This is one of those posts where I wish I could say, "Man, I was soooooooo stoned when I thought of that."
As it turns out: No drugs needed!
I have a very clear memory of being struck, with the force of revelation, by the absurdity of feet---as objects generally, but especially as objects attached to my legs. Sadly, I too was sober.
I think my how-is-it-that-I've-never-noticed-that-before moments are about equally divided between that sort of alienation and Stanley-style amazement. The latter are way better, although I think the former bring more joy to people within mocking range of me when the epiphany hits.
I used to be a sort of honorary stoner. Spent weeks on end in high school amazed at the fact that other people live their other lives, as full o subjective experience as mine is, and that so little of this experience ever gets communicated to anyone else. In college I entered some kind of rapturous state after a biology lecture as I walked down the hill to my dorm under a multiplicity various of photosynthesizing trees. At some point, I lost my easy access to awe, which kinda sucks. I'm still too dreamy to really consider myself a responsible adult, so I might as well go around goofing over dandelions or what have you.
Yeah, it still sometimes feels like my husband and I walk to work at a toddler's pace because there's all this great stuff to check out along the way. Look, a snail! Hey buddy! That's some great shear-thickening goo you've got there!
I recommend this one for some good Whoa! ishness. Albeit heteronormative.
4: Sometimes as a kid out-of-the-blue I'd get what I came to think of as "I am me" moments, when the whole reality of reality and consciousness of my being part of it seemed to just open up in front of me. A bit scary, but I usually came out feeling great and wondering how to make them happen more often. However, I was such a little liar and habitual concealer of my true thoughts on anything that I treated them as a huge secret that I absolutely could not share with anyone, ever. (You know, other than anyone in the world with a browser and Internet access.)
we've got wheels! WHEELS! How awesome is that?!
In a recent somewhat rambling post, Michael Bérubé ultimately gets around to a Jared Diamond quote on the impressiveness of alphabetic writing and opines, You know, everyone gets all worked up about the wheel, like it was some big thing. We even tell ourselves we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Well, compared to writing, the wheel was child's play. But what I really liked was that he went on to quote a great passage (of which I had no recollection) from Charles Kinbote's commentaries in Pale Fire:
We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students).
Meh. You can do lots of stuff without writing or wheels.
Jesus. No one said you couldn't archeology boy. Good fucking night.
Sorry, too. Just ya know, no one likes abruptly falling back to earth from the Ethereal Plane.
You can do a lot without writing, but can you retain the force of the most essential words without writing? Arguably you cannot.
I miss wonder.
(Ever since teo drained it from the world in comment 9.)
There's lots of other wonderful stuff! Just ask Stanley!
I was sad that I had no sense of wonder about wheels until I met the man who had no sense of wonder about feet.
And dark-colored underwear for guys.
Should have given MB a link in 8. Alphabet/reading/wheel stuff starts after the break halfway down.
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Just came from one of the least self-conscious, but most bohemian, parties in town tonight. Am Bex-style and DFH-style.
A crusty was playing tug-of-war with his pit bull and said:
"Ha-ha, you'll never win, 'cause I've got the leash"
I turned to the hostess and a friend and said "If that doesn't sum up our current condition, I don't know what does."
"He's lucky," I said, "at least he can see his leash."
Anyhow, does the assembled Mineshaft think I should go to grad school?
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Anyhow, does the assembled Mineshaft think I should go to grad school?
What sort of grad school?
(The answer is almost certainly "no," but we may be able to add some nuance depending on the exact circumstances.)
Sense of wonder: I was halfway up an Alp at the age of 14 or so (doesn't matter which one; one of the smaller ones anyway) when it struck me that every plant and animal I could see was made up of millions of cells, each of which contained information and machinery of unimaginable complexity. It seemed a terrible tragedy to destroy even one of these.
If you can shit out really grand sounding papers about really mundane things you'll have a great career as a mediocre scientist. If you can up mundane to interesting you can have just a great career. Either way a sense of wonder surely helps.
Grad school: it depends.
Wordsworth made a career out of this (wonder, not grad school). Stanley is probably a better poet than Wordsworth.
"Ha-ha, you'll never win, 'cause I've got the leash"
Hope it bit him.
Stanley is probably a better poet than Wordsworth.
He dwells upon our trodden ways.
Wordsworth was a better Distributor of Stamps than Stanley will ever be.
You know, contemplating one's navel is a cliché, but if you do take a minute to check out your belly-button, you will notice that its really fucking cool!
So wait, where do I get a pair of bendy sticks to put on my legs? And where is this marvelous stilts-world where Stanley resides?
What we really need is some way to attach wheels directly to our shoes. That would be truly fun.
32: Wait a minute. Are you having a laugh? Is everyone having a laugh? This is a very serious post.
I've ordered my pair! Now to sit back and wait for the FUN to arrive!
Heelys are great. When you first see some little kid apparently levitating down a supermarket aisle it's one of those nice little surreal moments.
that humans navigate the world around them on two bendy sticks with some bendy platforms at the end.
Totally mine. Jeez, have you ever considered the pelvic bone (in a totally non-pr0nagraphic way, not that there's anything wrong with that)? Where the fuck did they come up with that?
And another thing: way the hell out on the prarie, at say 2 AM in the morning, 'round Christmas, when there's been an ice storm and there is no moisture in the sky at all, and no moon. Dude, Milky Way shadows, and stars that cut right though you because they just don't care, and they've been not caring since most living beings were bacterial bits, like in the back of the fridge.
Or a really bad writer for Jack Handey.
You could be Jack Handey's stoner brother.
max
['Wow, man... have you ever wondered how many little round papers things there are in the world? You know, the little round papers things punched out by a hole punch. Dude: shitload.']
When you first see some little kid apparently levitating down a supermarket aisle it's one of those nice little surreal moments.
First time Iris noticed this (she was ~4, the kid was ~8), she watched in utter, slack-jawed awe. I don't think she was capable of expressing her wonder.
My sense of wonder often takes a macabre turn. Behind everything we know to be poison there's at least one unlucky son of a bitch.
It's sad that a person can be blown away by something as simple as a tornado.
Behind everything we know to be poison there's at least one unlucky son of a bitch.
My dad used to say it was a brave man who first ate a lobster.
I always wondered about cassava, myself. You have to soak, pound and dry the roots before you eat them, otherwise you die of cyanide poisoning. Yet it's a staple food in West Africa. Which means there were a lot of Africans whose last words were something like, "OK, but you soaked this lot for half an hour, so it should definitely be safe this time, right?"
42: Yeah, I've wondered exactly that. I suppose it must have been a famine thing, the first couple of times.
43. During WWI, some British government idiot recommended eating rhubarb leaves to make up for the shoratge of vegetables. Yes, people died.
I had one of those "whoah, dude" moments when my friend the biomechanics major explained to me that "Walking is a controlled fall."
I had precisely the same moment as a teenager figuring out orbital mechanics -- "Like, the Moon is falling? All the time. And it just keeps on missing. Wow."
My dad used to say it was a brave man who first ate a lobster.
Swift said the same about oysters.
Somebody told me today that dogs have ACLs. That was an "ooh" moment.
Learning ballistics (in two dimensions, with weightless elephants on frictionless planets) impressed me with the "calculations" made by outfielders everywhere.
I had one of those "whoah, dude" moments when my friend the biomechanics major explained to me that "Walking is a controlled fall."
I used to know someone who walked in a way that made that very clear. He was a real slacker, and it extended even to the walk, as if he exerted the bare minimum of effort to keep gravity from toppling him over.
A lot of those running technique books -- Chi Running, POSE, etc -- are all about relearning that walking/running is just controlled falling.
Sometimes as a kid out-of-the-blue I'd get what I came to think of as "I am me" moments, when the whole reality of reality and consciousness of my being part of it seemed to just open up in front of me.
Uh, I still have those, like, all the time. It's freaky.
49: I recently read somewhere that what an outfielder is doing, if you look at the tracks they take over the ground, is moving such that the ball in flight appears to them to be moving in a straight line rather than an arc -- if you do that, when it gets to the ground, you're standing in the right place. It's still amazing that people can do this without thinking about it, but it does seem possible.
47: Swift said lots of stuff. Leave some jokes for OFE's dad.
My bizarre travel "whoa, dude" moment always comes when I meet people some place that is far from both our homes. Like, I live in Chicago, Bitch lives in California, we talked for a while and sent some text messages back and forth and got on planes and trains and walked around and POOF! here we are standing in the lobby of the Hampton Inn in Denver, together.
Or, I get on a plane and someone else gets on a plane and we exchange some other information and POOF there we both are, thousands of miles from streets either of us are familiar with, smoking weed in an Amsterdam cafe.
You know, not that I would do that. But maps are cool.
I don't know if all that makes any sense, but it floors me almost every time.
Learning ballistics (in two dimensions, with weightless elephants on frictionless planets)
Parochial schools just keep on getting weirder.
52: Kipling has a nice (well, allowing for the Orientalism of it all) description of those moments in Kim:
A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity. When one grows older, the power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment.
'Who is Kim - Kim - Kim?'
He squatted in a corner of the clanging waiting-room, rapt from all other thoughts; hands folded in lap, and pupils contracted to pin-points. In a minute - in another half-second - he felt he would arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle; but here, as always happens, his mind dropped away from those heights with a rush of a wounded bird, and passing his hand before his eyes, he shook his head.
Some of the stuff in Dawkins' books, for example in I think The Extended Phenotype where he speculates about the evolution of the mating habits of these wasps that lay their eggs in figs, is pretty awe-inspiring. When reading that book I often felt like my brain was straining to try to be big enough to comprehend it.
HOW STRANGE IT IS TO BE ANYTHING AT ALL
These moments aren't quite as trippy, but I do occasionally get hit with surprise that it's Now. That the things in my life that have already happened, and the things that haven't happened haven't happened yet, and that I have no control over when Now is.
that dogs have ACLs.
Rehabbing after tearing one of my ACLs gave me the "whoa! moment" with regard to proprioception. So I (used to) know precisely where my foot was because some nerves sensed the changes in stretch in various ligaments and my lower brain integrated that and some other input and figured out where the vector segments (aka bendy sticks) were in 3-space? Close your eyes and serpentine your finger to the tip of your nose to appreciate it in action (it's not like there is some radar in your fingertip). It also provides a good theory of what happens to kids when they get uncoordinated during growth spurts. (You mean the length of the fucking vector segments are variables? FML!)
re: 61
Yeah, I've not torn anything, but doing basic proprioception work for a minor knee injury gave me a good sense of that. Standing on one leg with your eyes closed is hard, and you really notice the difference that visual feedback makes over pure proprioception.
"pure proprioception"
My dealer always cuts his proprioception with powdered baby formula, so I'm not sure how pure proprioception hits you.
60: Yes, those too. I'd also get a related thing right before big sporting events I was participating in when the inexorable march of time would just seem unbearable. Although in that situation my reaction wasn't wonder, but just yet even more anxiety.
I once spent several hours at Boy Scout camp breaking sedimentary rocks open, trapped in wonder that I was the only human being to see the material of the broken face, ever.
I used to break open sedimentary rocks, write "What you talking 'bout Willis" with a Sharpie and glue them back together.
67: Stephen Jay Gould relates a sad story that I first encountered in a Martin Gardner book.
In 1726, Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer, an insufferably pompous and dilettantish professor and physician from the town of Wurzburg, published a volume, the Lithographiae Wirceburgensis (or Wurzburg lithography), documenting in copious words and twenty-one plates a remarkable series of fossils that he had found on a mountain adjacent to the city. These fossils displayed a great array of objects, all nearly exposed in three-dimensional relief on the surface of flattened stones. The great majority depicted organisms, nearly all complete and including remarkable features of behavior and soft anatomy that would never be preserved in conventional fossils - lizards in their skins, birds complete with beak and eyes, spiders with their webs, bees feeding on flowers, snails next to their eggs, and frogs copulating. But others showed heavenly objects - comets with tails, the crescent Moon with rays, and the Sun all effulgent with a glowing central face of human form. Still others depicted Hebrew letters, nearly all spelling out the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God - YHWH, usually transliterated by Christian Europe as Jehovah....
Alas, after publishing his book and trumpeting the contents, Beringer found out that he had indeed been duped, presumably by his students playing a prank. (Some sources say that he finally acknowledged trickery when he noted his own name written in Hebrew letters on one stone.) According to legend, the brokenhearted Beringer then impoverished himself by attempting to buy back all copies of his book and died dispirited just a few years later.
68: Certain ideas reoccur throughout history. Punking geologists is one of them.
69: Yeah it is, but think of the "Whoa!" moments he got to have!
New life is amazing. Sprouting plants and a happy kid do it for me pretty often.
Sometime fluid mechanics- eddies in a stream, or the instability in a column of smoke.
70: God pwned us all on that one, though. (Possibly, mischievously malicious God is the baddest ass God of them all.)
But as soon as you remember it's called fluid mechanics, the magic is gone.
72: or the instability in a column of smoke.
Or a paper bag caught in a wind eddy against a brick wall. (There's clearly something I am putting off doing.)
I spent years working on fluid mechanics. The names don't matter to me, it's the ability of such a mathematically simple system to give rise to such intricacy which is also beautiful that gets me. There are more minimal examples of similar unfoldings, but computers are needed to look at most of them, they don't tap you on the shoulder.
I misremembered in 58. The book is Climbing Mount Improbable. Here's a discussion of the whoa, dude! coevolution of figs and fig wasps that Dawkins wrote about.
8, 52,60,65, and the last bit of the Anniversary Thread: I spent a few years in my early 20s where the ratio of Whoa! moments to other moments was too big, including "Whoa! I've graduated from college" and a couple of years later "Whoa! I'm like, fucked." I suspect I am not alone in this experience.
Back when I was a connoisseur of psychedelic mushrooms, this used to be my favorite thing about them. Tripping balls and hallucinating crazy colors was all well and good, but the best part about it was the way they made you recognize just how amazing it is that the universe fits together in exactly the way the world fits together. Its like, everything in the world has its own identity and reason for being, Man... far out!
72: The vortex street formed as water flows past an obstacle just entrances me every time. The absolute best is when it's in a clear stream on a sunny day and the dimple in the water surface concentrates the sunlight falling on the stream bed, forming little drifting bright spots that shimmer and shimmy, slowly getting smaller as the eddy fades. I can watch that forever.
49, 53: Not to take away from the awesome, but the thing is, the analog ballistic interception computer in the brain can afford to be extremely inaccurate because it executes continuously. Right after the ball is hit, the fielder might only know to within, say, a 40-foot diameter circle where the ball is going to land; that's enough to tell him whether he needs to start running, and in which direction. If his estimate of the direction is off by 10 degrees he's still making 98% of the progress toward the interception that he would be making if he were dead-on. and As he runs and tracks the ball, the scale of the problem gets smaller so the error terms in the calculation get smaller, and everything converges nicely at the end.
76: But I will say that moving water in almost any form is great thing to wonder at. Even just watching the rivulets from watering the garden—the interaction of surface tension, gravity, the micro-topography and the absorptive properties of the underlying material—can be fascinating. (How the fuck do I even earn a living?)
"(How the fuck do I even earn a living?)"
Class privilege?
84: Me too. I'm trying to figure out how to be ambitious or at least finish this paper.
Have you ever looked at your hand stream? I mean really, really looked at it?
I was once swimming and it occurred to me that water was, like, a mineral. A rock, only liquid! And yet it was molten at a temperature that didn't kill me! And if there were a planet that was very very cold all the time and there were creatures who lived there and there were water, the creatures wouldn't think of it as a liquid at all. Because it would always be solid!
(Should Frowner go to gradjit school? Probably not, unless they offer some kind of scholarship for irritating people.)
I'm also often overcome by wonder at the sameness of places over time. The bookstore is pretty much like it was fifteen years ago! These were the very shelves we built and painted an unattractive brown! And yet they're still here. Also when I notice that friends have gotten older I'm all impressed. I think this is because I do not have a strong sense of my own reality, so I don't expect to be around things long enough to notice their persistence over more than a year or so.
IT'S ALL TOO BEAUTIFUL!!!!!1!!!
Right after the ball is hit, the fielder might only know to within, say, a 40-foot diameter circle where the ball is going to land; that's enough to tell him whether he needs to start running, and in which direction.
Sometimes not even that much. Little League coaches teach their outfielders never to run forward when a fly ball is ascending; the risk of misjudging the trajectory is high, and it's a whole lot easier to run forward to chase it at the end than to run backwards if it's descending behind you. You have to consciously compensate for your defective perception.
As he runs and tracks the ball
But s/he isn't continuously tracking the ball. The running part doesn't allow one to keep one's eye on the ball much, mostly right just right after the hit and then once one thinks one is in about the right vicinity.
90: To clarify, I'm talking about the situation where the ball is clearly going to land a good deal behind you somewhere and you have to sprint towards where you think it's going to land.
85: or at least finish this paper.
Use Annie Dillard as an inspiration, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is basically one long exercise in "Whoa!". The wonder is that she was able to write it at all. (Is it still read? I loved it, but it can be a bit much at times.) And she grew up right around what I think is your micro-neck of the woods. "Our family moved from house to house, but we never moved so far I couldn't walk to Frick Park." -- An American Childhood.
86: Have you ever looked at your hand stream? I mean really, really looked at it?
Just taking the piss out of us, eh?
92: Frick park would be about 20 minutes walking from my house.
90-91: In that case the inputs are intermittent and a fair amount of the running has to be done with an imperfect estimate, but the final interception phase is still the continuous-refinement-of-crappy-estimate cycle I'm describing. If the batter hits a ball deep enough that the fielder has to turn and run for the fences, what do you think would be the probable amount of error if the fielder stopped looking once the ball passed the 1st-3rd base line and ran for his best guess of the ball's landing point? If, instead of catching the ball, the fielder's job was to get hit by it, could he reliably do so without looking after he started running for the fences?
I was once swimming and it occurred to me that water was, like, a mineral. A rock, only liquid! And yet it was molten at a temperature that didn't kill me! And if there were a planet that was very very cold all the time and there were creatures who lived there and there were water, the creatures wouldn't think of it as a liquid at all. Because it would always be solid!
Yeah. Water is some fascinating shit. And in the ice phase, there are all those different crystal structures. A whole taxonomy of water.
what do you think would be the probable amount of error if the fielder stopped looking once the ball passed the 1st-3rd base line and ran for his best guess of the ball's landing point?
Willy Mays could do it.
My fluid-dynamics ex-boyfriend would sit in front of a fountain as long as I would let him. It worked well if we had cause to go to a mall. Twice, two times, he missed meeting me at my airport gate because he was watching planes take off at a different gate. I learned to page him.
I thought it was super neat when my physics professor explained to me that the signal that alerted me that I was on a path to collide with someone was that the background stops moving relative to that person. OH! That's what my brain detects!
If, instead of catching the ball, the fielder's job was to get hit by it, could he reliably do so without looking after he started running for the fences?
That would be more difficult, I suspect. The radius within which a full-grown outfielder can catch a ball thrown at him, even from a short distance away, is pretty wide, thanks to a long torso, long arms, the reach extension from the glove, and the ability to jump and stretch in any direction. Positioning your body to be hit would be arguably a greater challenge.
Related example: in football, if a ball hits the receiver, coaches rate it as "should have been caught". But the inverse is not true; there are lots of passes caught that would never have hit the receiver.
You know what I would love to understand on a perceptual basis? Eye contact. You can 'feel' eyecontact from far enough away that it seems implausible that you've got a lot of detail about exactly where the other person's eyes are pointed -- what exactly is the trigger?
Further to 100, look at how high and wide a ball can be thrown to first base and still be caught by a first basemen with his toe on the bag. (I preemptively concede that catching a ball thrown hard on low, flat trajectory is cognitively less challenging than catching a high fly on a parabolic path to the outfield.)
Initial signal: same amount of white-of-eye visible on either side of the iris, on both eyes?
That at least gives you a solid indication that the eyes are pointed at you, though the feedback loop of full on eye contact is a separate and amazing thing.
Initial signal: same amount of white-of-eye visible on either side of the iris, on both eyes?
It seems to work even for pretty peripheral signals, though, doesn't it? Or maybe there's some sort of confirmation bias at work there.
My cob-logger posted something today from the Pillow Book that's on-topic:
I remember a clear morning in the Ninth Month when it had been raining all night. Despite the bright sun, dew was still dripping from the chrysanthemums in the garden. On the bamboo fences and criss-cross hedges I saw tatters of spider webs; and where the threads were broken the raindrops hung on them like strings of white pearls. I was greatly moved and delighted.
As it become sunnier, the dew gradually vanished from the clover and the other plants where it had lain so heavily; the branches began to stir, then suddenly sprang up of their own accord. Later I described to people how beautiful it all was. What most impressed me was that they were not at all impressed.
102: catching a ball thrown hard on low, flat trajectory is cognitively less challenging than catching a high fly on a parabolic path to the outfield
Depends on what you mean by cognitively less challenging. The outfielder has way more time to refine the estimated trajectory, and I bet they make center-of-glove catches more often than infielders.
104: My understanding (layperson's at best) is that there are a number of visual signals that you are in fact most sensitive to in your peripheral visual field* (movement in general for instance); the "just so" story being that that is where the hitherto unknown threat is likely to come from. In that spirit, I think identifying that Holy Fuck! Something is looking at *YOU* would probably have some priority (and animals seem to do it extremely well). It does seem like you can pick it up when it is not even in your visual field, though.
*And as a consequence, supposedly drag racers only look at the starting signals out of the corner of their eye. I do this at traffic lights when I have reason to get out in front of my competitors.
Water is one individual thing; it never changes.
I do this at traffic lights when I have reason to get out in front of my competitors.
My one and only acquaintance from Luxembourg taught me the best trick for dealing with these situations. You ostentatiously rev the engine, glance menacingly over at the guy next to you (it works best with guys), and creep forward as if you're going to make a jackrabbit start. This behavior provokes the guy next to you to jam on the gas and screech off when the light turns green, whereupon you calmly signal lane change and pull in behind him.
110: But ... but, then he's IN FRONT OF YOU!
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Sara Robinson over at Orcinus has had quite enough of this bullshit.
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When sparring/fighting you are always taught to maintain constant eye contact. It's surprising how much you can tell about what people are about to do when you do that. I presume it's a combination of picking up cues from their eyes, and also it puts their hands and feet somewhere in your peripheral vision where the motion-detection is good.
I had one of those "whoah, dude" moments when my friend the biomechanics major explained to me that "Walking is a controlled fall."
Was your friend Laurie Anderson?
Depends on what you mean by cognitively less challenging. The outfielder has way more time to refine the estimated trajectory, and I bet they make center-of-glove catches more often than infielders.
On balls hit in the air? No way. Balls that infielders don't field cleanly are almost always grounders. And I'm willing to bet that first basemen make more center-of-glove catches on throws to first than outfielders do on balls hit in the air to the outfield.
There's a likelihood that there are specially arranged groups of receptors in the eye that identify the light-dark-light pattern of an eyeball, similar to those in a frog which are arranged to detect flies.
see (pdf)
I'm not sure our ability to detect being stared at is that discriminating. Hasn't everyone at some time tentatively greeted someone who was waving at someone else? I think a generally motionless face pointed in your direction is probably enough.
116: "...similar to those in a frog which are arranged to detect flies."
Is that why frogs boogle so many grounders?
117: To me at least, even momentary eye contact is a very strong, distinct sensation. It's possible that it's not real -- that I have that strong feeling of eye contact when the person I believe is looking at me really isn't -- but if it is real, it's not ambiguous at all.
It'd be interesting to experiment. Single neuron recording is problematical in people, but maybe it'd be approachable by briefly flashing crowd scenes and asking "was anyone in that picture looking directly at the camera?"
But then, I'm not much of an experimental perceptionist, I'm more into the theory of perception.
My big moment of wonder recently was looking at my tiny little garden and realizing how much things had grown - look, the basil is 4 times the size of when I planted it! the tomatoes! they're huge! and the wimpy one caught up with the bigger ones overnight! It seems a miracle.
115: Well, I have to take your word for it, because I really don't know anything about hockey anyway.
in football, if a ball hits the receiver, coaches rate it as "should have been caught".
Once in high school our QB drilled a receiver in the back of the helmet with a pass. The coaches blamed the QB although everyone botched it on that play, including the blockers (looks studiously down at ground).
When I was a little kid I had nightmares about my bedroom; everything was far, far too big. Not that I had shrunk relative to the rest of the room, but only that the pillow, the chest-o-drawers, the night-light, everything, were all too huge to handle. Then I'd wake up. These days I occasionally have nightmares about trying to go some place on foot, walking and walking and walking, but not ever finally getting anywhere or even getting any closer. As for looking someone straight in the eye, as far back as I remember I couldn't ever do that. Whenever I've consciously tried to, it feels like walking along the edge of a high sheer cliff; I clench up and freeze till I look aside.
I thought it was super neat when my physics professor explained to me that the signal that alerted me that I was on a path to collide with someone was that the background stops moving relative to that person.
AKA CBDR.
124: wait, you actually never look anyone in the eye, ever? that strikes me as very odd.
57: A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, ... 'Who is Kim - Kim - Kim?'
James Thurber had a more Occidental variation in "More Alarms at Night". He has lain awake half the night trying to remember name of the New Jersey town, Perth Amboy. (I thought of every other town in the country as well as such words and names and phrases as terra cotta, Walla-Walla, bill of lading, vice versa, hoity-toity, Pall Mall, Bodley Head, Schumann-Heink, etc., without even coming close to Perth Amboy. I suppose terra cotta was the closest I came, although it was not very close.)
I began to indulge in the wildest fancies as I lay there in the dark, such as there was no town, and even that there was no such state as New Jersey. I fell to repeating the word "Jersey" over and over again, until it became idiotic and meaningless. If you have ever lain awake at night and repeated one word over and over, thousands and millions and hundreds of thousands and millions of times, you know the disturbing mental state you can get into. I got to thinking that there was nobody else in the world but me, and various other wild imaginings of that nature.
124: I am lying in bed five flights up, and my day, which nothing interrupts, is like a clock-face without hands. As something that has been lost for a long time reappears one morning in its old place, safe and sound, almost newer than when it vanished, just as if someone had been taking care of it — : so, here and there on my blanket, lost feelings out of my childhood lie and are like new. All the lost fears are here again.
The fear that a small woolen thread sticking out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steel needle; the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head, bigger and heavier; the fear that the breadcrumb which just dropped off my bed may turn into glass, and shatter when it hits the floor, and the sickening worry that when it does, everything will be broken, for ever; the fear that the ragged edge of a letter which was torn open may be something forbidden, which no one ought to see, something indescribably precious, for which no place in the room is safe enough; the fear that if I fell asleep I might swallow the piece of coal lying in front of the stove; the fear that some number may begin to grow in my brain until there is no more room for it inside me; the fear that I may be lying on granite, on gray granite; the fear that I may start screaming, and people will come running to my door and finally force it open, the fear that I might betray myself and tell everything I dread, and the fear that I might not be able to say anything, because everything is unsayable, -- and the other fears . . . the fears.
I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.
105: As it become sunnier, the dew gradually vanished from the clover and the other plants where it had lain so heavily; the branches began to stir, then suddenly sprang up of their own accord. Later I described to people how beautiful it all was. What most impressed me was that they were not at all impressed.
My Ohio-mundane equivalent of this was one morning while getting the pool where I worked ready to open. I had ridden through fog on the way there, but the pool was on a hill above its reach. As I worked, the fog ever so slowly crept up the slope until it finally enveloped everything in a gratifyingly muffled, glowing haziness. For a minute or two, then in a flash it dissipated, and the stupid bright, sunny world returned.
There are no penalties against awesomeness... or attractiveness.
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