I was in bed the other night, with my laptop on my knees, and my mother, seeing that I was on Skype, called me. She was eleven thousand miles away from me and we sat, on opposite sides of the world, me in darkness, her in morning sunlight, and chatted about our lives for a few hours.
Skype cost me nothing to install. I don’t need (as my mother did when she lived in Sydney and her family in Gisbourne, New Zealand) to book the phone call ahead of time with the phone company. I don’t even need a reason. Twenty years ago that same phone call would have had to have contained maybe a years’ worth of conversation, and would have been carefully planned. Now? Easy as anything. And in another twenty years… I don’t know. I can’t imagine it, but one day my child will look at me and wonder how I managed my life with the limited technology available. Amazing.
I was watching the Phantom Tollbooth a few night back. An oldie but a goodie (not as good as the book though) and I had the same idea: how can anyone be bored? Look at the world!
Water amazes me. The feeling of swimming in it, being submerged in it, feeling it move around me. The fact that it can be frozen, heated, directed and manipulated, but that’s all temporary, and in the end it will outlast us and can kill us with very very little effort. The supreme indifference of the rivers and oceans.
Lust. I look at a certain person, doing a certain thing, and chemicals start percolating. Only certain people, certain things. Other people, no reaction. And sometimes, no telling what it will be.
Snakes. A long limbless body, no appendages. It shouldn’t be successful, but it is, and it’s beautiful (to me, anyway).
Showers. Each time I shower I am amazed and full of gratitude that any time I want, all the clean hot water I want comes out of the wall. In my own house!
I have this thing in my home that is just a bowl filled with water. I use it to expell my bodily waste into the water, push on something and it spirits away this waste to some unknown place, never to be seen by me again. I don’t have to worry about it, I don’t have to care. I just know that whenever I have to do this in the vast majority of buildings, they have this thing that will take care of it so that I never have to deal with it myself. Still pretty amazing to me.
The fact that two people can decide together to create life. My wife and I created two other human beings out of nothing. They are our creation, and we are solely responsible for their development into other adult humans.
If that ain’t mind boggling, I don’t know what is?
The fact that most of the fauna not microorganisms on earth evolved to have most of our senses in one end of our bodies, which is a poor argument for redundancy. Who the hell thought cephalic designs were a good idea?
To say nothing of the fact that way back when, some monkey thought, “Hey, let’s see what I can do if I try walking on my back legs all the time instead of knuckle-walking…”
Dishes involving tapioca. Or acorn flour. Both of which are rather poisonous until they undergo a fairly involved process. (Fugu!) :dubious:
The concept of infinity and the fact that us three-dimensional creatures can imagine it.
Yeah, this is amazing. Just the language skills alone…my son is 2, and he’s still working on 2-word combinations. I remember my daughter was at about the same level at his age, and now that she’s 4, she can speak in complex sentences, tell stories about thing that happened to her, describe things at school. It’s astounding the verbal development that takes place in a 1-2 year period.
I was typing on Ye Old IBM Selectric II, and a teenager watching me remarked with awe “That is so cool. You actually see what you’re printing as you are typing it.”
The instanteousness of news stories. It use to take weeks to get the news. Then newspapers made it weekly, than daily. News programs made it hourly. The iInternet gives us news as it happens.
Perhaps because I didn’t get much of it last night, but I think of sleep as one of the coolest things ever.
It’s like a “reboot” button. You completely check out of your life for a few hours; you are allowed to be unconscious and uncaring while you recharge. And almost always, whatever seemed horrible the night before will seem much less so by the time you wake up. You get to leave yourself behind. You get to bury yesterday and start from scratch.
For those of you who have never had insomnia, just trust me…sleep is one of the greatest gifts in the world.
Not to mention that sleep gives you dreams…including my personal favorite, The Flying Dream. It’s one of the few things humans can’t do in real life…but you can always experience it–as vividly as if it were real–in your dreams.
George Carlin on the elevator: I walked in a little room, the doors closed and there was a humming sound, then the doors opened and I was in another place.
Athough it has been suggested that some of the posters in this thread are high right now, let me assure you I am not.
What marvels me though is the whole idea of seeing a plant, thinking, hmmm what if I chop that down, dry it out and light it on fire and then do this in a controlled manner, for recreation. I mean really? Smoke is an irritant, it doesn’t make any sense.
The miracle of pregnancy. I saw a woman I used to have a class with today, a beautiful, intelligent and warm individual, and she’s about 4 mo preggo. And I thought, wow, how special is this that a woman can grow, right inside her, a real live BABY! How awesome is THAT?!
That for 42 cents, I can mail something to anywhere in the US, and it will reliably get there in 2-3 days. Just the immense amount of organization and sorting that gets it from point A to B. Whether in rural Nebraska, or here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Mine is at any point in time I have 3 gigabytes of casual data storage available on me (2 gig USB stick on my key chain, and a a gig on my phone) and that’s a piddly amount! I could easily add more!
I’m walking around my daily life with machines capable of remembering 3 trillion digit binary numbers, and I find it annoying to record 7 digit phone numbers sometimes.
Paper. Who thought this up first? I can grasp writing on clay, or bark, or reeds. You grab what’s handy and start writing (which is also pretty freaking amazing, writing). But who thought to take wood or old clothes, pound and shred the ever lovin’ shit out of it while soaking it water, then straining the resulting pulp through a fine screen, let it dry, then write or paint on it. A fairly complicated process when you think about it. I mean, did this happen by accident, did someone get a vision, what??
Our little girl’s language has developed incredibly quickly. She turns 2 next month, and already she’s making multiple word sentences. It’s incredible to realize that she’s not just the cute little lump that we used to tote around and play with. She’s turning into an honest-to-god actual person, wholly separate from us, with thoughts and ideas of her very own. It’s crazy and amazing. Cramazing. Or something…
This is what I came here to post (but with genders reversed). It’s really profound. I feel especially filled with awe that I did most of the physical work in the beginning. They grew in me, nourished solely by my body, until they decided they were ready to be born.
