Outside Observers

There are numerous occasions which I can recall where I was surprised by something that a friend discovered while they were at my house. It seems like we can know our environment intimately, but up to a certain point. By this I mean that we can, for example, know specifically where the floor in our house creaks, or other such oddities of living in a particular environment for a long time.

However, there still appear to be strange details which we do not or cannot observe for any reason, and it takes an outsider to notice these things. Case in point: a little while ago a friend of mine was over at my house. She commented on a vase that we have in the kitchen which has fake flowers in it. She starts laughing and tells me how funny it is that these fake flowers have been put in a vase which has water in it -- as if it mattered. I looked at it and noticed that there was indeed water at the bottom of the vase, and I started to laugh.

I kept looking at this a little closer and noticed that it actually was not water, but rather some type of hard jelly which was meant to look like water. The flowers were actually stuck inside this jelly. I'm not sure that I ever would have noticed this had my friend not pointed it out. So I kept laughing at the fact that this vase was somehow designed with the idea of "keeping up appearances" in mind.

Eric's recent post reminded me of a few things we had discussed in the past, and this prompted me to recall this story about the vase. It's funny how whenever I go to a person's place that I have never been to before, I always have to satisfy my curiosity by poking around and noticing all the strange objects and things which seem to serve no purpose, or are very strange by nature, and yet those who live closest to them have never even noticed.