Author Archives: Jason Wiemels

Exploding Sodium

Text: During his Peace Corps years teaching chemistry in Fiji, JW would take his students down to the bay every now and then with a chunk of sodium. His school lab had real sodium, kept in oil. He would fish out a small piece and throw it as far as possible into the water. It would skim across the surface and then catch fire and sometimes explode. The students loved it. He had seen it done by another teacher before trying it himself.

Context: JW is my father. He served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Fiji for two years following his undergraduate studies, teaching high school chemistry at a local school. The demonstration is not part of any sanctioned curriculum, but rather an informal reward to a well-behaved class. It is generally considered dangerous, and therefore impossible in a well supervised urban school setting. JW has not seen the practice done outside of his peace corps years in Fiji. He has retold this story to me on several occasions.

Analysis: This is a good example of occupational lore. The sodium demonstration is a chemistry teacher’s vernacular practice: it is not taught in the credentialing program, and the manuals tell you not to do it; you learn it from your own teacher and transmit it to your students. Its status as both pedagogically vivid and institutionally suspect is what gives it folkloric stability: every chemistry teacher who has ever done it remembers their own teacher’s version, and JW’s repeated retelling of the story, with the same opening and the same skimming and the same explosion, is itself an iteration of the form that keeps the practice circulating. The Peace Corps placement adds a second layer. An American chemistry-teacher folkway moved with JW to Fiji and entered a different pedagogical ecology, where his students may now be carrying it forward as their own, possibly without ever knowing whose Ohio classroom it had been picked up from in the first place.

Sleep Paralysis and The Hat Man

Text: The Hat Man is a recurring figure in LS’s sleep paralysis episodes. He is tall, faceless, dressed in a trenchcoat, and wears a wide-brimmed hat, like a big fedora. He stands in the corner of the room, watching, while the sleeper is awake but unable to move. He does not speak or approach. After a few minutes he is gone. 

Context: Told to me by my friend LS, who experiences recurrent sleep paralysis. LS had encountered testimonies of the Hat Man online both before and after her first sleep paralysis episode featuring him, notably on Reddit’s r/sleepparalysis and YouTube. He has appeared in several of LS’s subsequent episodes, almost always the same way. 

Analysis: Sleep paralysis itself is well-documented neurology: during REM the body is paralyzed to keep us from acting out dreams, and on waking the paralysis sometimes outlasts consciousness, producing hallucinations of intruders, pressure on the chest, and shadowy figures. What is folkloric is the figure. Different cultures have produced their own intruder for the same neurological event: the Old Hag in Newfoundland, the Pisadeira in Brazil, Kanashibari in Japan, the night-mare of medieval Europe. The Hat Man is the contemporary English-language version, relatively common on internet forums and YouTube in the 2000s. It’s interesting how in lockstep different accounts of the Hat Man align with each other, and I wonder if it is a natural phenomenon that causes this similarity of accounts or if it is the sharing of the accounts that causes the Hat Man to appear in such a consistent form. 

“Just a Little Something I Learned in the War”

Text: My good friend KH, who has never been in any war, has installed the line “Just a little something I learned in the war” as a personal signature, dropped after she performs an act of trivial competence. Two recent examples: following up a successful U-turn in her car, “Just a little something I learned in the war.” Another, she twisted off a stuck cap from a soda bottle with some difficulty and said, “Just a little something I learned in the war.” She uses the line straight-faced, without further commentary, which usually makes it even funnier.

Context: KH does not appear to have inherited the phrase from a parent or grandparent; she has identified social media (primarily TikTok) as the point of contact, where the formula has circulated as a stock comic move. 

Analysis: The catchphrase is a piece of folk speech that works through deliberate, comedic over-attribution: KH credits a tiny bit of everyday competence to a vast, unverifiable, fictitious, catastrophic past. The joke depends on both speaker and audience knowing there was obviously no war. The gap between the trigger (a U-turn, a bottle cap) and the dramatic framing is the entire setup. It’s like wider American comic phrases such as “Vietnam flashbacks,” “Back in ‘Nam,” “in the trenches,” and “old Army trick.” All these dresses something small in the language of something terrible and huge, for comedic effect. 

Asking Mom If It’s a Good Day for a Haircut

Text: My friend AH, who has on multiple occasions described himself as “not religious” and does not actively observe Hindu practice, casually mentioned that he needed a haircut and added that he had to text his mom first to find out whether the day was a good day to get one. When I pressed him on what made a day good or bad for haircuts, he was vague and unsure: something his mom kept track of, something about certain days being unlucky. He did not subscribe to the system or the belief but thought it worth it to ask. 

Context: AH’s family is Tamil (South India), and he has been raised in California. He identifies as essentially secular but retains a small handful of inherited practices that he observes operationally even if he doesn’t subscribe to the backing religion. Checking on haircut days is one of them. His mother keeps the schedule, and he checks by texting her. 

Analysis: I became curious of the schedule AH is alluding to, I pulled most of the following from online resources. The Tamil Hindu framework rests on the panchangam, the almanac that maps each weekday to a planetary deity. Tuesday (Sevvāy/Mars) and Saturday (Sani/Saturn) are the days most strictly avoided: Tuesday because Mars is held to govern blood and vitality, and Saturday because of an old rule that a Saturn-day haircut shortens one’s life by seven months. The folkloric move here is AH’s deferral to his mother: a Hindu astrological ritual surviving in California as a text message to mom, with the operational practice shifted from the individual consulting an almanac or priest to a son texting his mom, who functions as a keeper of the schedule. This is a common pattern in diaspora households: the ritual knowledge stays with the older generation of the family, but those born into the new setting struggle to internalize the framework as well. In AH’s case he explains that he is not doing it necessarily because he believes in it, but more out of respect for his mother and her beliefs. 

Left-Handed People Are Evil 

Text: My roommate JS’s grandmother believes that left-handed people are evil. JS himself is left-handed.

Context: Told to me by JS one evening in our apartment. His grandmother’s family is from Texas, and the belief came down through her own family’s Catholic-inflected Mexican folk tradition. JS describes the belief as something his grandmother says with a considerable degree of humor, often teasingly, often when the topic of left-handed people comes up. They laugh together about the contradiction between the stated belief and his own existence as her left-handed grandchild. 

Analysis: What is interesting about JS’s case is that the belief is doing none of the work it was originally meant to do, and yet it still circulates, just in a different way. She says it teasingly, often when JS is in the room, and the two of them laugh about the obvious contradiction between the rule she is pretending to hold and the left-handed grandson she is pretending to call evil. The belief has been domesticated into a running family joke. The “left as evil” belief is one of the most widely distributed folk beliefs in the world, showing up in Latin Catholic, Chinese, Islamic, and Hindu traditions with varying degrees of severity. The Latin American Catholic version draws on the Latin sinister (left meaning unlucky in Roman augury), the goats placed on the left at final judgment in the bible, associations of the left hand with the devil’s preferred side. What JS and his grandmother share is the belief’s late life: a folk rule that has lost its teeth, but is yet useful, here as the setup of a joke that grandmother and grandson perform together.