The Wonderous Mundane; Or, Grocery Stores Are Amazing

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I love grocery stores. Not only do I love eating, I also enjoy looking at all the foods available. Every once in a while, I just stand there in awe. I know it sounds silly, but I really do. We’ve got salmon, hamburg, chicken, corn, peppers, onions, lettuce, peanuts, cherries, lobster, tomatoes, watermelon, papayas, bananas and on and on and on. Just the amount and variety of fresh foods available is incredible. It boggles my mind, thinking of all the labor and time put in to grow the food, prepare it, preserve it, and ship it, so it can arrive down the street from me and I can buy a whole cartful of it that can feed me for two weeks with the amount of money it takes me an afternoon to earn.

What are the things you see everyday that once in a while inspire awe?

2

Roads, man, roads. Every time I drive I am amazed by the highway system. We have everything from 400lb bike to 22 ton 18-wheelers, all whizing down the road from one place to another in what would be considered the blink of an eye a mere century ago. Add in that the thing operates as smoothly as it does basically because people agree to do so, and it is even more amazing.

3

Could you at least stand to one side of the aisle? I’m trying to get in and out of this hell hole as fast as possible!

4

There is hot, clean running water in my house that costs me a *tiny *fraction of my income. Hot showers are the pinnacle of civilization. I am reminded of this every time I come home from a camping trip where I’ve had to haul and heat my own water.

5

That your car doesn’t hardly ever break down. There is shit exploding in there all the time on purpose! There are a billion little tiny precision parts that all move! And it actually works, so well that it’s most people’s first choice of transportation!

6

Email - I can type a message, hit send, and my words go winging off into who knows where, to appear to the person I want, in just a few seconds.

Don’t feel like reading off a quote over the phone? I can email it while we are chatting and we can both look it over at the same time.

Trying to contact someone overseas? No longer to I have to figure out what time it is there, wondering if they are at work or asleep. No $1.00/min phone calls. No waiting a couple of weeks for the mail to go through, and then hope that someone doesn’t steal it.
USPS - yep, the United States Postal Service that everyone loves to gripe about.
44¢ will get a letter picked up at my curb, and delivered anywhere in the US, usually in 3 days or less. 44¢? Let’s see, that’s about 4 miles worth of gas. Or maybe a minute of my paycheck.

7

Same here. The act of driving awes me immensely. The fact we can all operate these hulking steel behemoths without killing each other is incredible. It’s a symphony of metal and man.

8

My MacBook, for entertainment and information. I can take it anywhere, and in two minutes I have the world at my fingertips until the battery runs low. Plug it in to recharge and do it all over. In the morning with my coffee, in the evening to catch up on my Facebooks and e-mails. It is truly a wonder and a joy (for the most part) in my life.

I agree about grocery stores, too, but particularly Wegmans. Wegmans is one of the wonders of the world to me. It is to an ordinary grocery store as a full blown rose is to a dandelion.

9

Toilet paper. Not only does it dissolve in water, but I heard a story that in India, tourists get mugged for it. I guess I’m not that much in awe of TP itself, but that I live in a country where something so minor is nearly free and readily available everywhere.

10

Yeah, grocery stores are awesome. I read a book by a Soviet interceptor pilot name Viktor Belenko who defected to the US through Japan in the seventies. The first time he saw an American grocery store, he didn’t believe it was real. He talked about it in this interview: http://www.fullcontext.org/people/belenko.htm

[QUOTE=Viktor Belenko]
When I came to U.S. I behaved like someone from outer space. I put myself in very funny situations. Americans were laughing at me. I behaved worse than Mork in “Mork and Mindy”.

Q: Like what did you do, for example?

Belenko: First of all American super-market, my first visit was under CIA supervision, and I thought it was set-up; I did not believe super-market was real one. I thought well I was unusual guest; they probably kicked everyone out. It’s such a nice, big place with incredible amount of produce, and no long lines! You’re accustomed to long lines in Russia. But later, when I discovered super-market was real one, I had real fun exploring new products. I would buy, everyday, a new thing and try to figure out its function. In Russia at that time (and even today) it’s hard to find canned food, good one. But everyday I would buy new cans with different food. Once I bought a can which said “dinner.” I cooked it with potatoes, onions, and garlic-it was delicious. Next morning my friends ask me, “Viktor, did you buy a cat?” It was a can of chicken-based cat food. But it was delicious! It was better than canned food for people in Russia today. And I did test it. Last year I brought four people from Russia for commercial project, and I set them up. I bought nibble sized human food. I installed a pâté, and it was cat food. I put it on crackers. And they did consume it, and they liked it. So the taste has not changed. By the way, for those who are not familiar with American cat food. It’s very safe; it’s delicious, and sometimes it’s better than human food, because of the Humane Society.
[/QUOTE]

His book MIG Pilot is out of print, but it’s available used on Amazon and an excerpt from it about the grocery store can be downloaded as pdf with this link: K-12 Core Lesson Plans - UEN

I’m awed by fabric. All those microscopic fibers, turned into threads, and enormous numbers of those tiny, tiny threads are somehow assembled into the cotton clothes I’m wearing. How the hell does that happen, especially in pre-industrial societies? How can a bunch of Bedouin nomads have long robes and head-dresses as traditional clothing? I guess what I’m trying to say is:

Fucking fabrics, how do they work?

11

Electricity. Little invisible particles moving around and our entire technology runs off of it.

12

And so amazingly interconnected. My front step is made of concrete. I could (should I want to) walk from my front door to my parent’s front door, more than two thousand miles away, without ever setting foot on anything other than continuous concrete and asphalt. And the same is true of almost any two inhabited points in the US (although of course some roads are gravel, some bridges are wooden, and there exist places accessible only by ferry, but I’d be willing to bet that there’s almost always a pure-pavement route to anyone who’s not at the end of one of those cases).

13

This is EXACTLY what fascinates me about the Lincoln Highway. Holy Cow! How did they do that in the early 1900s?

14

Radios, TVs, cell phones, and other wireless things. They pull text, sounds, pictures, and live video out of thin air. Absolute magic.

15

Light Emitting Diodes- I understand how they work, but they will never cease to amaze me. I can get a ring with multiple LEDs in a tiny printed circuit out of a gumball machine for two quarters. Fifty years ago, the technology to make such a thing would have been priceless.

Re Supermarkets

Heaven And Earth with Tommy Lee Jones has a scene in which a Vietnamese immigrant sees a standard US supermarket for the first time. She responds with disbelief, then begins grabbing industrial sized bags of food and loading them into the cart. Jones stops her and explains that the food will really still be here the next time they shop.

16

Yikes. This is a pleasant thought?

17

Would it help if I pointed out that pretty much anywhere along those 2000 miles, you could step off the pavement into deserts, plains, forests, mountain trails, national parks, etc. without going more than a few feet to either side?

Seriously, can you conceive of building a web of ANYTHING that would connect virtually every home, business, park, school, and church in America? And have it be something as robust as roads…built by the same low-bid highway workers who take seven years to finish a single exit ramp? And yet, it exists.

18

That’s actually a myth. These things just make stuff up right in the device – they’re just really, really good at it (especially the cell phones, since they have to make stuff up at both ends that’s consistent).

19

As someone who’s gone without, my favorite modern wonders are: modern heating and washers and dryers.

I LOVE THEM A LOT.

20

It’s entirely anecdotal, but my HS Eastern Studies teacher - who I find is now a PHD (Crusading Realism (Damn. I should look him up and drop him a note. He’s a hell of a smart guy. Fairly right, and I’m now quite left. We got along well and I’d put him among my top five teachers of my life.)) Told a similar story about Gorbachev visiting the US. Just being absolutely gobsmacked by the incredible bounty and variety available to the average US Citizen.

I also remember reflecting on this in the fourth grade, after our teacher had finished reading us Hatchet, where Brian at the end finds himself transfixed in grocery stores just marveling at all the types and quantity of food available.

I’m a foodie, so yeah - the incredible food diversity that the US allows even its poorer citizens is staggering.