Words of Danny O'Bigbelly My idea of a good time

Faithful reader Prunella Farquar suggested the following topic:

Things that there are perfectly reasonable explanations for…but that still don’t make sense in your mind. Why does water expand when frozen when everything else contracts? (Yeah, yeah, I know…hydogen bonds, but it just doesn’t seem right)
Airplanes should not be able to stay in the air, but even knowledge of pressure and air currents doesn’t convince me.
Nothing will convince me that helicoptors can fly!

I am fascinated by what baffles other people, and how they express their baffled state.  For example, when Prunella writes that nothing will convince her that helicopters can fly, I know that this isn’t the truth.  She has seen helicopters fly (and, for all I know, as actually ridden one during flight) and has successfully internalized the idea that helicopters actually can and do fly.  What she really means is that she doesn’t understand how things can exist–especially things that have been created by humans themselves–that she is unable to understand.

This cognitive struggle isn’t unique to Prunella.  In fact, I think it’s an unavoidable aspect of the human condition.  It is one of the seeds of curiosity, the precursor (if not prerequisite) to all new intellectual creations.  Deep in her heart, I believe that Prunella longs to hear a satisfactory explanation of  how helicopters fly.  She doesn’t want to be convinced, she wants to understand.

But what is unusual about Prunella is her recognition and acceptance of this aspect of her humanity.  Far too many other people are content to settle comfortably into the cage of their ignorance, Prunella catalogs the contents of her intellectual prison and measures the dimensions of her confinement.

There are an amazing number of things that I simply don’t understand, and I’m not sure whether anyone else understands them either, or at least can provide an explanation that I could understand.  Sometimes my ignorance annoys me, most often when I don’t understand things that I believe I should, and especially when I don’t understand things that other people do.  In no particular order, here are a few things that I simply don’t understand:

• Sex.  Why do some people have a preoccupation with inserting convex parts of their anatomy into the concavities of other people, and why do some people have a preoccupation with having their voids filled with the protrusions of others?  And there are infinite additional variations, of course, many of which can’t easily be described with a straight face, but for the sake of this discussion, we’ll limit the definition of sex to pleasurable actions involving friction and genitalia.  So, what’s the attraction?  And what does it have to do with high heels and stockings?  People say that the pleasure we derive from sex is necessary in order to ensure that sex, and thus procreation, occurs, and I can’t disagree–I certainly wouldn’t poke my penis into a smelly dark crevice unless I thought there was something in it for me–but I think there’s much more pleasure than strictly necessary.  People do such stupid, asinine, and self-destructive things in the name of lust that, according to Darwin, it should have been winnowed out of the population many generations ago.  But who knows–maybe it used to be even worse.
• Sex.  Given the mysterious origins of lust, it astonishes me that people aren’t less accepting of how these mysteries manifest themselves in other people.  I like the friction on my genitals to be supplied by a woman (or, in my daydreams, several women), but other men might prefer this friction to involve another man, and some women might prefer the touch of another woman.  Why does this bother anyone?  I have no clue.
• Gravity.  Nobody has figured this out.  Most people don’t even think about it.
• Gravity.  I’m not sure why nobody thinks about this.  Some things just need to be accepted, I guess.
• Quantum physics.  It’s all just equations to me.  There is no intuition–none at all.  It could all be baloney, for all I know.  The fact that water expands when it freezes is a tiny part of this.  I don’t even understand why things freeze, except in a vague mathematical sense.
• Why I’m writing this.  I don’t know why I do most of the things I do, actually.  Most of the acts in my life are just reactions to situations.  Very few of my acts are the result of conscious decisions.   Most people are the same way, from what I can tell, but they never think about it.