air pollution

So we were wrapping up dinner tonight and Nathan noticed (Nathan is the most perceptive person in our family. That includes mom and dad.) some small clouds of stuff floating around our light fixture. He asked what we all thought it was. We had never noticed this haze of particulates floating around in our apartment before. Then we noticed that we had left the window open for the last couple hours to help the clothes dry on the drying rack.
Kind of a scary feeling looking up at your ceiling and wondering how you had never noticed the thin, wispy clouds of pollution swirtling around. When we looked at the light in the living room, we could even see some there too. We weren't too sure what to think about this or what to do to 'fix' it. Our only thought was how much worse it would get once winter hit and the coal fired power plants all fired up and belched all new streams of sulfer into our air.
That was when Nathan, the perceptive, pointed out that maybe the smokey stuff wasn't pollution after all and that maybe it was just the same smoke that was coming out of our toaster. We all turned and looked at the toaster. Sure enough, there was a really black piece of bread poking out. And yes the toaster was only a few feet away from our table. And yes we should have noticed it. I guess this falls into the category of your brain's power to hold onto a theory you're convinced must be true and ignore the data around you that refutes that theory. We were all convinced it was pollution, so there was no need to look for any other reason why we would have a cloud of smoke layering our ceiling.
So, it turns out we're just a group of knuckle draggers. China may still have a pollution problem, but its also got a problem with at least one family of dim witted foreigners.