In which the sync fairies undermine an attempted experiment

In my January 10 post "Ask for a mini T. rex, and ye shall receive a mini T. rex," I describe how I decided on a random whim to focus my mind on the concept "mini T. rex," and how a mini T. rex obligingly materialized. As documented in several subsequent posts, this was not a one-off event, either: the mini T. rex theme entered the sync-stream and kept appearing again and again, which it had not done prior to my visualization.

So does that mean I have some degree of conscious control over synchronicity? That I can simply will a certain sync theme to start appearing? I decided to perform an experiment: Using randomwordgenerator.com, I would acquire a randomly generated noun and adjective, put them together, focus my mind on the image thus created, and see if the syncs started appearing.

I performed the experiment at approximately 1:00 this afternoon. I first got my random noun: trap. That's a bit vague and abstract, I thought, not nearly as usefully concrete as T. rex. Well, so be it. And then the random adjective: blushing. Great -- blushing trap? How am I supposed to visualize that? What does it even mean? After a few seconds of perplexity, I realized that I could think of one -- and only one -- thing that unambiguously answers to that description:

So I closed my eyes, visualized a Venus flytrap with its blushing lobes, and mentally repeated, blushing trap, blushing trap, blushing trap . . . . Now to see if Venus flytraps suddenly start showing up in my life here, 8,000 miles from Carolina.

Except, wait -- that already started yesterday.

Yesterday evening at approximately 7:00 p.m. -- 18 hours before the "blushing trap" exercise -- I had been teaching this page to children in one of my EFL classes.

Why is an article about eating a healthy diet illustrated with a picture of a Venus flytrap? I don't know, ask the sync fairies.

I was attempting to artificially inject something into the sync stream and see if the fairies would pick up on it. Instead, they had actually already made the first move, and I was the one unwittingly following their lead. The thing about experimenting with synchronicity is that there's no such thing as a control, since even "randomness" falls under its purview.

It was a trap, and I walked right into it. How embarrassing!

Update: Apparently the "blushing trap" is a thing: