I yelled a question to my husband while he was in the shower the other day (I rarely have the patience to wait until he’s finished with, say, brushing his teeth before I must blurt out some mundane comment and then ask him a question he clearly can’t answer with a mouth full of foam.) We were getting ready to head out somewhere, and after he answered my initial question, he said:

“Sorry I’m taking so long. Shower gravity.”

And I could hardly blame him, because who hasn’t been sucked into a hot shower on a winter day for a finger-pruning amount of time?

His usual gravity vice is online. Actually, the pull of surfing or skimming stories off his RSS feed is usually stronger than gravity. It’s closer to the sucking power of a black hole. I have my own gravity issues, too, but I won’t confess which daytime television show(s) are drawing me in, sorry.

But there are worse kinds of gravity, relatively speaking, so I try not sweat these little anomalies of the physical universe. I could have French-fry gravity, or some other form of trans-fat gravity. Casino gravity. Cigarette gravity. One-up-you gravity. Couch gravity (not unheard of in small amounts) that would prevent me from playing in the mountains and cause me to gain 30 lbs.

However, gravity is something you don’t notice until you’re in an extreme situation. Your pruning skin will eventually send you looking for a dry towel, regardless of shower gravity. But with some things, you might have to go to the moon to figure it out. And sometimes we live with strange forms of gravity just because the escape velocity needed to get to the moon seems impossible.

I suppose the important thing is to find a hospitable, livable gravity, somewhere between the sun and the moon. Perhaps Earth?

“Shower gravity, eh?” I asked my husband.

He peeked out from around the shower curtain, grinned under his soapy mohawk and nodded yes.

You don’t have to sit under the apple tree long to figure out that relative to the other kinds of gravity out there, a little shower gravity never hurt anyone.