I was having lunch with friends the other day, and upon looking at the menu, one of my friends asked that universal question that has plagued mankind for eons. When the heck is that waitress going to take our order? I’m starving.
In society today, there are so many challenges and each time we solve one, two more seem to pop up. This would be fine if we answered all of the questions before a new one came along, but what if some questions fell between the cracks and went unanswered.
Some are unanswerable like which is better, a bath or a shower? and if a tree falls near the road, what are the odds that it would fall across it and not make a noise while killing the chicken?
So my friend asked that question that still stops traffic in uptown Bombay: What came first, the chicken or the egg? Meg said it was the egg because dinosaurs came before chickens. Then Joe said implied in the question is that the egg is a chicken egg. Staci agreed with Meg because they’re roommates and girls and they go into public restrooms together and they’re always giggling when they come out. And I wondered why diners serve steak and eggs, eggs and sausage, bacon and eggs but never the chicken and the egg.
In the question itself, the chicken is mentioned first and I’ve never heard anyone say, what comes first the egg or the chicken? But it couldn’t be that simple could it? The wording or the question should make it obvious that the egg takes a back door to the chicken.
But the egg people are sticking to their yolks and pushing the shell. On the menu, of course, breakfast is before lunch so the answer could be the egg. And the egg people fuel the argument further by saying that the egg had to have come first because the chicken hatched from it.
The chicken people say that in order to have the egg, you had to first have the chicken to lay it and now we have the snake eating it's own tail. The original question should have been like those word problems from high school with a Part A and B: was it a chicken egg, and ostrich egg or those plastic eggs that panty hose come in?
When I go to the grocery store, the eggs are in the far left corner and the chicken is in the middle in the back. I start from the right and I circle around to the left so I get to the chicken first. And people in London probably go to the left first so the answer needs to be one that crosses oceans. The egg is a breakfast food and chicken is at least a lunch food or maybe even dinner. So, all of this thinking has produced a big old goose egg for results and I don’t think the original question involved geese.
The further I went down the rabbit hole, the more confused I got, the more roots I came across and the grosser my fingernails became; and now I’ve got dirt in places that I didn’t know I had places. Like that age old question that get us more confused rather than rectifying things; Who’s On First?
Abbott and Costello had it right and arriving is overrated; the journey is what it’s all about. Who created this question and what difference does it make what the answer is and after all of this thinking, I don’t know the answer to the question; and I’m back to first base.
Meg ordered an omelet and Joe got a chicken wrap and I got my eggs well done and Staci got a Cornish hen. So the question remains unanswered, unless the waitress brings out my eggs first.
a decidedly myopic rehashing of the not so obvious... Seinfeld should have thought of it
