an hour's lot of thoughts

While I was driving out and about today, the host on the radio boasted that LiveEarth will be staging concerts on "over seven continents." Is Antarctica supposed to be happy that it gets a concert, or upset that it is not, in fact, the most obscure of the...more than seven continents? I wonder if the tickets for the Antarctic concert will be cheaper than the rest. I hope I can get a hotel reserv--okay, I'm done...someone needs to update Wikipedia to include these additional mystery continents. I'm really done this time.

I've spent 35 days in Europe and nearly 7233 days in the US yet every time I've walked out of a store since those 35 days, it's felt odd to not say goodbye to or acknowledge the person or people working there, as is normal in Europe. I guess it's something that, when I was exposed to it, seemed like such a natural action that I was able to disregard the previous 18 years of never really considering it standard practice. This needs to change.

Our high school driver's ed instructional videos put us in driving situations with footage from a moving car. At certain points in the video, the motion would pause and we'd have to identify potential hazards. These hazards were then highlighted in partially transparent red rectangles to make sure we caught everything. When I'm driving and an animal is running around near my car, or a kid is bouncing a basketball on the sidewalk, or some lady is opening her car door to put away her grocery bag, I see these red rectangles. I don't think the intent of the videos was to get us to project graphics in our head, but if that's what makes me a safe driver....

I run through conversations and situations, both hypothetical and previously occurring, in my head. I drift off to subconscious-land for a just a few seconds, and I catch myself mouthing words and making hand gestures and facial expressions that have occurred or would occur in that certain situation. I really hope somebody sees this happen.