Life Before AskJeeves: A Collection of Misconceptions
I remember my very first philosophical inquiry. It was evening, I was five, and I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth gently, as this was a decade prior to when my dentist diagnosed me as a “Type A brusher.”
“Dad?”
—“Yes, Kathryn?”
“I have a question. Why is it so dark outside… [a four-second pause indicating thoughtful posturing]… but so light inside?”
My family still references this particular exchange almost bi-yearly, though I was always asking questions as a child. A year before, I had come home from Montessori school, elated after spending the day preparing for my class’s art show. “Just one question, though,” I said after relaying the day’s excitement to my parents. “What’s an art show?”
During the next few years, I continued to probe questions of “why” and “what” on a frequent basis. One morning around 3:00, my parents had awoken my brother and seven-year-old me and proposed a retreat to our neighborhood field. It was the Leonids Meteor Shower of 2001, a rare event, and it couldn’t be missed. So we went, and as I stood there gazing up at the sky with the wash of sleep still clinging to my nightgown, I asked with unconcealed bitterness, “Do other people do this?” My dad later told me that he thought for sure nothing but sheer awe could have slipped from my mouth in that moment — but I of course had voiced the opposite.
What defined my character as a child was neither naive belief nor a suspension of disbelief, but rather an intensity for deciphering truths. As an extension of this, a genuine trust in the supernatural or the mythical had no place in my worldview. For the longest time I feigned belief in the tooth fairy just to avoid ruining the charade for my parents, and the role of keeping the truth about Santa Claus at bay for my non-Jewish friends was one I self-imposed. Paradoxically, I somehow awaited my Hogwarts letter well beyond age eleven, but I think that fact marks the fine line between actually adhering to a belief and holding onto it out of sheer desire for its fruition. All of this is not to suggest that the supernatural escaped my fascination; on the contrary, I was obsessed. Upon each visit to our local expanded video store, I would drift away from my mom’s side and over to the extensive horror section, selecting each DVD case and scanning the back cover for movie stills of terrifying creatures or cornfields rife with demonic youths. I wasn’t particularly good at stomaching horror, but some part of me craved it. I carried the fascination with me through higher education, enrolling in a course during my second year entitled History of Supernatural Europe from 1500–1800. There, it became commonplace to read an essay from the 16th century claiming that “witches be commonly old,” or to come across a transcript of an interview with a convicted werewolf who admitted that although he has chosen the path to repentance, he would probably still eat a child if given the opportunity. Our role as students in the class was not to wonder about the validity of these first-hand accounts, but rather to accept them, beyond their roots in rudimentary science or faulty logic, as representations of truths believed by many.
My intensity for deciphering truths, as I’ve put it, doesn’t imply that I always got it right. In fact, while my theories were often based in logic or in lessons I felt I had gleaned from experience, they rightfully fell under the category of ‘misconception.’ I myself, then, wasn’t so far off from our witch-hunting friends of 16th-century Germany.
Here’s what I mean:
After enough urging from friends’ parents not to share brushes in order to avoid lice, I’d deduced that it was the act of sharing a brush itself that created lice. While this misconception was enough to reinforce the appropriate behavior prescribed to me, and was therefore quite useful, it proved confusing and tenuous when I eventually found out about nits. After hours spent recreationally picking larvae from cabin-mates’ scalps during the latest camp-wide lice epidemic, I fully internalized the origin story of the louse.
Similarly, I had two theories related to movies. The first: because death scenes appeared too believable to be fabricated, I’d decided that the director only hired actors who, conveniently, were about to die anyway or wanted to die, so (s)he could actually kill them off on-screen. The second: upon discovering that Lindsay Lohan of “The Parent Trap” wasn’t a real-life twin — and furthermore that a high-tech computer was behind the illusion of twindom — I decided to scour the movie in order to decipher what lay beneath the surface. First I had to absorb the fact that computers served a function other than housing Kid Pix. After that hiccup, I eventually settled on the only feasible explanation: one twin was Lindsay Lohan, so that meant the other must be a computer. My bets were on Hallie as the human because, as I had once explained to a friend, “She’s the livelier of the two — it’d be really difficult for a computer to do all that work.” AskJeeves wasn’t around yet for me to verify anything — though, coincidentally, my very first AskJeeves search happened to be “Who is Lindsay Lohan?” (Beforehand, my dad had explained that I could ask Jeeves absolutely anything within reason, and I went with “Who is Lindsay Lohan?” — a question to which I already had a sufficient answer. Hmm.)
Finally, my most elaborate theory was also my most enduring; I continued to hold onto it even after it was debunked. An amalgam of old photos, movies, and news clips had led me to conclude that prior to 1960, the world was in black & white, not in color. In an attempt to reconcile the holes in my hypothesis, I once asked someone, “Well, then, who made the sky blue?” Mistaking my question for theological inquiry, the person replied, “Well, I guess God did.” This response neither satisfied nor squelched my pursuits, but all of my hypothesizing came to a grinding halt soon after when an elementary school friend and her mother showed me a black & white photo of their historic home in England where they’d lived before relocating to Virginia. Puzzled, I asked, “Well, when did the house turn to color?” It was in this moment that my delusion became clear to all but me, so it befell upon my friend’s mother to explain where my estimations fell short. I imagine it was difficult for all parties involved to understand how that one had slipped through the cracks.
Speaking of cracks, those are entryways designed by hobgoblins to make travel more efficient.
