What Mundane Things Fascinate You?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Two, mostly: trash and abandoned buildings. Trash because it is indicative of humanity, you are never too alone if you find trash. That, and many other things, like how it all litter tells a story, or the odd fact that you never find garbage more than a year or so old.

Now, abandoned buildings.

The closest I can come to describing the feeling of standing within an abandoned building is somewhat akin to standing in a sort of raft. But, imagine the raft has more patches than original fabric, more holes than solid barriers. Imagine that you are standing amidst the largest, vastest ocean, but that the beautiful blue waters are actually years, decades of age, slowly but surely waltzing confidently through the patches.

Imagine sinking so slowly that you can’t physically see it, you can only feel it in your bones or deeper still, at the core, in your marrow. Your mind and your body fight: are you actually sinking? If so, could you save this raft, - take it back to land, fix it anew?

And then the lobes of your mind are precisely and methodically separated by one sole realization: the raft and the ocean do not care at all. As you question, as you float from thinking of the beauty to shivering in terror, the raft slowly bobs along. Up, and down, then up again - slowly, surely, without thinking. As it has done, for thousands before, as it will always do until it bobs too close to the waters edge. Then, without feeling, it will do whatever comes next, be it sink or float.

Slowly. Aimlessly. Without thinking.

62

I’m always facinated by the nearly infinite ways plants have of protecting seeds until they mature. Pods of all shapes and sizes are way cool. I love the kind that pop open when you brush against them and can fling their seeds 8 or 10 feet away. Or more! And poppies often have a pod with many slits around the top. You can shake the seeds out like a salt shaker. And have you ever looked at the seeds of a hollyhock. They’re arranged around a central point like orange sections in what’s left of the flower. Even burrs are facinating in how they cling to a passing animal or human with the intent of falling off and growing somewhere far from the parent plant. Nature is just amazing!

Water is fascinating too. I love to watch watch the play of light and shadow the ripples make on rocks or sand. I even sat for hours watching the patterns on the bottom of a friend’s pool about a month ago when we were housesitting. Watching waves at the beach or seeing how reflections move and change on the water are wonderful too.

63

Plants also fascinate me, especially the way a bud is the new growth already intricately defined, but curled into this miniature package. It’s just so fractal. The same goes for mushrooms. They’re so cartoonishly alien. Whenever I catch that telltale fungal scent, I get really excited and will start looking around for the culprits.

The life cycle of frogs. While the concept is hardly new to me, I’m just as fascinated by it now as when I was five years old.

I’m also totally captivated by good handwriting. I get completely caught up following the precise strokes and sweeping wisps of ink. It’s like reading a dance from footprints in the sand.

64

A number of the above, plus:

Atlases. Only this morning I was sitting happily poring over an atlas while I was eating my toast. Names and shapes of faraway places that I will never see. Patterns of small islands on the other side of the world. It’s not a continuous obsession by any means - but it never gets old, either.

65

Most of the above, but transportation in particular. I’m equally happy watching planes land or take off, ocean-going vessels on the Houston Ship Channel, trains, or an endless cascade of vehicles on a busy freeway. The company I work for has a satellite facility along Katy Freeway, and from the tenth-floor window facing westward, one can look down at I-10 heading off to the horizon, with thousands of cars and trucks all visible at once, a spectacular (and almost frightening) sight.

On the more eccentric side of things:

I’m endlessly fascinated by the moving radar maps of storms on the Weather Channel. I often leave it on in the background, with the sound off, when I’m working at home.

When I was a kid, I could amuse myself for hours by throwing small stones into shallow puddles and watching the shock wave of displaced mud spread out from the impact site.

I like trash, too, especially watching stuff that gets blown around in the wind. When I saw the famous scene of the floating plastic bag in American Beauty, I practically slapped my head and said, “Dang, I should have been videotaping that stuff all along.”

66

Fluid dynamics.

Not that I study it or anything, but I’m fascinated by how rivers flow. Water can appear a solid mass, and yet it is made up of droplts that can separate from the mass at any time. Then how the top of the mass slides down as the river flows over the ground, and how it’s got a depth, yet it’s also slickly fast flowing, and that the water at teh bottom of the river flows at different, sometimes unrelated speeds to the top, and, and, and…

Well, it’s just endlessly fascinating how it all works.

67

I agree with much of the above, especially the nature and science related items. But I can get lost for hours wandering through the Home Depot.

68

For me, it’s institutional architecture. Where I live there are two buildings I love to look at, and they’re fairly close together. One is a federal prison, and the other is a VA hospital.

Both have a vastness that just transfixes me. I love the design of them, and their solidity. The prison gives me a weird X-Files or Silence of the Lambs kind of thrill–even though it’s a medical facility and unlikely to contain Hannibal Lector-types. :smiley:

There are a lot of photos on the internet of buildings such as these that are now abondoned, so I think a lot of people share my fascination.

69

I’ve never considered trying that, what a great idea!

70

Fine particles. Powder, dust, ashes, dirt. Anything inorganic and smaller than a grain of sand, and I’m all over it.

In college, I went through a strange phase where I actually collected chalkdust. I would steal stubs of chalk from classrooms and smash them into little bits, just so that I can play with the resulting dust. I love the way chalk feels against my fingertips. I used to have a shoe box filled with chalkdust and I would entertain myself by grabbing handfuls of it, watching it flow through my fingers.

I can’t walk past a patch of dirt without kicking in it. It’s almost an obsession with me. When I used to walk home from the train station, I would plan my route so that I would pass by this one area which had a lot of loose dirt on the sidewalk. Just a couple of kicks, just enough to coat my sneakers, would be enough to relieve all the tension and stress of the day. I know it’s not normal, but it’s not hurting anyone so why label it as a bad thing?

71

I was born & raised right by the ocean; so, while I can see the fascination with waves, I think I’m over it.

For me, though, it’s trains. Not a serious train-o-phile, but whenever I see a train, I think “cool! a train!” And it’s been, oh, 4 or 5 decades since I was a little boy.

Interesting weather. We have the world’s most boring weather; I think we get fewer thunderstorms than any place on earth. So a thunderstorm, for me, is a big thrill.

And wild animals. Seeing an animal while driving always makes me happy, even if its something as mundane as a ground squirrel or a hawk. (Ditto what the previous poster said, about geese.) But the more exotic, the better.

72

I was working on a project last year, and I ended up buying about 750 40w light bulbs all at once. I went through a bulk dealer, and I got them for about 38 cents each. When I stopped to think about it, I was blown away. These bulbs were made in china (I think - it was somewhere over in that part of the world) in some sort of factory staffed by lots of people, they were boxed, crated, shipped across the Pacific Ocean on some huge transport ship, unloaded at the dock, trucked to the warehouse of the company I bought them from, then packaged and delivered to me. And I paid 38 cents per light bulb (shipping included). It just doesn’t seem possible that everyone along the way made some sort of profit on that.

73

Rocks.

This is a recent fascination, only about 2 years old, but it is firmly established, growing daily, and not likely to wane any time soon. I spent many hours fighting the rocks before I finally embraced them. I have piles here and there that were exhumed from the gardens and lawns and I always glared at them with irritation. Now I spend hours in my free afternoons sorting these piles into useful categories; drainage, fill, garden architecture. I scour the edges of our hundred year-old pastures for the remains of old stone walls built from behemoth leftovers of the last glacier to rumble through our farm, lever them out of their mossy resting places and heave them into the front loader of my tractor which will transport them to my next project; wall, terraced herb garden, water object, or raised bed. I’m especially thrilled with the rocks encrusted with thousands of tiny marine fossils, and with the smooth, round 40 pound ‘dinosaur eggs’ that make up our glacial till.

They’re all the more facsinating because they used to vex me so. I see my transformation as a larger life lesson in acceptance.

74

Jellyfish. The New England aquarium has an exibit of many several types, and oh my, I was in heaven when I visited right before Christmas. I probably took 40 pictures of jellyfish alone. The best part? You could change the lights in one exibit and make the jellyfish change colors!

Decorative Fountains. I can resist sticking my fingers in the water. We have one at work, and when we first got it we were told to stop putting our fingers in it, since I apparently have a lot of company :slight_smile:

Multiples. I find it facinating that people can have 2, 3, 4, even up to 7 babies at a time. How do they cope? How do you deal with 4 or 5 two-year-olds?

75

The inner workings of a cell (DNA and protein formation, the various pumps and all the little organelles etc.)
fire
stars

76

The fact that most fascinates me is my two boys, ages almost 5 and 2; I MADE them. It’s mindbending that I made a person, actually two people that are at once both me and yet, quite clearly not me.

You see that there? I MADE THAT! With my own uterus, I did!

77

I’m fascinated by quite a bit of the utterly mundane.

  • Mundane elements of bygone eras, particularly the late 19th and early-mid 20th centuries. Newspapers, certainly, and old photos of random areas, but in particular old products in their various natural habitats (home, supermarket). For some reason the packaging fascinates me. Whenever I go into a restaurant that has old posters, ads and products mounted in display cases or directly on the wall I have to examine them. The more an example of typical, everyday life it was in that era the better.

  • White noise, particularly interesting white noise. The distant sound of traffic as heard from a quieter area just outside of it, the sound of wind rustling through a forest, waves lapping on a beach or against a pier, that sort fo thing. It’s quite soothing. I could listen for hours. I even sleep with a fan going, as the white noise helps drown out the less-interesting, more startling noises you might hear while trying to drift off – the building settling, random noises from outside, etc. (I have difficulty getting to sleep sometimes so stuff like this can startle me awake very easily)

  • Pictures of anywhere that isn’t where I am. Just because I always see them and think, “It’d be cool to be there right now, just to nose around and see what it’s like over there.” It doesn’t have to be exotic, just not anywhere in my immediate vicinity.

78

The fact that most fascinates me is my two boys, ages almost 5 and 2; I MADE them.
OP by RSSchen

Not mundane. I think babies are miracles.
I’m fascinated by soft contact lenses. How can a tiny round piece of Saran Wrap change your vision?

79

Animals - mammals, birds, insects, whatever. They fade into the background sometimes, but every once in a while I’ll see a bug crawling on the wall and stop what I’m doing to just stare at it and see what it’s doing.

Airplanes. I don’t understand people who don’t like flying and find it boring/mundane. Maybe if you were stuck on a flight for 20 hours, but I could watch a plane take off (from the inside or the outside) 100 times and not get tired of it.

I’m fascinated by both of these. There’s a lot of stuff in grocery stores that fades into the background and sort of becomes a pattern of images, but sometimes I’ll stop and just look at something sitting on the rack and think “Look how much STUFF is here! It’s so valuable!” Walking by the beverage aisle, it occured to me that if I took out just one row of the refrigerated section, it would be enough juice/soda/whatever to last me several months, and that’s just a small fraction of what’s in the store. And yet when I’m walking through the store looking for a specific item, it all just becomes a part of the background.

And I can’t get over the fact that the sun is just a really bright star. Take any of those tiny little dots in the sky and multiply the brightness by a billion, and that’s what you get. Not to mention the fact that the sun is unimaginably huge.

Clouds are pretty fascinating too, when I think about how big they are. Sometimes I’ll look at a cloud and see a tiny part of it sticking out and think to myself, that small looking piece of matter is as big as the skyscraper I’m looking at.

Speaking of which…tall buildings. They never cease to amaze me.

Other mundane stuff that amazes me:

Language - I can move the muscles in my mouth to do incredibly complex movements to express a thought by sending pressure waves through the air, and someone else can receive those waves and interpret the original concept I’m trying to communicate in a seemingly increidbly sophisticated process, yet I’ve been doing it subconsciously since I was a baby.

Then there’s just the fact that there are 6,000,000,000 people in the world. And transportation…whenever I get on the freeway I can’t believe how many cars there are in the world. One of my favorite things is to watch (or make!) time-lapse footage of traffic.

80

Cats.
Babies.
Women.
Strangers’ conversations overheard.
Pretty much anything having to do with the 1930s, a time I am convinced I lived through in a previous existence.