Here We Go Again...

So it's been about six months since I've posted anything on this blog, but I was talking to one of my friends and they said I should write again, so now I'm writing again.

I was thinking this morning about how you would describe subatomic particles to a four-year old child, and it got me started again on how ridiculous our existence is. First of all, there is simply a ridiculous amount of stuff out there. Like, first of all there's the earth, which is really unfathomably massive, but in the grand scheme of the universe, it's really not that big. But even then, there's simply an insane amount of complexity in the structure of life. I figure an atom is considerably smaller than any viable object, so let's put it this way. If my body was constructed out of sand-sized particles, there would still be millions of particles in my body, and they move. Think about how hard it is for us to make machines. If you've ever played with legos, you know how hard it is to make something big and moving, and you have instructions for that. Now imagine that you threw all your legos in a giant bag and shook them until they stuck together in the proper way. That actually happened, but the legos were actually little bits of your ancestor. Hella long ago.

I just don't understand how all this stuff came to be. Sure, primordial stew makes sense as an idea. Sure, I can imagine that some molecules got randomly smashed together and formed other self-replicating molecules, which eventually became bacteria and stuff. But I lose this at some point where these cells become lions and tigers and bears. Oh my. Those moving legos apparently made more moving legos that put themselves together (or got shaken together somehow). Then eventually you had giant megalodons and velociraptors and Vervet monkeys fighting in the streets of Japan. That's totally inaccurate but you get the idea.

Anyway, I'm possibly going to write more soon. Look for updates. But don't be disappointed if none come.

Raaaaaawrrrrrr!

I want to know what dinosaurs were like. I think it would be really cool. Jurassic park was a great idea in that sense. I would totally pay a lot of money (like, more than it costs to go to the San Diego Zoo, which I'm assuming is pretty expensive) to go to a dinosaur zoo. I would especially love to see real dinosaurs because my only impressions of them have come from books and movies and museums, but I feel like they're never really the same--especially when there aren't any live specimens.

I tripped on a rock while I was walking on a rocky path but I did a graceful little stumble/leap to avoid falling on my face. I didn't even think about it; my body just did it itself. I was amazed. Somehow, through evolution or learning, my body has become so coordinated to do complex motions without me consciously telling my body to do so.

Wow. Ok, so those last two paragraphs were written several weeks ago and I never got around to finishing the post and publishing this so now I'm gonna finish this post and publish it. I'm writing in the present tense even though when you're reading this it's not going to correspond to the same time that I'm speaking of in the present tense right now. It'll be like, "Dang, man, I'm reading about what this guy is writing about right now, but right now is actually right then. Whoaaaaaaa..." Except it's less likely to be like that unless your brain is functioning at less than full capacity.

Here's a thought. Sex is an incredibly bizarre physical action which requires an devoted set of body parts for the single function of making babies (and excreting waste. What a weird combination of functions). Like, who would've thought that the best way of making babies would be to stick some bit of flesh into one of several ambiguously purposed holes in another persons body? This, evolutionarily, is beyond me. Let me write out a completely hypothetical and implausible scenario to demonstrate why this is strange.

Let's pretend we're the first animal with proper sex organs. Our parents were fish or something similar and we don't know what penises or vaginas are, let alone lungs and legs and arms and brains and who we are or where we came from and what's going on in the world. I would guess that we're kind of like fishy frogs or something like that. This probably isn't how sex began and those creatures don't have the same level of cognition or anything like that either, but this is totally implausible and I'm just writing this for my own amusement.

Sexually Reproducing Creature 1: "So here I am, walking along... Hum de dum dum... Buh doo bah doo wop, bah doo bee doo wop... WAIT HOLD THE PHONE--I'm walking? No way, man, this is like, totally revolutionary! Wow! This is so cool, I have to go show someone."

Sexually Reproducing Creature 2: "Hey yo, what's crackalackin?"

SRC 1: "Dude, you're never going to believe this. I'm walking. How cool is that?"

SRC 2: "Ummm, yeah. I do it too. It's not actually that special."

SRC 1: "Okay, whatever. I think it's pretty cool and you're not going to change that. What else is new?"

SRC 2: "Well technically speaking, walking isn't new either, so you should be asking, 'What's new?' instead of 'What else is new?' but I've been checking out what actually is new and I found this little extra bit of flesh hanging off me. Do you have any idea what it might be?"

SRC 1: "Ewww man. Is that a tumor? I feel like that can't be good for you."

SRC 2: "Naw, but it's pretty fun to play with. I don't know why but I really enjoy touching it?"

SRC 1: "So my aunt Gertrude had this tumor on her forehead, and it got so big that I started calling her aunt Unicorn."

SRC 2: "Look, I said it's not a tumor."

SRC 1: "How do you know?"

SRC 2: "Because it gets bigger when I touch it a lot. Have you ever seen a tumor that does that?"

SRC 3: "Heeeey boys. What's going on?"

SRC 1: "Ohhh, nothing. Just discussing this guys tumor. It gets bigger when you poke it a bunch, apparently. You wanna see?"

SRC 3: "Hahahaha that's awesome. Did I tell you that I had this friend who had this aunt with a tumor on her forehead..."

SRC 1: "That was me. I just told that story."

SRC 2: "I TOLD YOU IT'S NOT A TUMOR!"

SRC 1: "Yeah, whatever, mister I'm-so-cool-because-I-already-knew-what-walking-is. Prove it's not a tumor."

SRC 3: "Wait, you guys are walking? That's so cool!"

SRC 2: "You guys are so dumb. You know what? You can suck my tumor."

SRC 3: "I thought it wasn't a tumor."

SRC 2: "It's not. But for some reason I feel compelled to get you to suck it anyway."

SRC 3: "Eh, why not? There's gotta be a first for everything."

And that's how oral sex was invented.

Bigger is Better

Well, not exactly. Different sized bills are better. The size of the Euro increases as the denomination increases, which results in small 5€ bills and big 100€ bills. I'm fairly sure that there's not a direct correlation in size, but maybe it's logarithmic or something. Anyway, I really like the Euro. It's colorful, aesthetically pleasing, with varying designs on the coins. I guess good, old-fashioned American currency is pretty cool too, but it's not nearly as charming as an orange bill. Here're some of the things I've observed about the Euro so far.

ATMs don't just give you $20 bills. In fact, they don't give any $20 bills, because they would be pretty useless here. Instead they give you 20€ bills, as well as 10€ and 50€ bills just to spice things up a little. What this means is that you can withdraw increments that aren't multiples of 20€ ! It's insane ! I'm putting a space between the last word and the exclamation point because that's how they do it here in France ! I'm not sure if they do it in the rest of Europe, but they do it here. When in Rome... (or Paris, I guess...)

Pretty much everything you buy is paid for in increments of 0.10€. That's ten centimes, but I don't know what the sign is for centime on my keyboard, so it's 0.10€. Like, un café is usually 1.10€ instead of like, $3.18. It's not that I'm getting a really cup of coffee either, it's just that it's really, really small. And it's a multiple of 0.10€. So my point is that pennies (or the Euro equivalents) pretty much don't exist. You only deal in pennies (I'm still using this word for convenience) when you go to the grocery store. It's kind of nice, because you don't have to carry around a bunch of change, but it's also kind of bad because sometimes I feel like I'm being ripped off by people rounding up all the time (if they in fact do round up, which I'm not sure about).

Different sized bills are both a boon and a burden. They're great, because you can easily tell them apart (good for blind people, of whom it seems there are a many), but also kind of a pain in the butt, because when you try to fold a stack of them in half, you're usually not folding the smaller ones in half, but instead in some weird fraction that isn't a half (terrible for OCD people, of whom there are 497--there's actually a record of this in la Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, which I visited yesterday.) Stuff like that. I could come up with more but I have to wake up early tomorrow, so maybe I'll write more about this later.

Au revoir. (Or would it be au relire?)