There’s plenty of magic to it.
If I wanted to, I could have a baby. Like, a little person would parasite itself inside me, and grow bigger, and it would come out, and then it would grow up to be a person just like me, with ears and toes and things.
Not exactly mind blowing, but everytime I’m channel surfing and get distracted, I always come back and find that I stopped on either Univision or the local Religious channel.
I have 70+ channels, yet whenever I come back from an ADD induced distraction, it’s ALWAYS one of those 2 channels (and I despise religion, and speak zero spanish) 
It’s not just this cable service either, it happened when I was away at college as well. Although the religion channel there featured a nun sporting an eyepatch about 20 of the 24 hours of the day. I always liked to pretend she lost her eye in a sword fight, Zoro style. 
Sounds nice.
I’m amazed by quite a lot of things - some of them mentioned already - so I had to think about this for a few to come up with a really good one.
Suspension of disbelief. It blows my mind that even the smartest, most logical person can pick up a book, and go through the emotions that are presented on the pages. For instance, I know that hobbits and dragons and elves don’t exist, they are just the products of a very vivid imagination. But when I read LOTR, for the second or sixth or twentieth times, it still makes me laugh, makes me cry, makes me cower in fear (Ack! The Eye will see us!) And, to me, that is truly amazing.
I know the internet is plenty amazing, and I know a lot of people complain about the postal system, but I’m still pretty impressed that I can put a stamp on a piece of mail here in Ohio and drop in in a box, and a couple of days later, a person will bring it directly to the door of my cousin in Florida or somebody in Seattle who I’ve never met who’s selling me something I bid on in an online auction.
EBay is amazing. I can find almost any obscure thing I can think of, whether I need it or just want it. I can do business (almost) directly with a little old lady on the Upper Peninsula who gets housebound by snow, who does machine embroidery for me on scarves, customized with intricate images from her vast library of computerized designs, for my friends and family. I can buy an almost-perfect leather ottoman or stained-glass lamp or Guatemalan free-trade-made patchwork quilt for 4% of its retail price. I can order two dozen toothbrushes at a time, for my husband who wears one out every other week, for less than half the grocery-store price (including shipping!). I can find a duplicate of the little golden perfume compact I found by the side of the road when I was six that I treasured so much but lost in a move years later. If I got off my butt and did the work, I could sell my extra stuff, too, for more than I’d get in a yard sale.
It also amazes me that more democracy and capitalism boosters – the political and academic type – aren’t singing the praises of eBay and similar internet commerce, for being such a free-market enabler to those without much capital or infrastructure. Or singing louder, anyway.
floor cleaner
after-shave
nasal douche
gonorrhea treatment
scalp treatment for dandruff
and a mouthwash!
I’m amazed at the U.S. constitution. The framework put in place about 220 years lets us correct nearly every problem we had without any violence.
Whenever one branch messes things up, the gears go to work and someone is around with the power to make things work correctly again.
It’s even amazing watching it at work. Most recently with the SCOTUS saying that Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Even better with the country voting for Democrats in 2006, after six years of failed policies.
That also means that when we screw up, we all screw up. With Iraq, it was not only the executive branch that let us down, but also Congress, the media, and the people in 2004.
Do I want to know?
Similarly, sometimes when I’m hanging out with my Mom I am suddenly completely bowled over by the idea that I used to be inside of her. She just up and *made *me, seemingly out of nothing, then popped me out and here we are, 30 years later, eating sushi and discussing Chronicles of Narnia movies.
I’m amazed by the NYC transit system. For $81 a month, I can ride a train or bus anywhere in the city, as often as I want. I can catch a train at 3pm or 3am. I never have to worry about parking or the rising price of gas or insurance. And I’m amazed that people – including myself – still manage to complain about the MTA.
I’m amazed at the big results seemingly insignificant choices I’ve made have had on my life. Three years ago, I went to a bar with my coworkers instead of going home (as I kinda wanted to do) and I met my SO. I decided to go “one more time” down the hill even though everyone else was ready to go and I got into an accident that still affects my health today. I randomly walked into PetCo, even though I was running late, and I found my sweet kitty. Little choices matter.
I’m amazed and heartened when I read a book or see a movie by a first time author/director. Getting to the point where your work is out there for the public to see is amazingly hard and takes a lot of confidence, patience, and luck. It amazes me that people can stick it out. I love debut novels.
The now-extinct Tierra del Fuegians amaze me. Living at the ends of the earth in a cold, stormy mountainous bogland with nary a piece of skin for clothing, bough wigwams for shelter and beech fungi, fish and meat for food, the all-important fire done by striking two rocks together over dry bird down, for untold centuries…
Same here, though I was a fetus in my mother’s womb at that time.
For me, what amazes me is how we can. for the most part, flawlessly reproduce millions of times over such technically intricate machines and electronic devices, and for so little cost, too. I can buy a DVD with such tiny bits of data encoded onto its surface with such unerring precision and play it on any of several dozen machines made to recognize and properly translate its coding into high-quality video and audio. Every automobile out there has to be made to the same specifications in order to work the way it does, and yet each one of them does (barring the usual breakdowns and the other usual problems associated with a car).
Books. Specifically, fiction. A 7x5x1in chunk of flattened bits of ground-up dead tree with little black squiggles on them is at the same time a complete world with people and their lives and problems and things that can completely take over my brain for hours or days and yet has no actual connection to reality.
Regarding cell phones, it’s funny to think now that, when they were expensive, a person who would use a cell phone while standing next to a pay phone was derided as ostentatious. Now, for most of us, it would cost more to use the pay phone, assuming we could even find one.
Babies. They go from pooping/peeing/crying/nursing blobs to walking/babbling/curious little things with their own personality in the space of one year. In no other time during human development does so much happen so quickly.
Nature and evolution. The Planet Earth mini-series on Discovery Channel blew me away…so much wonder and so much niche-fitting, and so much we still don’t know. I think that’s the neat part…for all our technological advances, there’s still so much out there to discover.
Medical advances. So much disease is easily treatable now, and cancer is not the death sentence it once was.
The amount of stuff a modern computer game can render in 3D, in real time, while still operating everything else in the game world.
I mean, for someone who cut his teeth on an Apple II, it’s dazzling enough. But on another level…I’m lousy at math, I can do simple arithmetic. But to think of all of what a machine has to calculate and hold in it’s memory (it’s “mind,” to be overly generous AND overly poetic), every single instant, through processes I can barely begin to understand…
Very humbling, to say the least.
*What really amazes me even to this day is the emotional and phyiscal sensation you get from a man inserting his penis into woman’s vagina. The deep breathing, the warm quivers that roll over your body, the total closeness you get with the woman you love, the warm sweating sensation, the french kissing, the tongue in the ear with the hot breath. My God there’s nothing like it, nothing like it in this whole wide world. In away, I feel sorry for the gays cause fellas, it just can’t be the same. Kissing a scruffy face with dry chapped lips, holding a muscular body close to you, the general smell of a man and inserting your penis up another man’s hairy, stanky, pimply carbuncle infested crap chute. I mean come on guys. You’ll never know the joy & pleasure of a soft warm lucious woman to hold her sweet smelling,soft body close to you. So guys, the next time some guy looks at you and your honey holding callused hard hands and laughs, you’ll know why.
Reported.