I had a vast imagination when I was a little girl. I remember when I was in elementary school, I couldn’t wrap my mind around sitcom audiences. I was so confused about where all the chuckling was coming from. Like, who were these people? Where are they? Did the TV folk just have a bunch of different people record their guffaws and then overlap the audio? Also, how could I get my laugh on TV? Were there auditions? When were they and why hasn’t anyone told me about them? Frankly, I was a little offended. Being the unbelievably defensive child that I was, I began to think that my parents were plotting against me. I started hearing my mom’s distinct hyena laugh and my dad’s low, bouncy chortles on Seinfeld. And as I listened to joke after joke, laugh after laugh at yet ANOTHER one of George Castanza’s screw-ups, I became more familiar with each giggle. And with each giggle, I was becoming one step closer to unveiling the truth behind the mystery of the snickers and snorts. Somewhere down the road I worked it out in my twisted little head that the TV folk were recording every single person who was currently watching the show on their television sets.

I was convinced that it was live laughing from different people all around the world… I envisioned a large hairy man in a fluorescent-lit Laundromat eating an egg sandwich from the gas station across the street waiting for his laundry to get done, watching the small television set in the corner letting out a wheezy chain-smoker’s laugh every few minutes. I was so damn confident in this theory. So confident, that I began my own cackling club. Yes, you heard me, cackling club. Shockingly, I was the only member in cackling club, but, hey, I thought, if a large hairy man gets to have his laugh on TV, why can’t I have mine? So, Cackling club met every night during re-runs of Seinfeld. I would sit there with my pigtailed hair and make damn well sure that I was howling and wooping and cackling louder and heftier than everyone; hoping, dreaming with every fiber in my body that I would be able to hear my own desperate attempts of fake laughter. But as the nights dragged on and my laughter turned into tired wheezes, I grew skeptical. One night, I put my soul into it. I huffed, and I wheezed and I chortled my little heart out. Still nothing.

In a fit of rage, I said, “Mom, HOW COME I CAN’T HEAR MYSELF LAUGHING ON TV?”

She looked at me, her brown crescent eyes searching for a clue on what the hell I was talking about. “Well, honey,” she said, hunting for the right words, “You are not in the live studio audience…”

“Audience?” I said, the word cutting through me like a dagger.

She went on to explain that yes, there was indeed a whole audience full of real people letting out real laughs in real time with each other and that it’s not fucking rocket science. The earth wobbled beneath me, and I came to the brief horror-stricken realization that I would never hear my own laugh on television. The curiosity was gone. There was the answer, in black and white. That was it, there was nothing else to it. Here I was, creating this elaborate theory and it was shot down with her icy answer. Some questions are better left unanswered. And here’s the thing with questions, They’re easy. They’re easy because it is in human nature to be curious, to question, to have this yearning for the unknowable. That’s why answers are great, because they quench our nosy-ass unending thirst for wanting to know. They’re especially great when we ask questions like: Who closes the door after the bus driver gets out? Is there another word for synonym? Why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle? Why are apartments called apartments if they’re built together?

And perhaps, in all seriousness, the most important question of all, How in the hell did we all get here? We just-ugh we just want to know so badly. But the thing is, we will never know. Not in this lifetime, at least. But that’s okay, because imagine what it would be like if we knew the answer. If we knew all of the secrets of the universe and beyond. There would be no curiosity, no yearning, no Star Wars (because we would already know what was going on). Some questions are better left unanswered. Answers are where curiosity goes to die, they are where the broken dreams of little girls’ fantasies of their laughter being on television lie.