Things that are actually pretty weird when you think about them?

[PutItInYourPocket]

I've just been thinking about this as I've been lay in the bath.

I'm currently pregnant and baby goes mad when I'm in the bath and I was watching him kicking and squirming inside me and just thought... This is actually pretty odd when you think about it. I have a living thing that's moving around inside me!

A friend had to have a blood transfusion not so long ago and she can't think about that for long without feeling squeamish that someone else's blood was inside her!

What other things do you find strange when you really think about them?

Your body still functions whilst your sleep. I used to worry as a child that I'd just stop breathing lol

@KarmaNoMore

Putting crucifixes in churches and at home. I didn’t even notice how bad it was until a Buddhist kid said to me “Christian? Like those who put dead people hanging from crosses on their temples??? Okay....”

I know a very religious woman who won’t have a crucifix depicting Christ’s dead body in her house. She’s fine with plain or decorative crosses as a symbol of her faith but not the other sort. She also lobbied (unsuccessfully) for her church to do the same.

At first I was puzzled by it. As a Catholic I have seen so many If these that I’d become inured to it but the more I thought about it, the more I’ve come to agree with you and her. The whole point of Christianity is that Christ rose again so it would make more sense for our faith to be represented by a depiction of him alive rather than dead.

Writing this made me remember that in Thailand many temples have quite shockingly lifelike waxworks of particularly revered dead monks on display which seems healthier than replicas of their dead bodies and also raises another interesting question - How come the Thais can create waxworks so lifelike I often genuinely thought they were either real, living, breathing people ( or incredibly skilfully embalmed bodies) but Madame Tussaud's waxworks are so shit?

This thread is ace. It's like having a big chat with Bill Bryson.

3 things-

Poo. If I have produced a particularly sizeable poo, I often wonder how long I've been carrying it round inside me.

Dogs - the fact that I have a creature from another species that I feed, put on a lead and take out twice daily is WEIRD.

Reading - I teach little ones to read. The whole concept is weird. That humans have constructed a whole series of squiggles and lines that we bunch together to make sounds & meaning blows my mind. And that these squiggles made by one person can transport an idea, an image, a feeling into another person's brain to make them feel or think or 'see' something is truly miraculous.

Crying. Why does water leak from our eyes when we’re upset?!

Other people. Every passerby has a full life that I know nothing about, they’re just a person walking by in the street. And they know nothing about me either because to them I’m just another passerby. It’s mad.

Oh I've loved this thread!

Things j find weird-

That I made two actual humans, grew them in my body and loved theM before I even knew what they would be like

How they are so very different, different hair colours and different eye colours, different personalities..

How no one but me knows what I'm thinking, that my thoughts don't have a voice... they are just there... mind blowing!

Dreams and how real they can be-I'm having a stressful time at work and have had awful dreams that I swear are real!

Identical twins. My daughters are identical twins and I sometimes wonder who they would have been if the egg hadn’t split? One of them? Or a weird mix of both of them? Also, how can they have such different personalities when they have the exact same DNA and have the same upbringing. What gives us our own personality?

Probably Morbid but the whole concept of Death is horrifying to me. Like one day we won't exist, what happens to our souls? do we just go to sleep and not wake up or does something else happen? I hope something else happens!

Also that one day millions of years from now, Earth won't exist so all of the things we do and have built/achieved will no longer matter. Its just mind boggling!

Also another vote for dogs. They are our little best mates from entirely different species and they can't understand a word you say yet ill natter away to them like they do. Bonkers!

And words! who decided what words meant and how to write them? I don't get it at all.

Sometimes I think about the fact that literally every law is there to stop people's feelings being upset.

What's wrong with murdering someone? It upsets the people who love them.

What's wrong with theft? It upsets whoever has lost something.

Etc etc.

The Spotify algorithm literally reads my mind. Virtual reality is also mind boggling.

@autumnleaves1220

My daughter thinks everyone has the same middle names. So if you're a girl you have her middle name and boys have the same middle name as daddy.

She asked me once why she has a middle name... And then when I thought about it, middle names are weird as they don't have a purpose

In a lot of cultures the purpose of a middle name is to give the child the name the family actually wants and will use whilst upholding tradition and family precedent by giving them an ‘official’’ middle name. This might be to honour or appease older family members by using their names or for religious reasons.

That’s why so many royals aren’t called by their given name - Queen Victoria’s first name was actually Alexandrina because protocol decreed she should be named for her most senior godparent She couldn’t be christened her families preferred name Victoria after her mother because her mother was a more junior royal than the god mum. However her family always used what they thought of as her ‘real’ middle name.

A less aristocratic version exists in my own paternal grandads family. Tradition dictated that the oldest male\female children in every family were called Nicholas\Mary. With this going back at least 100 years there were an awful lot of Nicks and Marys in his extended Irish family so confusion was often avoided by giving them them the traditional official first name and then using the more varied middle names in real life. I only recently discovered that my much loved 50 year old cousin ‘Sarah‘ is officially called Mary.

Going to the moon blew my mind like they actually got there before flat screen TVs and smart phones.

@almondfingers22

Like someone said earlier. That so many people just think we’re here by chance. I mean, how can they NOT believe in a creator. The proof of God is everywhere. I just don’t understand how they can’t see it.

Point me in the direction of the proof god exists.....

Why is black pepper so precious?

You know how in (some) restaurants the waiting staff come out with a, sometimes huge, pepper mill and asked you if you want some pepper. What's that about? I mean often you haven't even had a chance to try the flipping dish so how do you know if you want it!

Is it as precious and as rare as gold?

Why can't the ordinary person add it themselves? Maybe the giant pepper grinders have a special knack to them - but I'm make do with a small on my table (after a bit of training).

Would any (normal-sized) pepper grinders left on restaurant tables go missing and be sold on the dark web?

Dogs can totally understand human language. Dogs have been trained to use sound boards to 'speak'. There are dogs who can understand complex instructions.

Which makes it all the more weird that you never see dogs fetching the newspaper these days...

Spelunking you are spot on, side saddle was invented to protect the hymen. From wikipedia:

In Europe, the sidesaddle developed in part because of cultural norms which considered it unbecoming for a woman to straddle a horse while riding. This was initially conceived as a way to protect the hymen of aristocratic girls, and thus the appearance of their being virgins

It also slowed women down too and you can't fight as well side saddle. Have tried and while it's not uncomfortable, I did feel restricted. Don't care how elegant I looked.

Life in general, how cells can be made from nothing and then form into living breathing thinking things, the world and space and how it goes on for ever, if I think about it too much my brain kind of feels dread

"on mainland Europe the accents / dialects spoken in boarder places are understood by the people on the other side of the boarder, this goins in continuum of about 10 miles, so if you are French but on the Belgian boarder you will understand the Flemish spoken just over the boarder.

You can go in a continuum of 'understanding' from Calais to Russia with people in the same 10 miles understanding but not understanding people further away."

I'm afraid I don't believe this. Any source for it?

"Hymens. Why don’t men have something to ‘lose’ when they first have sex too? "

Look up a TED talk on YouTube by two Norwegian women. According to them, the hymen isn't a membrane/skin that you lose. You always have it, it just might/might not tear.

Space. Apparently it's infinite so there's no end to it, BUT at the same time it's expanding. What's it expanding into if there's nothing but space out there?

@almondfingers22 I agree! So many posts on this thread point TO the evidence of a creator, rather than away from.

Also, animal instincts regarding mating and birth. They don't have ante natal classes so how do solo pet animals (who have never seen another of their pack go through this) know exactly what to do when their babies are born? Do they even know they are pregnant or do they just think 'Wtf is happening to me?!' when tiny things start coming out of them?

I think they do. My dog had a false pregnancy before we had her spayed and started nesting, I.e looking for somewhere to have the pups.

@Wherrsmaclickypen

The wild idiosyncracies and diversity of species.

e.g. Beavers. That building drive and instinct. Whats that all about.

I spend way too much time thinking 'what if I was born a little beaver who couldn't be arsed to build dams and wanted to be an astronaut instead'.

That really made me laugh 😂

How all the memories you have, and indeed your very consciousness, are basically chemical reactions in the brain.