It's 2014 and a lot of mysteries have been solved: the sun's general whereabouts, how worms pee, ice cubes, but there's one thing no one has any idea about and I think it's because we're all too nervous to ask.

Why is everybody keeping so many books next to the toilet?

Books are great, and I like reading as much as the next person. My family has a friend who stores books in her dishwasher because she washes dishes by hand anyway and needs the extra book storage space. Books in the dishwasher is pretty weird, but it makes more sense to me than books in the bathroom. And I see books in bathrooms all the time.

I have three theories:

THEORY 1: EPIC JOURNEY

I've always assumed that people must be taking so incredibly long to use the bathroom that they need to prepare for it the way they would for a long commute or a journey west or a trip to outer space.

They're bringing reading material because they're going in not knowing when they're coming back out.

Why they're in there so long I have no idea. Lack of fiber? Too much fiber? Very long digestive tracts? Those have question marks but they're not questions, I don't really want to know the answers.

THEORY 2: OVERACHIEVERS

I was talking to my mom on the phone a few months ago about people who have it all together, who are going to school while working and keeping plants alive and wearing mascara and she's not into those people. My mom says some people need to learn to take it easy.

"I went to someone's house the other day," she said, "and there was a book in the bathroom. A book in the bathroom how sad is that, even the two minutes it takes you to sit there and go to the bathroom needs to be useful multitasking time you can spend getting a page ahead in your book. Why can't people just take two minutes off from it all and go to the bathroom."

I have a few additional suggestions for people who read in the bathroom because they like multitasking.

Do squats instead of sitting so that you strengthen your leg muscles
Check your arms and any other visible skin for unusual moles
Recite the Greek alphabet twice while you wash your hands
Also use that hand-washing time to check your teeth in the mirror in case there's salad in them.

THEORY 3: SECRET HIDEOUT

I think sometimes people want to play Candy Crush and Words with Friends and their real-life friends are tired of them being on their phone so they stay in the bathroom forever. Like the guy in This is 40. Maybe that wasn't This is 40. Whatever movie that was.

Actually it was This is 40, here is proof.

He's playing Words with Friends. See that tea light on the back of the toilet? I have so many questions about bathrooms.

Anyway, maybe some people are the same with magazines and finance books? Maybe they're just looking for a quiet place they can read with their pants down because people won't leave them alone.

We'll never know.

Sometimes I remember that in college, six years ago, I took a Molière class and read seventeen Molière plays, in French, and wrote papers and took tests on all of them.

Molière is a playwright? That seems like a good guess. But if you held a gun to my head I could not tell you a single thing about even one of those plays. And if you put the gun away and asked me nicely, thinking maybe the gun was stressing me out, maybe I could answer if I had a minute to catch my breath and answer calmly, I still wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about them. Then I guess you’d have to decide what to do next. The gun didn’t work, no gun didn’t work, what’s your plan? Why do you need to know about these plays? There’s probably an easier way to get the information.

They say that our cells are replacing each other every second, so fast that every few years we’re a completely new person, a lifetime away from plays we read and studied and used to care about. But when I think of this Molière class I think that isn’t true.

Because one morning when I was getting ready for that Molière class I don’t remember, I made myself tea but forgot to drink it before I left the apartment.

I just decided to run out the door with a thermos full of tea. The class started at 8 am, and I was going to be late, and why was I holding this stupid thermos? I didn’t feel like drinking it anymore.

The tea was lemon which you would expect to be lemonade-colored but instead it was dark red, and the temperature was between molten lava and soup on the planet Mercury. I ran into the closest bathroom and filled the first sink with the dark, rust-colored steaming liquid. More bad news - the drain was broken. So the tea didn’t go anywhere, it just splashed around the way it would if a feverish mid-sized animal had met its end at 7:50 that morning in the first sink in the women’s bathroom. I ran water to dilute it but instead of getting clearer it somehow got darker, bloodier, more steamier, just then the door opened and half a dozen middle aged women walked in. At eight am. I don’t know why, maybe they were sharks in disguise, but one took the only stall and the other five stared at me, the mirror covered in steam, the sink filled with hot blood, the entire room smelling so much like lemons.

And I think the theory about your cells multiplying every few years is garbage because every time I think of those women staring at me and my thermos in the bathroom seven years ago, I can still remember exactly how that last sip of tea tasted.