As scientists have examined the animal kingdom more closely, they've discovered that animals are smarter than we think. Sea otters, for instance, use stones to crack open abalone shells. Octopi use coconut shells as portable armor to protect themselves from attack. Monkeys have been known to pull hair out of the heads of humans and use it as dental floss.

In fact, after years of extensive research, scientists have discovered that there is exactly one small family in the animal kingdom that doesn't use any tools.

The Hans family.

It all started thousands of years ago. Back in the caves with the other Neanderthals, one of our ancestors chipped a rock into a point, tied it to a stick, and threw it at a deer. It hit the deer sideways and bounced off, and the deer got pissed off and ran away.

My distant relative said to himself, "Well, that was a fuckin' useless, eh?" and that was it. Word passed down from generation to generation. Ever since then, we've scoffed at all the new inventions that made everybody else's lives easier and stuck to the tried-and-true.

An early ancestor tried something, and didn't like it. It's the same reason we don't eat liver.

I learned about this family tradition when I was a teenager. I wanted to hang up a picture in my bedroom. Naturally, I went looking for a hammer. "Hammer?" my mom said. "What, did you lose all your shoes?"

Mom always convinced me that tools didn't make sense. I think the underlying motivation was that we were poor and they were expensive, but she offered a variety of excuses. "How many times will we need to do this?" she announced as I mixed cement with a broom. "You could hurt yourself with a power sander," she said as I stripped the paint off a door with a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a brick. "By the time you got to the hardware store and bought a shovel we'll be done," she said as I dug a hole for our new lemon tree with a wooden spoon.

Still, as our family grew, we actually added new rooms onto our house. Every year there'd be another bathroom, another closet, a patio. That's hard work for hunky dudes with circular saws and nail guns, let alone skinny white people with a Hello Kitty stapler. The jobs that should have taken five minute took us five days, and frequently suffered because we used a plank and a water balloon as a level.

I explained all this to Raoul at my place over dinner on our second date. I wanted to share, and it explained a lot about me. "So, I'm assuming you don't have any sex toys?" he asked.

"Nope," I said. "Not a one."

He smiled and shrugged and the topic changed. After dinner we kissed a bit and then fell into bed. I smiled as I went unconscious. I was actually pretty surprised the story didn't scare him off, not so shocked that he didn't touch his carrots.