Random Facts & Bookworm-ness

Today is: 5 Random Japan Facts Day...

1.) Taxi doors open by themselves when the driver pushes a button. That's right - you don't have to open or close the door, you just hop in and out. Super efficient.

2.) Bloodtype supposedly tells what your character is like - so everyone knows theirs. My friends at work were shocked that I didn't remember mine. (Find out your personality here. I'm O...judge the accuracy for yourself.)

3.) When someone sneezes, nothing happens or is said. I'm used to Britt saying 'Bless You' every time someone sneezes...so the silence after the sneeze always strikes me as odd. (Miss you, Britt!!)

4.) During political campaigns, the candidate will stand outside a train station with a van with a loudspeaker and promote themselves and their platform; and, people walk around the streets wearing matching outfits, carrying signs, and chanting something or other for their candidate. I think they'd probably get arrested in Canada for public harrassment, disturbance, or something.

5.) Drinking in public is perfectly legal, and beer can be found in any vending machine or convenience store that you see (tall cans = $300). Come on, Canada. Get in touch with the times, already.

I finished A Study In Scarlet today. I thoroughly enjoyed Sir Arthur's writing style - two stories in one. First the mystery is presented, and Sherlock Holmes solves it. Then he told the story of the culprit, and how the mysterious murder came about. At the end (and I breathed a sigh of relief at this), Sherlock Holmes explains how he solved the mystery. If there had been no explanation, I know I would have thought for hours to figure out how he did it. Turns out - his methods are quite usual, and his clues quite obvious - for someone who has trained themselves to be as observant and thorough as him. Next on the list - The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Followup: (to this)
Imagining is a lot harder than you would think! I tried to imagine on the walk to the train station, this morning. I kept getting distracted by the things and people around me. So I closed my eyes. Dangerous. I opened my eyes. I ended up 'imagining' that I was about 1.5 inches high and was hangin' out on a flower having a conversation about how complicated life is, with an aphid (who was about 0.5 inches big). I also found myself having the conversation outloud - yes, both characters. I stopped, for a minute, but decided I was determind not to be "clapped into jail by [my] consciousness". I tried imagining on the train on the way to work, but was too distracted. I tried again to imagine on my lunch time walk, and this time found myself a fish in the sea who leapt out of the water with all my might, and then found a large metal structure and gathered the other fishes for a day of olympics. This adventure included me doing cartwheels on the path beside the road...which earned me some strange looks. And I have no doubt that as you read this you may wonder if I may have started to lose any sense that I had...but! as I said, I was determind to not be constrained by my worry of other people's opinion. Having said that, I think I will try to imagine a bit more often.

However, I did realize while reading my book on the way home, that I do have a good imagination when reading. When I read a book, I get lost in the world it portrays. I can see around me, in detail - the colors, the textures, the faces, the furniture, the emotion on the character's faces. It's all in my head as I read. So I'm not too worried about losing my imagination.

Where Does The Wonder Go?

I finished Alice In Wonderland this morning...she's quite a peculiar girl. She has an incredible imagination (as I suppose most children do), but she's also very argumentative and impertinent. Granted, the creatures she's interacting with are also very argumentative and I can emphathize with her occasional frustration, but nonetheless, she's an interesting little girl. Her adventures in Wonderland made me wonder what happens to our imagination as we get older. As children, we can have hours of fun with a couple friends and a front lawn, on a playground, or in a sandpit - even without trucks and buckets. But as we get older, it seems to me that adults need constant stimulation or entertainment, and there is certainly a lack of 'play'.

In his essay Self-Reliance, Emerson writes,

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes! That divided and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arithmetic has computed the strength and means opposed to our purpose, these have not....But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account.

Children play and act freely, without regard for consequences or the opinions of others. As we get older, we allow the opinions of others to rule our actions - to a point that is detrimental, I think. We learn 'proper' behavior - what is appropriate or not, what is regarded as strange or wierd; and we live our lives by these rules.

I decided to cruise the net for some more thoughts, and came upon this article. The author provides this possible explanation: (I encourage you to read the whole article - it's both interesting and thought provoking)

Still, we might ask, why do children explore the far and fantastic possible words instead of the close-by sensible ones? The difference between adults and children is that for most adults, most of the time, imagination is constrained by probability and practicality. When we adults use our everyday theories to create possible worlds, we restrict ourselves to the worlds that are likely and the worlds that are useful. When we adults create a possible world, we are usually considering whether we should move in there and figuring out how we can drag all our furniture with us.

But for human children, those practical requirements are suspended, just as the jungle laws of tooth and claw are suspended for young wolves. Children are as free to consider the very low-probability world of Narnia as the much higher-probability world of next Wednesday's meeting—as free to explore unlikely Middle-earth as the much more predictable park next door.

What would it take to break free of the constraints of the practical and think in the realms of the possible, despite a lack of practicality; or even the impossible - what can it hurt? Thoughts? Comments?

Goal for Wednesday: Spend the train ride to work just imagining...all things possible and impossible.

PS - Having finished Alice In Wonderland, I started into A Study In Scarlet on the way home. Please excuse me if my tone and style of blogging changes as I read through different books...I have a tendancy to pick up and adapt to the writing style I am immersed in as I experience it.