The comfort of blame

My room mate was frying chicken and after he finished, I offered him the glass jar that I had used earlier that morning to collect bacon fat.
"That's okay," he said.
"But what do you do with the fat?" I asked him.
"It's okay," he explained. "It's just olive oil, not fat, so it's fine to send down the sink."

This thoroughly confused me. In my head, it didn't matter what kind of oil it was, all oil went down the sink as a liquid and then turned to solid and clogged your pipes. Bacon fat and olive oil were the same in terms of the whole liquid to solid changeability. Liquid bacon fat seemed to me to be the same as liquid olive oil. But I trusted my room mate on this one, decided that fat was different from oil, somehow, and let it go, until...the next day.

The next day, I was doing dishes and the drain filled with water instead of running down nicely.
"See!" I exclaimed. "Olive oil does clog the pipes. I'm not totally crazy (and my room mate doesn't know what he's talking about)."
And I noticed that I had great delight in watching the sink clog.
"That's weird," I said to myself. "You're happy that the sink is clogged. That's really weird."
And at first I thought I was happy because my room mate was wrong. But then I felt what I was feeling and it wasn't self righteousness, it was settled, it was safe, it was that things made sense.

And then I realized two things.
Having the sink clog was comforting to me because it confirmed my experience with hot liquids turning to cold solids, no matter what kind of fat or oil they were.
But the other thing was that I had a reason for the sink to be clogged- and that was comforting to me.

See, I think we like to believe that things happen for a reason. I think we like to believe that there is a cause and effect to things because if there is, then we have some agency in this life, some control, some way of determining or at least having an idea of the future or how things work in this place we call living.
But the truth of it is that we are random beings living in a random universe and, though we want to believe that there are patterns or direct consequences to our actions, that's not always true. The only actual truth is that we are subject to the same physical laws of the universe that everyone else is (including the sun, moon, ocean, plants, animals, etc.).
But when things happen that we don't like, or that aren't what we expected, it's kind of nice to be able to blame it on someone or some thing. When we do, it gives us this feeling that things happen for a reason, that there is a relationship between what we do and how things happen, that we actually have some control over our lives and that if we could just change that one thing (that we blamed it on) we can keep it from happening again.
I don't know, maybe this isn't true, but it feels like that's the reason we blame events on people or things- it reassures that that there is an order to things, that we can keep things from happening in one way or another, that there is a factor that is in our control.