shower thoughts that could end quarantine..

Extinction level events have killed up to 99% of all living things that have ever existed. Embrace the 1%. Being in lockdown has given us time. It’s given us time to think, to ask questions, and to consider things that we might not have given a second thought if we weren’t stuck inside with nothing to do. Things like traffic lights, for example.

We look at them every single day, maybe not as much this past year, but the traffic light is honestly one of man’s greatest inventions. It has made road transport a lot safer and easier to navigate. Without requiring manual labor, it’s genius. But honestly, it’s not so smart. Think about it; why are the two main colors of the traffic light red and green when those are the two colors that most colorblind people can’t differentiate?

Speaking of traffic, now that most of us have been working from home, the “I was stuck in traffic” excuse for coming in late sadly can’t work anymore. But no worries, I’m guessing the new version is just saying “my wifi was out.” You know, Uber drivers have honestly become essential workers during this pandemic. Thanks to them, people can get to where they need to be without having to worry about coming in contact with loads of people in public transport.

But while their work is important, driving an Uber is a very weird job because although their job literally revolves around sitting in a car all day, they still always have to walk to work. And I’ll be honest with you guys, I’ve spent most of this lockdown sitting in my room playing video games, which got me thinking a lot about how much the characters on our screen tell us about the real world.

Like, oftentimes, we’re told that life is a game. Well, if that’s true, then does that mean pregnant women are game developers? In most Role-Playing games, you have the main character, the side character, and non-playable characters or NPCs. In real life, you are the main character in your life, a side character in the life of your friends, and an NPC in the lives of all the strangers you meet, well, don’t meet along the way.

All we can really do is try to be the best character we can be, whether we’re front and center, or just somewhere in the background. Because at the end of the day, you don’t know how much your role, as tiny as it might seem, can affect someone else’s plotline. But moving away from screens, let’s go back to the basics: board games.

Everyone knows Jenga, but it’s a bit different from most games. In most games, you have one winner and multiple losers, but in Jenga, you have one loser and multiple winners. We often like to think that we’re without any prejudice and we always judge things fairly, but just look at the way we treat moths versus the way we treat butterflies, and you’ll understand what pretty privilege is.

By the way, did you guys know that Barbie has more movies than the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe? Don’t ask me how I know that. Human milk is one of the few things that almost every single human being on the planet has tasted, but also the one thing no one remembers the taste of… unless… If you just laughed, you got the joke. But if you waited too long, it’s probably not funny anymore.

Every joke has a hidden timer, and if you don’t laugh before that timer expires, it’s no longer funny. So let’s try this again, but this time, make sure you laugh before the timer runs out. When I was younger, I used to love waiting for the tooth fairy; it was the one chance I got to sell my body without child protective services knocking on my parents' door.

I woke up one morning and I watered my house plants. And then I looked outside and I saw the trees, just flowing in the wind. And I thought to myself, these trees look a lot more comfortable than us. Come rain or sunshine, they just… stand there… doing their thing. Which made me realize, man’s greatest problems are caused by our intelligence, which is also what solves most of our problems. I guess it’s just the cycle of life.

Birdwatching as a hobby increased by 37% during the pandemic. It’s not that the birds suddenly increased in number or just started showing up on more windows. It’s just that because we had pretty much nothing else to do, we were able to slow down and actually pay attention to the world. And well, some of the things we found are really interesting.

When we wake up in the morning, we often cuss out under our breaths at the thought of having to go to work so early. What if birds chirping early in the morning are doing the same thing? And, one day, what if all the birds rise up and sue Jack for using their bodies as the Twitter logo without paying them anything? There’s an estimated 400 billion birds in the world. 1 versus 400 billion, who wins?

Parrots are basically nature’s very own tape recorder, and the pigeons on your street probably miss you. Not humans in general, you in particular, because pigeons can actually distinguish human faces. But to be honest, I’m pretty sure most people couldn’t even identify a pigeon. If you haven’t figured it out already, nature is weird and gives us loads of things to think about.

Like why are humans scared of getting bitten by spiders when we have more teeth than them? And why are spiders scared of getting stomped on by humans when they have more legs? Why are our bodies full of bacteria that literally wait decades for us to die just so they can eat us? But of all the weird things in nature, octopuses are definitely one of the most intriguing.

In the blink of an eye, octopuses can change their skin color and texture to match their surroundings underwater, perfecting blending into their background. The mimic octopus, in particular, can also change how it moves and the shape of its tentacles to impersonate more than 15 different underwater animals. Learning about these creatures made me think, what if there are other animals or sea creatures that are much better at camouflaging than the octopus?

Don’t get me wrong, the octopus’s camouflage mechanism is incredible, but the fact that we know what it still looks like originally means that it might not be doing the absolute best job. So in reality, there might be other animals that are so good at camouflaging that we just haven’t noticed them yet. For some reason, lemons, limes, lemon soda, lime soda, and lemon-lime soda all taste completely different from one another.

And since we’re on the topic of fruits, a fresh fruit salad is a modern technological wonder that is often overlooked. Think about it, at what point in human history could you ever have one spoon that contained fruits from multiple countries, climates, and even continents? Definitely not before major technological advancements like refrigeration. Soon, these same technological advancements will drive us past the use of gas-powered vehicles, pun intended, and once gas-powered vehicles become archaic, the term “gas pedal” will also become archaic.

But it’ll still hang around as a symbol of the accelerator, just like the floppy disk is still the “save” logo for most things. The future is really fun to think about because you can have a thousand guesses and still be wrong. But still, it’s fun to think about what the world might be in a not so distant future. Right now we have Google Earth, but soon, we might have Google Moon and Google Mars too.

All this talk of Mars and the Moon reminds me of the 7 humans aboard the International Space Station. It basically takes the smartest people on Earth and stops them from being the smartest people on Earth. It basically turns the most brilliant minds humanity has to offer into a couple of space janitors, which is great. These are literally some of the greatest engineers and pilots on the entire planet, but you know, that space toilet ain’t gonna scrub itself.

Everyone says practice makes perfect, but in reality, that’s a lie. Doctors have been writing their whole lives, but still end up writing up a prescription like they’re 3-year-old kids who can’t hold a crayon. This shows that mindlessly doing something a million times doesn’t make you any better than a kid coloring outside of the lines for the thousandth time in a row. In reality, it takes conscious effort into trying to improve to actually improve at something.

But hey, don’t feel bad about your handwriting, on the bright side, you have your own unique font. “The future is bright,” “there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” “darkest before dawn,” we have all these quotes that tell us to be hopeful about the future. In their hearts, all of these quotes are great as they give us something to look forward to, but in reality, when you think far enough into the future, it’s hard to see a lot of bright spots.

It’s crazy to think about it now, but in a not so distant future, the term “artificial intelligence” and “robot” might be considered offensive to beings which have become indistinguishable from humans. But don’t worry guys, if they ever wage war on us, we can always send decoded messages to one another in the form of CAPTCHAS. The internet is filled with some of the most beautiful creative works of all time.

But in just a few years, most of the content on the internet will have been produced by dead people. Think a little further ahead and you’ll realize that sadly, all of humanity will cease to exist one day. Sometimes I catch myself drifting into these weird thoughts and I ask myself, am I just being paranoid, or am I just carefully observing the world around me?

And the truth is, the answer depends on how correct I am. If my thoughts are right, I get called observant, but if my thoughts are wrong, I get called paranoid. At the end of the day, it’s just a matter of perspective. The fitness industry has skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic. Because everyone now has all this time on their hands, a lot of people are trying to put more effort into their health, exercising being the biggest step for most.

However, for a lot of these people, it doesn’t last very long. They start very strongly, but after a while, they get tired, lose the fire, and give up. But don’t feel too bad about it, you have the same amount of gold medals as the majority of people who go to the Olympics. Remember, it’s all perspective.

Before lockdown, telling people to not be on their phones all day was great advice. But in the past year, that basically means telling them to quit their jobs, stop communicating with the outside world, and start making friends with the squirrels and lizards that are running around their backyard. Statistically speaking, we as a species are getting better.

We’re becoming more tolerant, we’re standing up for our rights, we’re learning to settle disputes without launching nukes at each other; overall, we’re generally becoming nicer to one another. Yes, we still have a long way to go, but I applaud our journey thus far. But sometimes, it feels like our generation thinks they’re doing much more than any other generation did to change things for the better, when in reality, only future generations can say whether that’s the case or not.

There is light at the end of the tunnel still; the future is indeed bright. Maybe not a few billion years from now, but in the meantime, we’re moving forward. The vaccines are rolling out, and it seems that a good chunk of the population is happy to get it. In time, it may appear as if nothing happened in the first place.

Because once this pandemic is completely over, we can all come out of our homes, hug one another, and tell each other “we made it.” And uh, it really makes sense that Future’s name is Future, because Mask Off is about to take on a whole different meaning.

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