The Complexities of the Mandolin

  I have an "issue" where I will glance at something and my brain interprets it as something completely different.  Here's a few quick examples:

  Reality: Man holding a bag with his arm draped over the back of an adjacent seat.
  What I See: Man sitting next to a large dog that is wearing a scarf.

  Reality: A random jumble of branches in the woods along a hiking trail.
  What I See: A man wearing a hat and sitting atop a horse.

  My friends have mocked me for years about an incident where I was riding in the front passenger's seat of the car and suddenly folded up, throwing my hands in front of my face and yelling out like I was about to die, which is exactly what I thought was about to happen. Yet I survived the incident with only my pride damaged.
  On the antenna my friend had a piece of tinsel shaped like a stick figure holding on for dear life. When I glanced up this time, my brain decided instead of the stick figure - which I'd seen dozens of times - that it was a guy riding a bicycle who we were about to hit head on.

  This misinterpretation applies to words as well.

  Early this morning, I had gotten lost in Youtube the way one does after looking up a few topics and then following various 'related videos' links from the sidebar. I was watching a video on methods of finding chords faster when I noticed a video, "Mandolin Made Easy" and I decided to see what it was all about. 

  I want to blame it on being 5 in the morning that I didn't notice a few obvious signs that it wasn't a mandolin video. I'm watching and she's talking about tones, then making various sounds with her mouth, and I'm not really getting why she's not using the instrument, all the while thinking, "wow, mandolin is really a different learning process than other instruments." 

  I only watched the video for about 45 seconds, but those were 45 very confused seconds. When she started talking about how you'd end up with a cat if you used the wrong tone, I knew one of the following things must be true:

1.   I didn't want to learn mandolin.
2.   This video wasn't about learning mandolin.

  Glancing at the title again, I read the actual name of the video this time, which was "Mandarin Made Easy". I'd like to think this mistake could have happened to anyone seeing as how it was grouped with a bunch of music lesson videos, but I still felt a little silly.

  On the plus side, I now know how to ask for a cat if I ever am in dire need of one while stuck in China.