I Looked Up Whether Defying Gravity Is Possible and Lost Two Hours

December twentieth. The plan was simple: finish the movie, be in bed by ten. The movie in question was Wicked, which I had already seen and was rewatching because it is December and I am allowed.

Except somewhere around the part where Elphaba starts actually rising, I paused it. Not for a snack or a bathroom break. I paused it to ask myself, out loud, to no one, whether the physics of the thing were remotely plausible. And then I opened the laptop. And then I was reading about aerodynamic lift, and then about buoyancy, and then somehow about the Bernoulli principle, and then about a completely unrelated Wikipedia article that I cannot now remember the name of but that felt extremely important at the time.

Deep in the Wikipedia hole. Movie still paused.

Two hours. The movie sat on pause for two hours. Elphaba was mid-air the entire time I was doing this. I came back to it, watched the rest, and went to bed later than I planned feeling simultaneously informed about fluid dynamics and slightly embarrassed about my own brain.

Closed the laptop. Did not finish the movie.

The cord is still on the windowsill. Gerald is fine. The box is still folded on the shelf. Nothing in the apartment changed tonight except that I now know more about aerodynamics than any of it required of me.