There are so many strange things and inventions on this planet. I think about them a lot, so get ready for a lot of mind blowing things you’ve probably never thought of:

 1. Balloons: A rubber expanding circle filled with someone’s breath. Why are these a thing to celebrate someone’s birthday? I don’t get it. It is funny how we live in a world where giving a rubber spherical object full of air to someone is seen as a thoughtful gesture. “Here’s this free gaseous matter I put inside a rubber object. It expanded. Happy birthday.”

2. Pregnancy: A larger human creates a smaller human and stores it inside of them for 9 months. I’m sorry, but what? I have always thought pregnancy was odd. How can a person literally grow another person? The human body is a magical thing. A man literally plants his seed inside a woman, and a child literally blossoms nine months later. That’s weird and also really cool. This is probably also the number one reason aliens do not want to communicate with us.

3. Words and letters: I understand the alphabet helps us spell words correctly, but who decided what words had meanings? How did they decide how and when they could be used? Who looked at a blade of grass and said, “This is a blade of grass”? Hard to say. It’s so fascinating to think about the development of languages and words. A lot of English words are derived from other languages. What was the first language and how did it become a widely used thing? I need a class to teach me these things.

4. Baking: How in the actual tarnation did someone decide to throw some eggs and flour and sugar and other ingredients together, cook them and decide it was a cake? Who invented the concept of recipes? It makes sense: a lot of practice created delicious delicacies we now know and love. My main question about baking is this: how did someone decide to grind up grains to make flour, make sugar somehow (I just watched a YouTube video on how sugar is made, and it’s a difficult concept), and find these other ingredients to cook? If anyone knows, hit me up.

5. Eggs: The concept of eggs is disgusting. You are literally eating something that could have been turned into a baby chicken. I couldn’t eat eggs for the longest time because I thought about this concept too much. Are they delicious? Yes. One of the grossest yet most common things people eat? Probably. I get so grossed out when my eggs are sunny-side up, or if the yolks aren’t fully cooked. It makes me think too much about what I am eating, and I lose my appetite. Maybe this would be a good dieting technique…

6. People’s faces and how they look: Okay, besides twins or sets of multiples, every single person you know looks different. Yes, there is that theory that at least six people or something look like you. Disregard that for now. Anyway, the amount of combinations of different ways faces can be arranged like shape of face, eye shape and color, nose shape and color, etc. is mind boggling. Are there actually that many combinations of features to make seven billion people all look different? And then everyone before them and after too? There has to be a glitch in the universe where at some point, we are going to have a “twin” in 732 years. It’s weird, and I’m done thinking about it.

7. Space: This is my final one because it spooks me. Think about Earth and all of the planets. Okay, now think about the stars and other galaxies and the sun. Okay, now imagine if none of that existed. There would be just black nothingness right? OK, well get ready for this: imagine if you took away the endless black nothingness. What the heck would be left?

Things on earth are weird. I don’t know about you, but I think some questions are best left unanswered.

 Kennedy Nolen is a senior journalism major. She can be reached at 581-2812 or kdnolen@eiu.edu.