Being Giddy

When was the last time you were giddy. I remember feeling that sensation at age five right outside the grocery store when mom gave me a hand full of quarters and told me I could ride the mechanical horse. This past Monday I saw people giddily staring up at the sky attempting to catch a glimpse of the 2024 installment of the solar eclipse. All of a sudden everyone wanted to borrow my welding hood. I advised them (all of them) that they were going to need a number fourteen filter lens to witness that event and mine only had a nine in it. However, that advice mostly fell on deaf ears, after all what do I know, I've only been a welder for forty years. They were all too busy feeling giddy when they really should have been making an appointment to see their eye doctor. Is it me, or does the world seem a whole lot more excited about such happenings these days? Many were calling it a phenomenon, but it isn't. We all knew it was going to happen again at some point, and if you are one of those that keeps track of such events you even knew the date and the time. Of course, the word I heard bounced back and forth by the generation Z types was "AMAZING." Their generation uses (and overuses) that word to describe everything from a poop to a pay raise. But their problem may run a little deeper than just lack of a thesaurus. Allow me to unpack this as I see it for you fine people.

Here is an experiment I'd like you to all try at home. Locate your favorite lamp and make sure it has a 100wt light bulb in it, the warning will tell you never to use anything higher than a 65wt but no longer than this experiment will take it will be fine. Remove the lamp shade, close one eye, and between your eye and the bulb pass a ping pong ball until most of the bulb's light is covered by the ball. THERE, you just simulated an eclipse in your living room. Are you under the impression that will make bologna taste like beef steak or change your life expectancy? It is essentially as benign as the difference between regular and decaf. First off, we should all take the time to study the difference between impressed and excited. I would be IMPRESSED that you can make a fat free/sugar free pie, but I would by no means be EXCITED to eat it. See the difference? So, the question of the day becomes this, "does this line of thinking just make me a crusty old man?" Is this just on par with yelling at the neighbor kids to stay off my lawn? I am trying my best to curb my inner old man, but it isn't easy. I have a poodle that lives two doors down who has been crapping on my lawn for so long I just started leaving him reading material. He loves National Geographic, but he won't read The Saturday Evening Post. Now to digress and go back to the matter at hand, the eclipse. Understand that I am in no way trying to dismiss the scientific importance this occurrence might play in your middle schooler's education, but can it truly be considered life altering?

I actually heard some people being interviewed on the radio that took time off work to travel in the path of the eclipse. Isn't that along the lines of dressing up as a Storm Trooper and camping out for the tickets to latest installment of the Star Wars films? HELLO, DON'T YOU PEOPLE HAVE JOBS!? My point is all this craziness seems largely unnecessary. They were saying things like, "I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end." One woman claimed that the temperature outside dropped twenty degrees, which seems unlikely because it the event lasted less than three minutes. Maybe she was just stretching the truth like hot Silly Putty. We American's have been known to do that.

The event on television was being characterized as a once in a lifetime event, also untrue because the next one is already set for August 12th, 2026. So, as you can see American's number one job was, is, and has always been stretching the truth like mozzarella cheese atop a Chicago deep dish pizza. When Colombus landed in Jamaica in 1504 (already in possession of a lunar calendar) he convinced the native people that he had special powers by predicting an eclipse. Isn't that cheating? This is a bit like explaining to my son that in OUR home the tooth fairy would NOT be leaving five- or ten-dollar bills, but rather quarters and silver half-dollars.