There are, of course, divers cues for existential crisis in the Science Center women’s room (irrespective of frequent, freshman, sink-front mis-self-diagnoses of existential crisis), but today the mother of them all presented itself to me.

Query: if I vigorously wave my hand in front of a faucet’s motion sensor and it fails to turn on, can I then be sure that I exist? If I linger over drying my hands long enough to watch someone else successfully trigger a cold crystal stream with only a slight undulation of the thumb, can I then confirm that I do not exist?

Moreover, if, fifteen minutes later, the people on either side of me in Pop Art (packed to the gills with sophomore chicks in summer-weight scarves and yet bound only to accept 12 students) carry on an animated conversation about the nightlife in Dubai as though I am not sitting between them, then–then can I assume that I do not exist and should therefore not go to the trouble of obtaining the roughly seven million signatures it will take for me to cross-register for the class I shopped in the morning?*

*Query assumes my existence at some point this morning.