There Are No Stupid Questions: Don’t Believe It

Written By: Bob Rehak
Edited By: Matthew C.K. Bradwell

Joboja Staff Writers

It’s no mystery that life is full of mysteries. There are things that happen that Plato, Einstein and even Alex Trebek could never explain. The mysteries we encounter make life interesting, unless they keep you awake at night. Then they’re annoying.

There are those among us who don’t pay any mind to the unexplainable. Those people are blissfully unaware. They don’t have any questions to ask, like a person who doesn’t understand a lick of Spanish sitting in an advanced Spanish class. Those people don’t have any trouble sleeping. You know that guy who sleeps on the train on the way to and from work every day? He’s got no questions.

The deep thinkers, like Plato and Einstein, sought answers to the big questions—questions about life, the cosmos, why and how we are here and why my electric bill is so high. But the majority of us only ask the questions we can answer in a spirited game of Trivial Pursuit. Most of us are in the same brain realm as Cliff Claven. We ask simple questions. When we don’t know the answer, we ask the guy next to us. If he doesn’t know, either he’ll make something up, in which case we’ll take his word for it and we will label him an intelligent man. If he admits to not knowing the answer, we’ll walk away thinking that man was an idiot.

Then we’ll just make something up so we don’t look like the idiots.

I have found that you can fake the answers until about age 30. Then, if you’re lucky, you’ll have some offspring nipping at your knees looking for real answers to some of life’s questions. Suddenly you can’t make up the answers as easily as you once did, lest your offspring repeat the answers in public and be labeled little idiots.

I may not know much, but I do know this: women are much deeper thinkers than men. They wonder about much more profound subjects than men do. A woman will wonder what love is and where it comes from. A woman will ask where rainbows and sunsets come from, and they will appreciate them 900 times more than a man. A woman will not involve herself in triviality; if it doesn’t have deep meaning to her or impact the world, she will not bother (which is why 92% of women change the channel while watching the news when the sports comes on).

Men aren’t that deep. If you’re like me, you wonder about much simpler mysteries, like why a dog barks wildly at a squirrel yet only wags its tail when it’s approached by another dog. How does it know the difference? How does it differentiate between the species in the animal kingdom so easily?

If you’re like me, you wonder how people on the east coast go to bed after the 11 o’clock news and still get to work by 8 or 9AM, yet aren’t more tired than those of us who live in the Central Time Zone who go to bed after the 10 o’clock news. And when there’s a major sporting event on TV the night before, like the NCAA championship last Monday, and the game goes into overtime, those east coasters are hitting the sack near midnight, yet they still get up for work on time the next day. (The flip side is the west coasters, who have their Super Bowls and World Series games end by 8 or 9PM, leaving them plenty of time to get to bed. Although they eat dinner at 8PM on the west coast, so you see how that stuff makes me wonder?)

Like me, you may also have other burning questions, like why hasn’t the world run out of rice yet, or where do robins hang out in the winter, or why does your beard grow back, every single day, yet your hair loss is forever?

I also stay awake at night asking myself how the Shuttle can be so big and its wheels can be so small. Stuff like that. Luckily for me, I’m a man, so I only stay awake about 4 minutes with my questions, and even then I forget I ever asked them in the morning. I’m good to go the next day, until I think of another stupid question as I watch the man sleep on the train on my way to work.