So, according to Wikipedia (and, as we all know, Wikipedia is always right), an eagles’ eyesight is so sharp that they can spot a rabbit moving through the brush from up to a mile away. To put this into perspective, this means that their vision is approximately six to ten times better than that of the sharpest human; or, to put it another way, that their vision is approximately ten million times better than that of the sharpest teenager girl.
I don’t know: maybe it’s also the same for teenage boys—after all, there are plenty of jokes out there about “going blind”—but since I only have a teenage girl (so far), I only know about the (ahem) fairer sex. And let me tell you, from where I sit, the fairer sex is pretty damn blind.
Or perhaps I should say, “from where I perch,” since in my house there is no place to sit: all of the flat surfaces have long been overtaken by huge piles of crap. Huge, invisible-to-the-teenage-eye piles of crap, that is. Take Clementine’s bathroom, for example (no, really: please just take it away). As a rule, I usually wait to issue the order to “get all of your crap off of your bathroom floor” until her clothes, magazines and empty Manic Panic jars start to mount higher than the sink. At that point she will go in, crash around for a few minutes, and then storm out, leaving the dirty clothes hamper full to the level of the towel rack with things like shoes, raincoats, and math books. The floor, however, will still be ankle deep in detritus.
“No,” I’ll say. “I want you to pick up all of it. And put it away where it belongs.”
With a heavy sigh she’ll march back in, scoop up the top layer from the floor, dump it on the couch, and then slam back into her room.
At this point my voice, never too pleasant to begin with, will start to take on a distinct upper crust British sneer. I’m not sure where it comes from: I think I’m channeling that one show—what’s it called? “Super Naggy?”
“PICK IT UP. ALL. OF. IT.”
Another sigh from her. “What? I don’t see anything else.”
And the thing is, she doesn’t. Of course, this is partly due to the fact that she insists on “cleaning” the bathroom with the light off. (We don’t call her “Little Lawyer” for nothing. I can almost see the wheels turning in her head as she pictures herself up on the stand, the ghost of Johnnie Cochrane making his case to the judge: “Your honor, I ask you—how could my client possibly be responsible for scrubbing the toothpaste off of the sink when she couldn’t even see the sink? Without any light, the bathroom looks all right.”)
But the other part of it is that she really doesn’t see it. The same way that we, as humans, can look at a field that is teeming with rabbits and only see scrub, she can look at a bathroom that is crawling with filth and only see tile.
Who knows? Maybe there’s some evolutionary reason for this: maybe the same way that teenage boys are supposed to be risk takers is because it is hard-wired into their brains to go after wooly mammoths and such, maybe teenage girls are supposed to be slobs because it is hard-wired into their brains to ignore piles of wooly mammoth guts and other crap on the floor of their cave.
Or maybe there’s no clear explanation for it at all. Maybe teenage girls are just slobs. I’m sure that’s what it says on Wikipedia.