Impossible

I have my Masters degree; Magna Cum Laude.

I received my BS in Psychology and English from Boston College.

I scored pretty darn high on my SAT's.

I tell you these things to prove to you that I am not an unintelligent woman.

What I am is lopsided in the distribution of what I know.

There are some items quite common to our everyday existence, some of which are even antiquated, that no matter how many times someone explains it to me; no matter how slowly they go; no matter how many diagrams they draw…

I just don’t get it.

To compensate for my lack of understanding, I create a mini-movie in my head of how these items work. The movies are fantastical and absolutely fictional. Maybe even science fictional. But, they work for me.

I’ll explain.

Impossible invention #1: The Fax Machine

This sucker has baffled me for years. Yes, I know there is an electronic transmission of information. There’s a scan of a piece of paper and that scan is converted to data and that data is zoomed along a mystery wire to the receiving machine.

Still I say, whaaaaat?

In my mind, what happens is quite similar to the scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the original, with Gene Wilder) when the little cowboy boy is shrunk into a miniature obnoxious dude. He gets pixilated first, then flies through the air in a million little boy pieces. That’s how I explain the fax.

The document being sent shrinks down and folds into a kind of a baby paper airplane. That paper airplane is, of course, indiscernible and flies to where it needs to go. It flies invisibly through a wire. Then, when it arrives at its target, it swells and smoothes-a plant growing in fast forward on the Discovery Channel- and boom!:

It arrives at its final destination.

Impossible invention #2: The airplane

As recently as yesterday, while I was actually on an airplane, someone tried to explain to me how flight is possible. An engineer, actually. A bright, patient sweet guy who started with air flow over wing tips and proceeded to lift, gravitational pull, and distribution of mass, weight and speed.

Please.

The way an airplane takes off is simple: It’s a miracle.

That sucker weighs seven bazillion pounds. It goes really really fast. Then, it hits a black hole of non-existent gravity. It becomes weightless and floats along. The pilot steers it, (but I can’t really explain the radars and GPS instruments either). It flies in the sky on a cushion of swirly-swirly-up-air. Then, when it’s time to land, it finds the zero gravity black hole on the other side and peeks its nose in and swan dives towards the runway.

Totally simple.

Impossible Invention #3: The cell phone

Are you kidding me?

This is some futuristic craziness.

My cell phone can work at 30,000 feet. I can buy the internet in the sky for $10.00 and surf the web for 3 hours. I can make a phone call to India from my kitchen.

With no wires (not that I can explain those anyway).

The way a cell phone works involves atom sized polka-dots of tornado sound waves that zoom out of the speakers. They turn into swarms of shimmering minnows. They cut through space and time and land in my ear. On my screen.

It’s ridiculous. That’s the best I have. Cell phones are the final destination for me. My head explodes.

That’s it, folks.

Three explanations for three of the most impossible inventions.

I didn’t even attempt to explain digital cameras.

I’ll leave that to one of you.