Easily Excitable

My curiosity often gets the best of me. 

Trey would nod his head to this, as he is the lucky beneficiary of all my questions. And there are a lot of them.

 This all came to a head when we drove through Glacier National Park, and I asked him no less than 60 questions: had you heard these questions, you would have assumed I was asking a park ranger, rather than an engineer. 

He really loved this because, much of this time, we didn’t have service, so I couldn’t look up the answers to my questions. Plus, there’s the fact that we were traveling through heavy snowfall on Montana dirt roads. 

He was a great sport.

I just have a lot of questions. 

These were the questions that led to my foray into brisket smoking. 

This application of my fascination occurred in 2022, and I researched for weeks, listened to podcasts, and read blog posts. 

I put my money where my mouth was when I bought an expensively large cut of meat with all of the confidence that comes with delusion. 

That worked out, but my curiosities don’t always. And such is the tale of a category in my brain called “Things I Don’t Understand.”

I was thinking about that little mind folder this week. 

So, I figured, why not write about it?

Be warned: this  is not a serious, heavy post. 

The world is heavy, so in this situation, I won’t be. This is a silly but serious (to me) list of things I don’t understand, though my curious mind is desperate to. 

Enjoy. 

1. Math

Look, I hate to be a stereotypical woman who doesn’t get math, but I’m winning in other male-dominated fields, like smoking cuts of meat. 

Give me a break. 

It was in Mr. Martin’s 9th grade class that we began plotting components on a Y and X axis. 

At the beginning of the year, he told us the X and Y axis went on forever because the lines had arrows on their tips. 

And that was the moment, there on Day 1 of Algebra, when I knew I was out.

Because, here’s the thing I thought every day, looking at those graphs: “Mr. Martin, these lines are printed on this paper. They can’t go on forever because they don’t exist in the first place.” 

That was just the tip of the iceberg in that class because, lo and behold, then we began to talk about imaginary numbers. 

I’m sorry. What??

I don’t know what kind of math you learned- whether it was that new math or that old math- but I think I had a mix of the two. Because imaginary numbers? 

That’s got to be fake, right?

If a number is imaginary, it doesn’t exist. Erego, we shouldn’t be concerned about it in the first place. 

In fact, I’m of the opinion that all math, save for counting money bills, is fake. That’s the only conspiracy theory I’m interested in. 

Surely, I can’t be that bad at a single subject. 

I digress. 

To make matters worse, I then took an entire math course over imaginary numbers in college. They said it was that or trig or statistics or some travesty like that. This, the advisor told me, was a math for English majors.

‘Perfect,’ I thought: perfect, it was not. 

What I discovered is that the only thing worse than one imaginary number is a whole subject based around imaginary numbers. 

Again, math? I just don’t get it.

2. Fish during Noah’s Flood

Where’d the fish go during the flood? 

This isn’t even a life or death question, and I know that it probably doesn’t disturb you like it does me. And if I just introduced a whole new concern into your life with that question, I’m so sorry. 

I’ve spent a lot of time ruminating on this one. If I don’t watch out, I’ll start really getting away from myself.

I’ll start thinking about the ocean itself, and the fact that it’s the one place on earth that we’re not really *sure* about. We’ve only explored 5%-20% of the ocean, which means there is absolutely no telling what kind of critters are down there.

Well, is that because, when it flooded, more water just got compounded to the ocean Noah knew about? And all these fish are really dinosaurs? 

Is that why those fish in the deep, deep ocean ( that we know about) look so weird? Case in point: look up the anglerfish or the blobfish. 

3. Time Zones

People talk about time travel like it’s some far off thing, when in reality, we’ve been time traveling ever since we discovered time zones. 

People step on a Spirit airline and don’t realize that they’ve stepped into the future (or the past). 

Closely related and close to all of our hearts right now? Time change. 

If you could have seen me trying to figure out this ‘spring forward’ and when the sun was supposed to rise. It was a travesty surpassed only by the aforementioned imaginary math. 

When I try to figure out these things, I truly do feel like all sense escapes me. 

Now, if you noticed that we were late to church on Sunday, I do want you to know that this wasn’t because of time change: that was because I forgot to set my alarm. 

My idiocy need not be governed by time. 

4. Black holes in outer space

Trying to consider space in general feels like you’re operating on another dimension. I understand none of it, but I’m a sucker for the James Webb telescope pictures.

Walker, my older brother, once told me that, if you got into a spaceship and went somewhere in the galaxy a lightyear away, when you got back, everyone you knew would be dead. 

Do I even have to tell you that I, a very easily spooked child, moved space travel into my ever-expanding list of fears? 

It was an addition to a list that, in 2003, included frogs, Osama Bin Ladin, skunks, and sinking sand. Jot down lightyears to that list, I guess. 

But here’s what I don’t understand about black holes: where do they go? Why do things in space go in and never come out?

***Curiosity killed the cat on this one. As I was writing this, I tried to figure out what was in a black hole, and where in the universe the exit is. 

Bully for me. I discovered black holes are actually filled with matter: they are just so dense that light can’t get through at all. 

So, this prompted me to then look up, “How heavy is a black hole?”

Answer: Because black holes are extremely dense, a teaspoon of their matter would weigh billions of tons.

Well. One mystery solved. 

Again, these are not serious wonderings. 

But curiosity? There are worse qualities to possess, I guess. 

This doesn’t scratch the surface. Maybe this topic needs a blog category unto itself. 

Stay curious, my friends.