Recently in a political science class that I take, I overheard one student advising another student that the information she was looking for was in Plato’s The Republic. The student replied, “Oh, so Plato was a Republican?” That really happened.

Also, a girl I work with recently told me that her husband’s employees get mad when she calls them Mexicans. I asked where they were from, she said Guatemala. I had to explain that Guatemala was in fact, not in Mexico. That also really happened.

I find examples of people who say and do things that are comically devoid of logic fascinating. Seriously, how do you make it to a college classroom without having enough deductive reasoning to realize that Plato could not have been a Republican? These aren’t isolated examples. I mentally catalogue these irrational nuggets so I can rant or laugh about them later with friends. If you’ve ever worked in customer service then you can think back to all the times you came home and ranted about the dumbest customer of the day, maybe some crazy guy who made impossible demands then left a prayer card for a tip. Some years ago when I was working at Blockbuster Video, I had a 30-year-old man challenge me to a fist fight in the parking lot because I wouldn’t let him rent off of his father’s account.

I’ve mentioned in previous columns that one of my bigger pet peeves is people talking in a movie theater. It happens in almost every single movie I see. It can be the late showing on a Wednesday of a movie that’s been out for three months with only one other person in the theatre, and somehow that person will manage to strike up a conversation with himself. It happened again last week when a whole row of guys piled into the theater at the last minute, sitting directly in front of an elderly couple who were doing a good job of playing “quiet as a mouse,” and these jugheads spent the better part of the movie chatting with each other and checking text messages.

Some might chalk that up to people simply being rude, but why are there so many people who consistently do this? It’s not just a matter of manners; it’s a matter of logic. It’s not that the guys didn’t care, because you’d actually have to have considered something to be able to draw the conclusion that you didn’t care. So they were inconsiderate, but the inconsideration was based on the likelihood that they couldn’t connect the logical dots that they were driving everyone else in the theater crazy. I had contemplated doing a series of interviews with people who I see talking in theaters, but I’m pretty sure that would lead to me getting punched, and that might be my own lack of logic. Who knows, maybe you’ll be reading about my brutal beat-down in the next column.