If people could actually see into my brain, I think they would be shocked to learn that what's in there consists mostly of answerless questions. I live alone, and because of the COVID pandemic, I have very little face-to-face interaction with other adult human beings. (My choice, due to my high risk status for succumbing to the corona virus should I contract it.) That means that I don't get out much. My only means of gathering information, except for a few of my solo trips out to forage for things I need, comes from television and social media. Since one can only believe about half of what is on either media form, that leaves only my inquisitive mind left to fill in the blanks that are left behind. I even scare myself, sometimes.
For example, I'll be sitting in the kitchen endlessly/mindlessly staving off the boredom by solving sudoku puzzles on my Kindle Fire, when my mind will flash to something remote and not related to anything going on around me. It might be a place, a person, a memory, a song, or even a circumstance, and I wonder where it came from. Did I see something or hear something to remind me of it? The answer 99% of the time is no. And then that same remembrance will happen over and over and over again, as if having it the first time created some pathway in my brain for it to come back repeatedly. I don't worry about my sanity, but I do wish I understood it all.
Here are some of the questions for which the answers can't be Googled to any successful degree. Some are amusing; some are not:
1. When I was a child, I would get disabling headaches that would last for days. My mother had my eyes checked. No problem there. She threw every kind of age-acceptable pain remedy available in those days in my direction--everything from Aspergum, aspirin, Alka Seltzer, Bromo Seltzer, blah, blah, to no avail. Most of the time, all I could do was go to bed and hope that it would be gone when I woke up. Sometimes it was; sometimes it wasn't. Any little bump on the head would set one off. Sometimes, the way I sat at the sewing machine when I was a little older--tense in the shoulders--would cause one. Even just the way I slept could make my head explode before I even got up. It wasn't fun.
Then, sometime in my 20s--almost unnoticed--the headaches stopped. They stopped so completely that I never even got occasional headaches. Done. Finished. The very next time I got a headache was in 2007, when I was 60, when an aneurysm ruptured in my brain while visiting my sister. I should have died, but I didn't. Was airlifted by helicopter to a trauma center with a huge neuroscience department in another city. Had brain surgery to clip the aneurysm. Got sent home after a week. The post-surgery headache after that lasted two weeks, as predicted. Then I got back to my headache-free life.
I have read that people can "outgrow" headaches. That's apparently what happened to me...but WHY? What caused them to begin with? What about the growth process changes the proclivity to headaches? I lived in so many different places, the causes couldn't have been environmental. Who has the answers? I'm grateful not to be a headache sufferer like I once was, but who has the answers? Anyone??
2. A big chunk of my answerless questions has to do with crime. Long a student of why people do what they do, I wonder what goes on in the minds of criminals. I mean, if they were honest.
*Do they consider the consequences but decide to act anyway because they lack impulse control? *Do they really believe they won't get caught? *Do they ever truly regret what they have done? Or are they just sorry they got caught? *Do they ever learn their lesson and go on to lead stellar lives after prison? *Is the driving force behind their crimes some sort of mental illness? Are they reacting to voices in their head, or just some perverse gratification to behave outside the law? (The voices in the head thing also troubles me. Just because some voice tells you to do something doesn't mean you have to do it. Or am I being too simplistic?) *Is the human sex drive so irresistible that even rational thinking people feel like they have to act on their fantasies? (I am reminded of people like Jared Fogle and Jeffrey Epstein...even Bill Cosby...who had everything but threw it all away to accommodate their desires to have things to which they weren't legally entitled? Was it worth the immediate gratification?? *And the real biggie: WHY is mental health counseling/rehab so expensive that even people who seek it can't afford it??
3. Who invented or discovered the notion of cooking food? Did it happen by accident? Surely it did, since ancient homo sapiens didn't have science to guide them, but when did it all start--and how?
4. On that same vein, having seen all that it takes to create chocolate out of cacao beans, I wonder who figured this out? I mean, really? Was there some mad scientist somewhere that took a bunch of cacao beans and just started messing with them with fermenting and acids, etc., to come up with luscious chocolate? Also, who was the first person to pick up something as ugly as a lobster or a crab--or even a shrimp--to ask, "Hmmm... I wonder if this would be good to eat?" Boggles my mind! (Just for the record, I love lobster and crab and shrimp--all considered shellfish--but I've had scallops twice, also shellfish, and got sick both times, so I avoid scallops. But WHY would my body accept other shellfish, but not scallops???)
5. This is a biggie: WHY, when I settle on a product that I love so much that I won't buy any other brand, does the company decide to change it or discontinue it?? Offhand, I can think of so many--my Moisture Wear makeup foundation (discontinued), Holland House cocktail sauce (discontinued...can't find anywhere), I Can't Believe It's Not Butter Light (changed for the worse), Diet Pepsi (changed to eliminate a particular brand of artificial sweetener...but then, happily, changed back again. The only success to this story!) If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
So many questions; so few answers. I recently wondered what happened to Lazarus after Jesus raised him from the dead, since the Bible doesn't say. I Googled it to find what "Eastern Orthodox tradition" says. Unfortunately, tradition doesn't always equal truth. I'll just keep on asking the tough questions.
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