I've always been mystified by the ocean. So the other day when I was on a boat, cruising over the waves and looking out at what appeared to be a massive expanse that holds its own shape, with peaks and valleys and smooth surfaces and frothy surfaces and god-knows-what swimming around underneath it all, I started thinking about units of measurement and just how someone would quantify that immense a body of water in both distance and depth. I understand I could probably have just googled it, but I was on a boat. And then I forgot. And when the moment passes, the object of your curiosity is rarely as important to actually research a few days later. But, almost as if to remind me, I heard a radio commercial a couple of days after this boat ride and it said "there are over 358 million trillion gallons of water on earth." So how did they come up with that number, I wonder?
Moving on...I drive into the city every day. When I see the trash trucks and the public works employees and all the solar trash cans and think of the thousands of actual trashcans and bags that must be emptied and collected every day, I wonder where it all goes. Obviously to a local dump or landfill, but since different neighborhoods have different trash days, do they all have their own landfills? Does the trash go somewhere else to get sorted before it goes to the landfill (like to a waste management facility)? Kind of like how mail goes to the post office first instead of directly to our houses from the sender? And what about the ripped bags and bags full of glass? Do trashmen ever get hurt by our careless disposal of sharp and broken objects? What about when trash is so heavy it breaks the bag because the resident didn't double-bag it? Do the trashmen have to rebag it? Is that one of the reasons they make good money (besides just dealing with smelly trash all day and riding around in an ugly truck in an ugly outfit stopping every five seconds)?
And what about the sewer systems? All the manholes in the city and all the sewer grates; think about it. I know they're not all sewer - some have to be electric or other kinds of wires, but whatever. When you think of streets as arteries running into the hearts of living, breathing cities, those massive underground networks become less invisible, and kind of creepy. Who goes down there? When? How often? To do what? Or is it ignored? Other than the subways, do you ever wonder what else is going on underneath you? Or if you're in, say, the 11th Street subway, do you ever wonder what's going on underground just a couple of blocks away from you and what's behind those subway walls? Can you get a map of the underground tunnels of a city (not the Septa map, like a sewer system map), or is there secret, classified stuff that happens down there? Like a whole creepy underworld?
Then I heard a Peco commercial. At least I think it was Peco. Someone talking about hauling away your old energy-guzzling refrigerator and paying you $35 for it. Anyway, where do they take the refrigerators? Back to their warehouses? Or are there special refrigerator dumps (I'm picturing a mountain of refrigerators sitting somewhere). Or do they go to regular dumps? Surely they can't all be recycled for parts, right? What about the really old ones? Same with unused electronics. You always see cell phone drop-offs and camera/computer recycling, but where do they go? Who's sitting in some lab taking them all apart? And is the content always really "wiped" or "destroyed," or is someone secretly hacking into hard drives and memory cards and viewing all of our information?
What about food permits? Who has to have them (do restaurants even have to have them, or street vendors, concert venues?) Are there different permits for different types of food and if so, do they vary in cost (are seafood permits more expensive?) Is restaurant insurance expensive? Does it cover everything? How many times does a restaurant have to get complaints, receive bad reviews, be found in violation of food safety laws, and get unsatisfactory cleanliness inspections before it gets shut down? What about all these places you see sporadically on the news about food courts with mouse feces and other vermin, uncovered containers, mold? Chemicals in food, hazardous particles in ice dispensers? We only see a couple here and there - think how many of those places must exist!
Or what about chemicals and drug names? First let's start with chemicals. Check this picture out:
How 'bout the "linoleamidopropyl PG-dimonium chloride phosphate"? What the heck is that? Why are all these fancy names needed for soap/cleanser ingredients? Who the heck is naming these chemicals? Or even the pharmaceutical commercials: Humira, aka adalimumab, is a drug used to treat rheumatoid arthritis. I can't even pronounce adalimumab. Who came up with that? How was that made? I'm sure the little packet or even the website could tell you, but I don't have that much time. Who came up with Humira? What's that supposed to mean? It doesn't sound at all similar to adalimumab. Isn't it a scary world? And what about all the side effects of all these drugs? Bodies aren't mean to have drugs pumped into them, so naturally when you treat one thing you harm another. But I wonder if it's possible to ever manufacture drugs without side effects (or with far fewer side effects), or if it's all a big scheme by the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies and health care networks to get more money out of patients. How sick would that be? Keep everyone sicker under the guise of getting them better. Line our pockets. Hmm...
Totally switching gears on you now (are you exhausted yet?) and moving on to song lyrics. Every time I hear a great song I wonder how the songwriter came up with the inspiration. Not all songs are really about their alleged subject. Sometimes the people in these songs don't even exist. So was it a string of words that popped into someone's head and then a whole song was built around that, rhyming structure, melody, chord progression, etc.? Or did someone different write the lyrics and the melody? And in some cases, is someone else entirely different from either of the songwriters the one actually singing the song? And how many songs exist about women and how many songs exist about men? And how many songs exist with the word "love" in the title? Are there musical statisticians sitting in a room somewhere collecting data and putting it into song databases for people like me who wonder these things? I googled my "love" title question and couldn't find even an approximate answer. One guy Mike has a blog where he shared that he has 1,189 songs with the word "love" in the title in just his iTunes collection alone. SO fascinating.
Then sometimes when I see babies (or hear babies or smell babies) I think about the actual act of a human gestating and giving birth to a real live baby, like the rest of our mammalian friends do. And then I compare our species to animals. And then I think it's gross (sorry guys, don't mean to offend anyone, I'm just not interested in actually having a baby). And then I wonder why we have to have little cellular eggs and little micro tadpole sperm and why we have to get all big and alien-like and carry something around for 9 months - why can't we just lay eggs like reptiles and birds do and incubate them until they hatch? Wouldn't that be cool, to lay an egg much smaller than the size of a newborn, nurture it for several weeks, and then watch a baby hatch out? Then none of that stuff would have to happen to your body and overall it would just be a much less unpleasant experience. Plus you wouldn't be like, "Sorry guys, I can't go out, I'm pregnant." You'd just be like, "Hey wait, let me get a sitter for this egg and I'll meet you there!"
In case you're laughing hysterically (and hopefully not grimacing in disgust), I have plenty more material. These are only a handful of thoughts that float through my brain in any given 30-minute period. Is that normal or do I have some form of A.D.D.? It's literally hard to stop myself right now. I was on a roll and I have hundreds more things I wonder about constantly. All this while I'm going about my day-to-day routine and actually thinking about real stuff, like working out and my grocery list (oh yeah, that reminds me, is everything at Trader Joe's made at some colorful, happy factory? Do you think all the workers in all the stores hum and ring bells and sing?) Sorry - there goes my brain again. I just can't shut it off, like ever!
Please tell me I'm not the only one like this. For the love of God. Humor me, someone!
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