Louis C.K. Thinks He's Smart
I have been trying to find an inconspicuous way to show people how my brain works. To tell them about my general thought process without extending them an invitation that reads, “Please, sit back, relax, and enjoy the wild ride we’ll take through the mind of a 17-year-old.” But at this point, I can no longer hope for discretion, so please, stay for a brief demo.
The oversized shirt is from freshman year. It’s a faded royal blue and has a big picture of a small motor protein on the front. I am sitting on my bed thinking about a few lines from one of Louis C.K’s standups, “As humans, we waste our words. It’s sad. We use words like ‘awesome’ and ‘wonderful’ like they’re candy. […] You use the word ‘amazing’ to describe a sandwich at Wendy’s. What’s going to happen on your wedding day, or when your first child is born? How will you describe it? You already wasted ‘amazing’ on a sandwich.”
When I process what he says, my first impulse is to start an extensive research project about sandwiches. They shouldn’t be as easy to dismiss as that, and I will prove it. A sandwich can be amazing, because in the end, can’t most things? A rock could have heard secrets, absorbed classified information, and witnessed disasters and miracles. And that potential for a story would make the rock amazing.
And, I find it as laughable as it is upsetting that as humanity advances, we start calling our once most prized inventions basic. Combining two slices of bread with meat and spices in between to create a sandwich, John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, left us a great legacy. The sandwich is now a subculture in the western world and has also become a verb, expanding our language. But not being able to call a sandwich amazing makes me wonder if there will come a day when we’ll be condemned if we call our VE-DIC (video-enhanced differential interference contrast) light microscopy – which helped us discover kinesin, a motor protein – ‘amazing’ as well.
This little guy (the motor protein) carries cellular cargo that is about 240 times its weight across a little microtubule in every cell in our body. If we think about it in circus terms, a tightrope walker would be carrying two average sized elephants on her back. And to compete with the motor protein, the tightrope walker would also have to be working in complete darkness, have no consciousness and no senses, just little magnets on the soles of her feet to guide her on the rope.
So, every time I make myself a sandwich and then eat it, I think to myself, there are a hundred trillion miniscule circuses in my body working together to help me enjoy my sandwich. To be able to make this sandwich, thousands of people came together. Farmers, marketers, packagers, cashiers, health inspectors, this teenager. The history geek in me nods appreciatively to the science enthusiast while the budding etymologist smiles at my choice of words. My taste buds rejoice in different flavors as my brain supplies a fitting adjective. This sandwich is amazing.
The oversized shirt is from freshman year. It’s a faded royal blue and has a big picture of a small motor protein on the front. I am sitting on my bed thinking about a few lines from one of Louis C.K’s standups, “As humans, we waste our words. It’s sad. We use words like ‘awesome’ and ‘wonderful’ like they’re candy. […] You use the word ‘amazing’ to describe a sandwich at Wendy’s. What’s going to happen on your wedding day, or when your first child is born? How will you describe it? You already wasted ‘amazing’ on a sandwich.”
When I process what he says, my first impulse is to start an extensive research project about sandwiches. They shouldn’t be as easy to dismiss as that, and I will prove it. A sandwich can be amazing, because in the end, can’t most things? A rock could have heard secrets, absorbed classified information, and witnessed disasters and miracles. And that potential for a story would make the rock amazing.
And, I find it as laughable as it is upsetting that as humanity advances, we start calling our once most prized inventions basic. Combining two slices of bread with meat and spices in between to create a sandwich, John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, left us a great legacy. The sandwich is now a subculture in the western world and has also become a verb, expanding our language. But not being able to call a sandwich amazing makes me wonder if there will come a day when we’ll be condemned if we call our VE-DIC (video-enhanced differential interference contrast) light microscopy – which helped us discover kinesin, a motor protein – ‘amazing’ as well.
This little guy (the motor protein) carries cellular cargo that is about 240 times its weight across a little microtubule in every cell in our body. If we think about it in circus terms, a tightrope walker would be carrying two average sized elephants on her back. And to compete with the motor protein, the tightrope walker would also have to be working in complete darkness, have no consciousness and no senses, just little magnets on the soles of her feet to guide her on the rope.
So, every time I make myself a sandwich and then eat it, I think to myself, there are a hundred trillion miniscule circuses in my body working together to help me enjoy my sandwich. To be able to make this sandwich, thousands of people came together. Farmers, marketers, packagers, cashiers, health inspectors, this teenager. The history geek in me nods appreciatively to the science enthusiast while the budding etymologist smiles at my choice of words. My taste buds rejoice in different flavors as my brain supplies a fitting adjective. This sandwich is amazing.
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Another college essay, I hope you liked it.
~Belle