#radical optimism

I moved into a house a few months ago, along with two other people. We share one bathroom, and it has his-and-hers-style sinks. The right hand one is close up against the shower and shower curtain, and the left one is against an open countertop.

I was cleaning today, and I realised that the "pop-up" plugs in the sinks could be unscrewed to clean underneath. I started with the left-hand sink, finding it about as disgusting as I had expected, with black gunk coating the underside of the plug, the filter below, and what I could see of the pipe below that. I cleaned it and moved on to the next one.

The right-hand one was sparkling clean.

I'm assuming that, like me, my housemates (and probably the people before us) just unconsciously find the left-hand one more appealing because it has more room around it.

There's nothing special about it, really, but it made me unreasonably happy to be looking at this stark evidence of a shared human experience. It's not like we all sat down and agreed that we should all use the left-hand sink, and it's not like the right-hand sink is all that different from the left-hand sink anyway. If you asked any of us which sink was better, we'd probably tell you it was a silly question - they're identical, that's the point of his-and-hers sinks! And yet, time and time again, maybe for years, people have found themselves standing specifically at the left-hand sink.