Things I Don’t Understand (and most likely never will)

What would you do if I sang out of tune?

Would you stand up and walk out on me?

See I don’t actually know how the lyrics to that song go. But then again, I don’t know an awful lot of things. Here are a few:

1.       How trains work.

Have you ever thought of this? How the hell do trains work? Really, they’re attached to cables at the top, and they sit on rails, and then, all of a sudden, they just start moving, often at great speeds. And because I have no idea how they work, I find them pretty scary. At least with buses you can see that the petrol goes in, and there’s an engine, and the wheels spin around, and a driver sits in the front with their hands on the steering wheel and turns the bus and stops the bus at traffic lights, etc. But not with trains! Oh no. That’s why I hate them so much.

2.       Fireworks.

I get the ones that just shoot straight up into the air. But what about Catherine Wheels and the sparkly white ones which just stay up there, glistening? How do they work? I remember there used to be an exhibit at Powerhouse Museum where you could make your own fireworks (on a computer, that is) by choosing all the different types of colouring and gun powder and a little movie would play and in the end you got to see what your fireworks looked like. But I still don’t understand them. I used to be so frightened of fireworks too, in the days when they were legal my school used to buy a bunch for school discos and then set them off in the top playground, and I would find my mum and she’d drive me home as fast as possible and I would just get so hysterical, they were so loud. And scary. And they defied everything the kindergarten-me knew about the world.

3.      Time.

There is one thing that makes me want to bash in my head every time I think about it and that is time. I just don’t understand it. And when I watch Doctor Who, which is one of the world’s most fantastic brilliant shows, and the Doctor does some awkward time thing, I think, but-but-but, I don’t understand! But I don’t hate time. What is strange about it is how we’ve almost harvested it, roped it into doing our own bidding. What are seconds, minutes, days and years? Who created them? Why do we start school at 8:55 and finish at 3:20? Why do we have a big party at midnight on New Years’ Eve, at that one second of that one day out of millions and trillions of seconds? And sometimes I try to work out, if we were nocturnal, would that mean we would celebrate New Years’ at midday? Would we cloud-gaze instead of stargaze? And what if Earth suddenly got knocked a little bit off its orbit around the sun and the days grew longer all of a sudden and one year was actually five hundred days? Because that’s us, we, humans, have created this thing called time, and I just wonder if things were a little bit different, how we might see the world.

Ouch, my head hurts J

Anyway, this is what it is like to live inside my brain. I’m one of those people who delight in hypotheticals and won’t stop thinking about something until their mind just aches or someone interrupts them and brings them back to the real world. Ah, the real world. Isn’t it just a brilliant place? Because if we lived on Mars we’d probably be three times as tall and covered in a thick layer of fur.

Yeah, that’s right – Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night – but colourfuller. It took me approximately an hour and a half. I wonder how long it took Van Gogh.