Boom-de-ada

The girls and I have spent a good part of the last two days cruising through YouTube, a website that is definitive proof that the world is full of people upon whose hands time weighs rather heavily.

Not that there is anything wrong with that.

We've looked at the OK Go Treadmill routine, and the History of Modern Dance. We've watched the Muppets perform Bohemian Rhapsody. We've listened to every Phineas and Ferb song ever aired. But mostly what we've been looking at are commercials, to be honest, and one set of commercials in particular - the ones that the Discovery Channel runs to promote, well, I'm not entirely sure what they're promoting. The network in general? Life in all its glory? It's hard to say.

But we love those commercials.

If you don't know these ads, well, you should. There are a couple of them, each very much like the other. They start out with two astronauts just staring in awe at the planet Earth below them, and then they proceed through a dizzying array of Discovery Channel show hosts and others singing what amounts to a love song to the mere fact of being alive and aware.

I love the mountains
I love the clear blue skies
I love big bridges
I love when great whites fly
I love the whole world
And all its sights and sounds
Boom-de-ada, Boom-de-ada
Boom-de-ada, Boom-de-ada.

You forget these things sometimes, or at least I do. It's easy to get caught up in the whirlwind that is politics these days, with the constant assault from the right on the founding ideals of this country. It's easy to obsess over the poor state of the various home teams, or the economic crisis that was dug so deep over the last decade that who knows when we'll scratch our way back to the surface. It's easy to focus on the things that break, the things that don't fit, the things that fail. Easy, but not good. It's nice to be reminded that there's more than that out there.

I love the oceans
I love real dirty things
I love to go fast
I love Egyptian kings
I love the whole world
And all its craziness
Boom-de-ada, Boom-de-ada
Boom-de-ada, Boom-de-ada.

Because it is a crazy world, and one that can be breathtakingly gorgeous. It is a world with bagels. A world with children, families and love. A world where books smell the way they do and open minds the way they can. A world with colors to spare, differences to enchant, and tea to drink.

I love tornadoes
I love arachnids.
I love hot magma
I love the giant squids
I love the whole world
It's such a brilliant place
Boom-de-ada, Boom-de-ada
Boom-de-ada, Boom-de-ada.
Boom-de-ada, Boom-de-ada
Boom-de-ada, Boom-de-ada.

I'm not sure what it means that it takes a commercial to remind me of these things sometimes, and I'm pretty sure I could do without tornadoes, but there you go. Life is like that. We've watched these ads several dozen times over the last couple of days, and you know, they're right.

The world is just ... awesome.

At least it can be.