It feels like all my life I've been preoccupied with subjects that people just didn't want to talk about. Even as I kid I used to stare off during class thinking about all the parts of the world that I didn't understand. Science classes didn't satisfy me. Sermons at church still left me questioning. When I asked an adult about something, there was always this piece of my brain that recognized they didn't know everything I wanted to know. Weird possibilities were always popping up in my mind; not that I believed them necessarily, just that I wasn't willing to discredit them indefinitely. I could probably make a list of a hundred of those thoughts if I had the time, but here are seven for starters.
1. The cats are spies.
Recommended for you
When I was a high school freshman, I decided to walk the few miles back home after class one day. There was an old railroad that cut through town behind several neighborhoods, and since I'd never seen a train on it I decided I'd follow it back toward my house. After I'd traveled a good way, I got this eerie feeling that I'd stepped into an entirely different world. I saw the backs of houses, piles of trash where people had dumped washers and refrigerators among other things, tons of graffiti... and cats. I mean hundreds of them.
Cats were everywhere-- crawling under fences and sitting high up in the trees, there were even cats running along people's rooftops. It was like its own society, cats running from all these different places to meet up or chase each other off. I started to wonder if maybe cats were different than I'd previously believed, if maybe they were using us for something. Even now when I see one my mind wanders off and I get preoccupied with what they do when people aren't around.
2. Some people see in photo negative.
I think I was 10 years old when I got my first camera and started some rudimentary attempts at photo editing. One of the first things I was mesmerized with was the ability to invert all of the colors. After learning a little bit more of what that meant, I had this weird question pop into my mind- what if I see in photo negative? I mean, how could you tell, right? If I had always seen the opposite colors to someone else, I would have learned them under the same names. For example, what I knew to be "green" would look different than what someone else knew to be green, and changes in lighting would still affect whatever I was seeing. For something to be "brighter" or "darker," even if it looked different to me, would still change at the same capacity no matter what the colors actually looked like. The jury is still out for me on this one.
3. Nocturnal foot-grabbers
I didn't watch scary movies growing up. First of all, my parents weren't really horror fans, and second of all, I hated being afraid. In fact, I still avoid them like the plague. As a kid I always shared a bunk bed with my younger brother and the top bunk was usually mine. One of the most terrifying things that used to haunt me when I was trying to sleep was the thought that something was about to grab my feet. Not that someone was going to kidnap me or kill me, just that an unknown something wanted to grab my feet.
4. Undiscovered/elusive wildlife
I want to reemphasize here that I wasn't convinced that any of this was real, I just wasn't ok with totally rejecting the possibility. I devoured books that talked about mysteries of the world, especially when it came to cryptozoology (the study of organisms whose existence has not been scientifically proven). It just didn't seem possible to me that we could have discovered every species of animal on the planet. Stories of people rediscovering animals long thought to be extinct like the coelacanth (a fish that looks like it was pulled out of a science book evolutionary chart) put my brain into overdrive. When my family would travel up to visit my grandparents in Minnesota we'd drive by miles of forests and I wondered what lived in there.
When I came down to the East Coast and looked out on the ocean, people and their tools just seemed so... small. Insignificant. Arrogant, even. Why was everyone so determined to write off some weird animals?
5. The world inside my mirror
Mirrors and I have a complicated relationship. I've feared them, loved them, ignored them, been drawn to them, and more recently sorta forgot they existed. For a long time the doors to the closet in my bedroom had these huge 7-foot mirrors on them, so they were the first things I looked at when I got up in the morning. The world looked different in the mirror. Same stuff, yet, somehow just a little off.
Sometimes I imagined that where my vision ended the world inside the mirror became increasingly different from mine, like there was another me doing exactly the same things at the same time, but in a place that looked different where it wasn't connected by mirrors. Also, since I knew the world looked different in the mirror than it did in person, I realized that I could never really know what my own face looked like. My view of myself was just a little off from what other people could see in person.
6. Death of the power grid
This one is probably thanks to knowing several disaster-preppers, and it's still something I think about nearly every day. What would I do if all of the power around me just suddenly died? I didn't grow up in the days where people were often taught how to find food or even shelter. I don't know how to start a fire. If everyone took all of the food out of the grocery stores and restaurants, would I manage to keep on? How would my community and friends look different and what roles would they fill?
7. Weird science
Oddly enough, science fiction wasn't something I got into until my later teens, but the possibilities found there were still floating around my brain. There are things we can do today that no one would have believed possible a couple of centuries ago. Imagine telling the people of the past that someone could speak into a little metal rectangle in one part of the world and someone else could hear them thousands of miles away. Spaceships and superpowers seem impossible to some people now, but I only picture possibilities. Take Iron Man's suit- why wouldn't that be possible with enough research? Or what if we found a way to transfer all of our molecules quickly into another place. Sure, there are about a million unknowns, but in my mind, that's different than impossible.
Of all of my weird thoughts, the most common one is, "Why not?"
