A Few Random Thoughts

Here are some random things I've been thinking about lately:

1. It's a good thing brake lights show as red instead of green or some other color. I think that if people's brake lights were green, there would probably be a lot more accidents. If you see red while you're driving, it usually means stop.

2. Being interesting is not always a good thing. The other day I was on a bus and a man started talking to me; he didn't have his glasses so he couldn't read the bus schedule without pressing his face against the case holding the schedule (and he preferred not to do that.) After I told him when the bus was supposed to come, he kept talking to me. When the bus came, he sat across from me and was still talking.

He had a lot of interesting stories. He'd been married three times, and had three kids with different mothers. His first wife had been killed by a drunk driver, but the other two hadn't worked out either. His last marriage didn't even last for a year. He hasn't really dated anyone since then. We talked about cars; we were riding the bus, but he's had some fast cars in his time. He told me about races, and driving over 300 mph, and about the time he rolled his car and broke tons of bones. He told me about his friend being stabbed as part of someone's gang initiation. And about driving him to the hospital, going so fast that four police cars chased him and the police followed him into the hospital. He talked about some time he'd spent in jail. He talked about his job, and working tons of hours, and about little things like how he and his son have the same prescription, so his son will take his glasses sometimes. There were other stories, too.

And I've always kind of thought that being interesting was something desirable. I want to be the kind of person that is so interesting that people want to know me, and want to hear about the random things I've done. And I enjoy being around people that have a lot of stories to tell about wild adventures. Talking to this guy made me crave stability and simplicity, though. His stories were crazy, and even though I absolutely believed that they were true (well, I think he may have exaggerated about some of the car racing stuff), I didn't want them.

3. If you think about it, it's really kind of a miracle that Chef salads exist. There are so many things that have to go exactly perfect for them to be prepared. How was anyone ever able to dream them up?

Consider my Arby's salad which had lettuce, bacon, chicken, tomatoes, egg, cucumber, cheese, and ranch dressing. In order for me to have my salad...

The lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumber had to grow. They had to be grown in specific climates, with precise amounts of water at specific times. They needed to have pest control (which had to be developed by someone, sold and bought by people, and applied by someone, or applied by a machine that had to be invented, etc.) Once they were grown, they had to be picked at the right time. They needed to be cleaned, shipped. (Transportation had to be developed.) They had to be cut. Even with all of these things going right, they only had a limited time that they would stay good for, and all three things had to have those short times coincide perfectly.

The cows, chickens, and pigs had to be raised. They needed food, water, and land. They needed to not die, not be eaten, and they needed to be killed at the right time. The chickens needed to lay eggs. Someone had to collect the eggs before they went bad, and the eggs couldn't accidentally become more chickens. [And chickens don't always lay eggs. We had a big chicken coop thing at one of our houses, and the chickens were like, stressed or something, and wouldn't lay.] The animal meat had to be processed. There needed to be butchers, and people who knew what parts of meat are used for what, and machines to process stuff. It all had to happen pretty quickly, too, because meat can go bad. Also, animals usually only give birth at certain times of the year, so the animals had to be born. Once the meat was ready, it needed to be shipped, and kept cold. There had to be truck drivers. There had to be the invention of knives for cutting, and fences for containing, and the animals couldn't be sickly. The animals had to be cut into useful sizes. There needed to be grease for cooking them. There needed to be pepper for my bacon. My chicken was breaded, so there needed to be wheat grown and processed, etc, too.

For each of the things that needed to be shipped, trucks had to be made, gas had to be imported, streets had to be built, people had to drive, and they had to know where to take the stuff too.

There had to be so so so many tools. And my chef salad bowl had to be manufactured.

Plus there had to be people at Arby's to prepare it for me. All of these things had to happen at precise times, like within a window of a couple weeks, and they all had to occur at exactly the same place.

How on earth did that ever happen? I am amazed that for $5 all of those things happened for me the other day.

4. Third wheels are sometimes useful. For example, tricycles are an important step before someone can ride with two wheels. Also, at least in Italy there were small trucks that had three wheels. Riding bikes is fun sometimes, but the power and potential of even a dinky three-wheel truck is vastly superior to that of a two-wheeled bicycle. Like when it rains, people on bicycles get wet. People in dinky three-wheel trucks do not. In motorized vehicles, usually people can go farther than on bicycles. Also, with a bicycle, if your tire pops you're really out of luck. If your tire popped and you happened to have a third wheel with you, that would fix the problem. So people talk about "being a third wheel" as though it's a bad thing, and it kind of is, but if you really think about it, third wheels are sometimes very useful.