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LIVING INSIDE THE BOX: THREE THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS ABOUT YOUR LIFE (AND MINE)
1. Chinese Room
You're in a Chinese restaurant. You can't read the menu. The staff speaks no English. You speak neither Cantonese nor Mandarin. You are hungry, though. You point to the third item down on the left. It's cheap and only has one star by it. The waiter says something. You nod. He brings tea.
The meal comes, and you're relieved it isn't braised eels or monkey's brains. You can't quite identify it, but it's tasty. The waiter says something. You nod. He brings the check, and you leave him a nice tip.
You come back often. You try other dishes on the menu but you eventually settle on the third item on the left as your usual thing. The waiters begin to treat you like a native, firing rapid sentences at you as if you understand.
You just smile and nod like you do.
2. Twin Paradox
You're in the airport waiting to pick up your twin. Or, maybe it's just an old friend you haven't seen since high school. You're a little nervous. She left; you stayed home.
She went everywhere, saw everything. She taught English in Zimbabwe. She saw the sun rise over Uluru. She baked bread in a Zen monastery. She never stayed put long.
You go to work in the morning. You drive the kids to soccer in the afternoon. You do the dishes in the evening. You go to bed with the same man every night.
Now you see her walking toward you, one bag slung over her shoulder, unencumbered. Free. It's like looking in a mirror but seeing a younger, more restless version of your self staring back.
You just smile and tell yourself you're the grown-up.
3. Schrödinger's Cat
You're a cat in a box. It's a really big box, though, big enough for you to grow up, learn, work, love, procreate, and die in without really noticing the box. It's small enough, though, so that you're always aware of it at some fundamental level.
And there might even be two boxes. In one, things blow up. Blood vessels burst. Some kid buys a gun. Some fool starts a war. A doctor finds a lump. In the other, they don't.
You're that cat existing in both boxes, in two probable states at the same time, both dead and alive. You can't live that way, though.
You just smile and pretend you're not in any damn box.
Not too terribly long ago, Angie fled the corporate world to pursue a life of poverty as a writer. Both the poverty and the writing are going well. She’s had 20 short stories accepted for publication this year. Her work has recently appeared in Pedestal, The Hiss Quarterly, Odyssey, and Flash Me magazines.
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