Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full

In this house, there is no half-empty or half-full. It's just plain EMPTY. And we aren't just talking about one particular gentleman's outlook on life. We are talking about his VERY odd perception that when something only has a little left, it's gone.

To better explain, he came to me the other day and said, "We are out of laundry detergent." Well that's just plain laughable. We order our laundry detergent through the food bank and I am not even kidding when I say that we probably have close to thirty bottles of detergent in the house. But he was referring to the bottles on the shelf in the laundry area.


So you can see that there are at least six bottles of detergent on the shelf. And they may not all be full, but I can assure you none of them is empty.

And when he makes a bowl of cereal in the morning, he almost always says, "We're out of milk." And he doesn't mean, "we're almost out" because unless I catch him first, he will inevitably throw the jug of milk away.



But I really thought I might scream today when he came to me and said, "We are out of toilet paper. We only have one roll left." I went into his bathroom and this is what I saw.



Can you guess which "one" is the only one left? Of course, in his mind, the only roll we have is the one that hasn't been touched. However, I CANNOT for the life of me figure out why he truly CANNOT see that there are seventeen, count 'em, seventeen other rolls that still have a substantial amount of toilet paper on them. But he can't. He really can't. He is truly convinced that we are out of toilet paper. There is no arguing with him. And it makes me want to cry and yell. But I don't. I just walk away. And tell Lowell that one of the guys next door wants to talk to him.