Where Have All the Scissors Gone?

There must be a purgatory reserved especially for scissors, tape, sunglasses, rogue socks, and the occasional set of car keys. Or possibly there's some sort of portal to another dimension that exists in every house, apartment, teepee, igloo, tree house, tent, hut, palace, and mobile home on the face of the earth. There simply is no other explanation. Aside from the people in Bermuda, or course, who have a reasonable excuse.

My kitchen scissors disappear quarterly, even when they're tied down, tagged, and fitted with a satellite-based homing beacon. There may actually be made out of a special kind of metal that disintegrates spontaneously - a clever invention by the scissors manufacturers to keep us coming back for more. Otherwise, you'd think that the world would reach some level of scissors saturation, and ever-sharp stock would tube. But no. They just keep making them.

My mother had the same pair of kitchen scissors for about 750 years. They were probably made out of the old-fashioned pre-space-age non-disintegrating type steel. I need to find some of those. I once, out of desperation, tried some plastic shears. Suffice it to say, they shouldn't be allowed to carry the name "scissors." They should be relegated to "Scissor-Like Device" or "Scissor-esque Cutters." Because plastic, based on my comprehensive consumer trials, cuts only slightly better than dried out play-doh.

The scotch tape phenomenon in my house is nothing short of paranormal. I keep it in the drawer by the fridge, and I NEVER put it anywhere else. But it wouldn't matter if I put it on TOP of the fridge, behind it, or even inside it, the fact remains that I've never been able to keep a roll for more than a week before it finds a way to defect. Not even with a bicycle lock.

Naturally, my first instinct is to blame the children. But after more consideration, I've come to the conclusion that if they were harboring the upwards of 72 missing rolls, I would doubtless find tape shrapnel clinging to the cat. Who knows, maybe there's an underground railroad specifically set up to handle miscellaneous office supplies.

The tape issue has gotten so bad that I no longer wrap gifts with paper. I actually make gift bags out of cloth. With hemmed edges and everything. I've been doing it for years, and people tend to be mightily impressed. But the bottom line is, I can't keep tabs on a roll of tape to save my life. And frankly, it takes less time to sew a darn bag than run to the store for a new roll of adhesive every time. Costs less, too.

Besides that, I have no trouble hanging on to scraps of fabric. In fact, they seem to breed well in captivity.

Socks are another major mystery. Everyone will tell you that they mate for life, but in my experience, there's a lot of sock divorcees out there. This, at least, is not unique to my house. Best I can tell, the damage occurs in the wash. All that flirting and mixing and swinging, and next thing you know, a tube and an anklet have run off together, leaving the bereaved mates on the scrap pile with all the other poor deserted sock spouses that thought "Till Death Do Us Part" really MEANT something.

The worst, though, is glasses. Because they're so darn expensive. Granted, their desertion rate is lower, and they stand an equal chance of death by buttock, but it really hurts when these guys take a hike. Mostly because during the transition through anger, denial, bargaining, and acceptance, I'm forced to wear my birth control glasses. In public.

It just adds up to TOO MUCH STUFF missing, is my point. It defies logic. It defies physics. (Okay, maybe not the law of entropy. Smartypants.)

I guess I'll chalk it up to one of life's great mysteries.

If I could find the chalk.