of light is a glowing monitor. Eliot is snoring to my left, blocked from the glow by a wall of pillows. Ivy is snoring to my right, blocked from the glow by a blanket thrown over her crib.

I am clutching in my hand the tiny memory card from my camera, with 8GB of photos stored on it. I approach the computer, which has a built-in card reader which accepts practically every sort of memory card in existence. I can’t see it because it’s too dark. But I know it’s there. I randomly jam the card against the hard drive box for a while, before being struck by a brilliant idea. The LCD monitor of my camera is huge and bright, so I turn on the camera. I pause to wonder if I have just invented the world’s most expensive flashlight. No matter. It’s all done in the noble pursuit of photo blogging.

I get the card inserted. Nothing happens. The disk doesn’t appear on the computer. I pull it halfway out and try again. Nothing. I pull the card all the way out and try again.

Except now I can’t find the appropriate hole in the card reader again. Rather than light up my Nikon flashlight, I just sort of randomly jam the card against the computer again… and find the card slot on the first try. Finally, some luck!

And here’s where neurobiology comes into play.

My fingers were issued the command to insert the card and then let it go. My brain simultaneously received an error message that read something like this:

The card inserted way too easily into the card reader, and our fingers are only grasping the bare edge of the card, whereas previously, over half the card remained outside the reader. DO NOT LET GO OF THE CARD! SOMETHING HAS GONE WRONG! ABORT!

This message traveled from my fingertips up to my brain. My brain immediately sent the abort message to my fingertips, cancelling out the let-go command. I felt the synapses firing all the way down my neck, across my shoulder and into my arm, then down my index finger and thumb. I actually felt them. At the second joint of my left index finger, this message was met by a sensory message headed for my brain, reporting a successful let-go operation. When the two messages collided, for some reason this actually caused my gut to clench.

I don’t know how interested you are in neurobiology, but personally, I found the gut reaction to the fingertip message collision fascinating.

As it turns out, the card got inserted into some random slot in the card reader not at all corresponging to its size… and when I let go, it dropped far down into the recesses of the card reader. Or a tiny black hole. For all practical purposes, the two are equivalent.

I turned on my Nikon flashlight and peered around. I turned the computer over and shook it as hard as I was willing to shake another person’s computer. No luck yet.

I can only assume that if my brain were located in my left index finger, none of this would have happened. This entire disaster could have been averted with a minor evolutionary course correction 486,000 years ago.

But no. I’m stuck with a center-weighted nervous system and a lost memory card.

Why do bad things only happen to me?