Missed Connections
Seeing What We Want to See
Today I had one of those moments that made me realize not just how dumb I, as a human, am, but also how much intellectual work I’ll put into moving in the wrong direction just to prove to myself I’m right.
Below is a screenshot from 8/19/24 NYT Connection Puzzle. If you don’t know what that is, maybe just skip this one, because I’m not gonna take the word count to explain it.
Also, spoilers for the 8/19/24 NYT Connection Puzzle:
Screenshot from my phone.
As you can see, my last eight words were Chair, Mountain, Tree, Warrior, Coconut, Soulmate, Updo, and Wallet. And they stumped me.
From those eight, two stood out: The yoga poses, Tree and Warrior. But I didn’t know you could also pose like a Chair AND a Mountain, all on the same mat. So I was stuck.
Then I almost got hit in the head with the word Coconut and its connotation: Kamala Harris’s now (in)famous speech, which became a sound bite, that has now devolved into a meme evoked with just that one word. Then I wondered if maybe the other clues referenced her. And I went from “maybe” to “definitely” faster than you can look from the word Coconut to Soulmate. Soulmate. Wasn’t there something on Twitter about how Kamala called her husband her soulmate? Yes! Maybe! It sounds true, so let’s work with it. (I don’t look stuff up as I’m playing because that would be cheating.) What else do we have? Chair. Hmmm … Isn’t she, as VP, the head of the Senate? I know she casts the deciding vote in a tie…. that sounds like something the Chair of Something would do. Now we’re cooking. What else, what else? Updo! She wears her hair up! Right? In a ‘do’?Sometimes? And like, they talked about it on the news maybe? I could see that.
Kamala's famous updo.
Photo courtesy of the US Government.
Confident I had cracked the code, but still applying rigorous scientific measures to the ordeal, I made sure the two remaining clues could plausibly be yoga poses. Mountain pose? Sure. (Turns out that was the only one I was right about.) How about… Wallet Pose? At first I rejected it (good instinct). Then I thought about how the last place I did yoga often referred to one pose as a “Japanese Ham Sandwich,” A phrase I could never be sure if it pointed toward racism or me being in San Francisco for too long. Regardless, I could imagine maybe one too many yoga students asking the studio, “hey what does that mean, though? What are you trying to say here?” and the studio responding by finally replacing it with the far more descriptive but equally mundane: Wallet Pose.
Anyway, as we all know now, I was wrong. But I thought it was interesting, how sure I was I was on the right track. How confidently I saw patterns that weren’t there and ignored obvious facts that would have corrected my course. Gotta be careful when expecting Kamala — or anyone, really— to be something they might only be in your mind.
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