Still Amazed, ...never grow up. Options

[Hobbes]

I can claim the benefits of education, partake in my own eagerness to learn independently about 'stuff', and have a seemingly-endless wealth of knowledge at my keyboard-tapping finger-tips...

BUT...

there are still some things that, despite a full (or at least, reasonably substantial) understanding of, continue to amaze me in a rather childish way; almost like I am still assuming magic must be involved as opposed to, say, physics.

For me, these things include:

~ Aeroplanes. Yes yes yes... I know how they manage to lift off into the sky, but when I'm walking along the street and look up to the clouds to see the winged tonnage soaring amongst them, the six-year-old within me expresses his disbelief: "They are HUGE! They don't seem to be flying THAT fast! Surely the only thing keeping it in the sky is sheer willpower?!"

~ Magnets. These things can move. They can MOVE without being actually TOUCHED. If that isn't magic, I don't know what is. And yep, even now, as I quickly approach my 28th ... 27th and 12 months ... next birthday, I can still occasionally be found running a magnet underneath a thin tabletop in order to make its partner appear to move on the surface: As.If.By.Thought.Alone! Or manipulating iron filings! Or seeing how strong a magnet is by creating strings of attracted paper clips to dangle from it. Or running a magnet over a CRT screen to make pretty colours, and then getting in a panic when the effect suddenly seems to have become permanent (and then remember the degauss button to make it all alright again).

~ Bubbles. Blah blah. Surface Tension. Blah blah. Surfactants. Blah blah. Elasticity. Pft, whatever. They are bubbbbbbles!! Having a niece means having an excuse to buy/make mixture and spend a summer's day blowing bubbles, catching them, attaching them to one another, enlarging them, popping them, getting mixture in your eye and blinding yourself briefly. Bubbles are great

So. What do you still marvel at, even though you really should know better?

[Phyllis]

Banana pancakes are pretty standard for Americans! They'd be thicker ones, I assume, rather than the crepe-y ones you get over here. We're always mixing stuff into our pancake batter. It's my favourite way to use up blueberries that look like they're about to get all mushy and gross (I can never bring myself to eat them plain when they get to that point...accidentally eating a mushy one makes me gag).

I'm frequently amazed by typing. I think the words, and they appear on the screen! How did I even learn how to do that? I remember learning, of course, but it seems like magic that I went from typing "dads fads sad" at a glacial pace to having my fingers fly over the keys without having to stop and remember where each letter is located.

Sometimes I forget that I live in England. It sounds weird, since I'm surrounded by people with English accents, but I don't notice those now. Also, I live in a not-so-nice East Midlands city where the general approach to any historic buildings seems to be, "Let's knock it down and build a road there." After months of going about life, not thinking much about my location, I'll do something like walk along Friar Gate in the fog. It looks like one of the novels I used to read as a kid, come to life (my mental pictures of England at that time were pretty stereotypical). That's when it'll suddenly hit me: I live in a different country now. Never ceases to amaze me.