As an “adult,” I spend my time wondering about really important stuff. Here are some of my most pressing questions:
1. What goes on in my fridge when it’s closed?
Several great works of literature have addressed this topic, not least of them Eggbert: The Slightly Cracked Egg, which was one of my favorite books as a kid. Seriously, though–does all the food come to life and start whispering to each other every time we close the fridge door? Or is everything sleeping in there? After all, the light turns off when you close the door.
2. Where do things go when you lose them?
Really, socks should never “get lost in the wash.” There’s nowhere for them to go. Though everyone seems to accept this phenomenon, there’s really no logical explanation for it.
When things get “lost in the move,” where do they go?? If they’re not at the old house, and they’re not at the new house, where the hell are they? On the sidewalk somewhere in between? Beamed up into an aerial graveyard for lost items in the atmosphere? Also, how is it possible to lose something inside your own house? If you systematically search every room in the house, you should be able to find whatever you lost. But this often doesn’t turn out to be true. For example, over thanksgiving, my mom misplaced a wedge of cheese. We searched the whole house for it, but it was just GONE.
This question is really part of a much larger question: where do things go, in general? What is the map of the flow of objects through the world? When a store is going out of business and “everything must go,” where, exactly, does everything go???
3. What are the contents of other people’s packages?
Let me be clear: by packages, I mean the kind you receive in the mail. The last package I received was from my grandma. It contained 4 avocados, 3 pomegranates, somewhere between 50 and 100 limes, and a lemon the size of a grapefruit. And a handwritten card, of course. I bet no one who saw that package anywhere along the line of its delivery guessed what was in there (she definitely lied about perishable contents at the post office, though by the time it reached me the box was a little pulpy and reeked of citrus). What is everyone else getting in their packages? I could never work for the postal service; I’d die of curiosity.
4. What is mascara made of?
I actually looked this one up, and it turns out to be mostly wax and color additives with really long names.
5. What is inside a lava lamp?
The answer to this one can also be looked up, but knowing the ingredients somehow doesn’t really answer the question.
Naturally, to see how mainstream I am, I took to Google to find out if other people have the same questions as I do. Here are some of the results:
The Who
This was by far the most depressing result of my search for other people’s questions.
The What
Fascinating how much the options change between searching “what’s” and “what is.”
The When
When is apple picking season, indeed.
The Where
The Why
Apparently, people are overly concerned with the definition of a fruit. I was always told a fruit is anything with seeds.
The How
For the record, a hemisphere is half a sphere.
Ebola and almond milk are really weighing on people’s minds, I guess.