Buttoned shirts. 2 things: -As I button and unbutton shirts, I wonder how much damage I would sustain, and whether I would survive, if a bullet went through my chest at the location of the button my fingers are working on. -One of the advantages buttoned shirts have over t-shirts is this: they can be…
Selecting a handful of family pictures out of tens or hundreds is a depressing activity. This has very little to do with it being tedious, and has mostly to do with having to glance at images of smiling people one after another. Speaking personally, looking at a few stills of smiling relatives evokes a similar,…
I would like to see an object the size of an uncooked tapioca pearl with so great a density that its weight on earth is 10 tons. If it were placed on the ground, could one watch it sink and disappear as if the soil were quicksand? Catching the speck, as though it were a…
Unfortunately I can’t take credit for this gem of a hypothetical idea, but I was lucky enough to be in the discussion when it came up at a party a couple months ago. Like most hypothetical ideas, this one requires that an assumption be made. However, it’s not a very difficult assumption to make. All…
Something that hasn’t happened for awhile has happened recently. I’ve caught myself using the same word, or variations of the word, too often, i.e. some others, some people, sometimes. Maybe it’s still happening, just look at the 1st word in this post. I need to consult with a group of neurologists and figure out what…
Having taken a couple creative writing courses for elective credit, I’ve come away with a sense that when you’ve written something in the 1st person, people tend to think that you’ve actually experienced the things you’ve written about. This attitude is helped along when the protagonist of a famous novel is claimed to be a…
I’ve been getting interested in parasites lately. I watched a couple vids of some remarkable behavioral changes that occur in the host. For instance, whipworms, after having matured inside a grasshopper, will influence the grasshopper’s brain chemistry to the extent that the grasshopper will make a suicide plunge into water. Then the whipworms burst out…
A few weeks ago I had the option of going to a party but when invited declined because I had homework. This would’ve been fine, except that when my friends’ responses were the typical “ah shucks, that sux” I reassured them that I was actually looking forward to working on it. This they didn’t understand….
When you’re anxious, maybe let anxiousness have its time. And if it sticks around longer than is comfortable, maybe think about things that compliment each other. For instance, plants exhale the inhalations of animals and vice versa. But thinking about things that compliment each other should be done with caution, because you run the risk…
Over the course of 4 months everyone in a household of 6 gets sick. The first 5 to get sick fall ill with the common cold. The 6th inhabitant to get sick contracts “sickness 1a”, which has initial symptoms identical to those experienced by the other members of the household but which is actually a…