Crazy Kids

When you're the father of two college age girls you find yourself discovering things you might wish remained undiscovered.

For instance, not long ago one of my girls brought home a gaggle of similar screeching, high energy millennials. The house was awash with them. Making the matters worse, my wife expected me to remember their names.

They were here for a month.

Correction, I'm being told it was only a week.

In any case, on one of those nights when I was barricaded in my man cave I could hear a chorus of oohs, ahhhhh and OMG's. Predisposed to ignore all this mishigas, the rising decibel level would simply not allow. That's when I emerged from my den and saw them splayed out on the couches, each with an iPad or iPhone in hand.

They were watching videos.

More specifically, they were watching videos of people removing wax from their ears. And before you run to the Google to test the veracity of that last statement, assuming this is some kind of April Fool's gag, let me warn you: Don't.

You see, there's not simply one video of someone pulling a meteor sized clog of wax from their ears, there are hundreds of them. Each more disgusting than the next. I know because the ruckus went on for hours.

And that's no exaggeration.

Being preternaturally curious, I did a little digging of my own. Into the subject matter, that is. And found out videos documenting the removal of waxy human silly putty from the external auditory meatus is but a small subset of a larger phenomena.

It's called Oddly Satisfying Videos.

And can include anything from bottle flipping, car crushing, dogs jumping, noodle making and origami folding. Here's a compilation to give you some idea of what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0NISZnwBaQ

It has over 18 million views so you know I'm not making this up.

Do a little more research and you'll find there's actual science behind all of this. Science doesn't have much cache in these Trumpian days, so I will dispense with further data dump. But I will say this.

Next time an agency head honcho looks at my advanced age of 44 and thinks, "Oh, he's kind of old. A little long in the tooth. And couldn't possibly be in touch with what the kids are doing these days."

Believe me, I know.

You don't want to know what I know.