Cheerios, Cottonballs, and the Futility of Life

So, I've been resisting reading this book for a long time now. The title of the book is A Year of Biblical Womanhood; the subtitle is How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband "Master," which makes it more palatable, I guess. The author, Rachel Held Evans, decides to explore living out, as closely as possible, the literal dictates and examples of femininity in the Bible in all their absurdity and irony. I've been avoiding it not only because it seems a bit gimmicky and because if someone found it open next to me and realized I was reading a book about "Biblical Womanhood" they might assume that I am a submissive domestic Bible-thumping type (I'm not), but because I'm a little jealous that I didn't come up with the idea to write the book first. Kind of like the "Reasons My Son is Crying" tumblr, I'm avoiding it out of jealousy. I'm a great person.

Anyway, I eventually ended up reading Evans' blog, which was witty and insightful, and as a result, decided to revisit her book, which was funny, thoughtful, and intelligently wrought. But this post is not about the book. It's actually about me, because I'm crazy narcissistic. The book, however, is essential to this post for the few moments in which Evans found herself in existential crisis for the most lovely, quaint and ridiculous reasons:

"While cooking strikes me as an essentially creative act, cleaning seems little more than an exercise in decay management, enough to trigger an existential crisis each time the ring around the toilet bowl reappears."  (27)

"My aversion to crafting goes way back to an incident in kindergarten during which, upon gluing something like the fortieth Cheerio to the inside of a giant O-shaped construction paper cut-out, I was suddenly struck by the futility of human existence." (79) 

I love these because I can relate so closely to them (I hate cleaning and gluing things). Maybe that's because these are universal moments of crisis, maybe it's because I'm a bit similar to Evans, or maybe it's because I have an especially delicate psyche and most things cause me to question the meaning and validity of human existence. I'm not sure. But it asking just what sorts of things throw people into existential crisis? I questioned a group of friends, and the general consensus was "the vastness of the cosmos." Bor-ring! I mean, isn't that kinda cliche? Not me. Bring on the entirety of infinite space and time. But these, these are the things and the moments that destroy me emotionally and psychologically. In no particular order:

• When the clouds in the sky aren't well enough defined
• Adult contemporary music
• Grocery shopping
• Being forced to listen to adult contemporary music while grocery shopping
• Driving through industrial landscapes
• Any town or city built primarily in the mid 20th century (those buildings are so freakishly small and cubicle, and where oh where are the sidewalks? DESOLATION!)
• Gluing cottonballs to anything
• Weeding the garden (nothing like playing God to mess with your neatly defined concepts of theology/theodicy)
• School buses and the accompanying school bus-y smell
• Treadmills
• 4:00 am
• Sleep deprivation
• Any repetitive, futile task, such as cleaning (as the state of my house will attest)
• Packing school lunches 
• Realizing how old I am, how many opportunities for success I had as a child, and what I actually do for a living
• Flowers with broken stems
• Roadkill
• Subdivisions and strip malls
• Any novel or movie that deals with the death of an animal
• Straight, level roads
• When I want pizza, but can't have it
• Being the new girl at work

Currently, I am the new girl at work, am surrounded by subdivisions and strip malls (through which I drive on straight, level roads), have an intense awareness of what I do for a living, pack school lunches, and write this as I gaze out into a sky full of woefully undefined clouds. So yeah, I guess you could say I'm in a good place right now. The good news is that am not listening to adult contemporary music and my grocery shopping is done. I am also not currently being forced to engage in a project employing Elmer's glue and cotton balls, so things could be worse...a lot worse. Because I hate cotton ball/glue projects with an unbridled passion...so much stickiness, stringiness, fuzziness...why was I born?! Yeah. It's like that. 

So I'm curious, what sort of things throw you into existential crisis? And whatever you do, don't say "the vastness of the cosmos."