Some things just escape me

Do you ever wonder if you're missing something? Not as in clothes or stuff like that, but essential pieces of information that everyone knows and somehow you just didn't get.
For example: One of the toilets at my parent's house splashes up a bit when you flush. Over the years I perfected a technique to prevent getting splashed. I like to call it the 'flush and jump'- you can probably guess that I would flush and then leap out of the way to prevent getting wet.
I was laughing about it with a friend one day and they said to me "Why don't you just close the lid and then flush it?" I was stopped dead in my tracks. It had never, ever occured to me to close the lid before. I felt extremely stupid.
Another example: chemical compounds can sometimes carry a positive or a negative charge (cations and anions), or they can be a radical species. Convention dictates that the electrons around an element are described by two little dots (Lewis dot diagrams). A cationic species has a little plus sign, and an anionic species has a little minus sign, and a radical species has one little dot. For years and years I struggled to understand radicals and their reactions, thinking that the single dot represented half of a positive charge.
Then one day as I read a textbook the light went on: a radical was not half of a charge: it was neutral! Radical reactions involved a neutral species! In an instant a world of understanding was opened up, the flood of light illuminating countless confusing moments. One thought was foremost in my mind: no one ever needed to know how stupid I indeed was; I would keep the secret of the radical 'half-charge' to myself.
Of course, those of you who know me well know I can't keep secrets about myself, so one day it inevitably slipped out as I talked with my boss at school. "Oh, that!" He said, smiling. "I used to think that too about radicals. It wasn't until I'd worked for a few years that I finally understood how it actually worked."
Ah, the comfort!
The point is that things escape all of us. Some of us keep it quiet until we've figured it out. Some of us tell everyone and reveal our silliness. But all of us have things that escape us, whether toilet flushing techniques or chemical reactions.