Weird Science.

Winter solstice approaches. So despite the dwindling hours of sunlight and what feel like dwindling hours of productivity, change is on the move. I love thinking about stuff like that – my brother is an “earth scientist” – basically, he’d steeped in physics, chemistry, and biology, and at the moment is working as a cleaner upper of this here our earth.

He once sent me a text photo, when he began his job last year in environmental remediation, of a teeny tiny little frog balancing on my brother’s blue hazmat gloves, with the note saying, "I’m cleaning his home." :) It was the very sweetest thing.

Once, Ben and I heard the rumor that on the equinoxes in spring and fall, you could balance an egg on its end in a window of like 3 minutes, and it wouldn’t fall over because the earth was positioned in such a way that the gravitational pull was completely equal. – It worked! It totally balanced on it’s little fat bottom end for about a minute or two before it lopped over onto its side like all other days of the year.

We used to sit at home on the couch, and he’d basically translate what he’d just read from Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell, and we’d talk about the expanding and contracting of the universe, and about black holes, and just science-y stuff in general. It was great. I rarely, if ever, get to talk to people about stuff like that, mainly because I’m so novice, and also, it just doesn’t come up – so, did you hear about Pluto doesn’t really count! (And p.s. I feel bad for Pluto’s demotion!)

When I was in college, heading toward, well, I wasn’t always in my right mind, I was taking a physics course, and one of the classes was on relativity. And in the “Whoa, man” state of mind I was in, after class, we’re all outside waiting for the bus, and I don’t really know anyone in the class, being an English major, and I say to one dude as the bus approaches, isn’t it crazy, the bus is moving relative to us, but we’re moving on the spinning earth, and the earth is moving in orbit… You can see why lots of stoners get blown away by such concepts ;P

But, it – science, math – comes up for me. Strange as it may seem. My brother was a double major in geo-physics and music theory. Art and science aren’t as far apart as they may seem. All my painting is is increasing the viscosity of a pigment to deposit it on another surface ;) One thing that came up repeatedly for me over the number of times that I did the Artist’s Way was to take a math class. Weird, I know. But we’re asked several times throughout the course to list – without overthinking it – 5 classes we’d want to take if money and time and fear weren’t an issue. And each time, math would be on that list.

I was proctoring an SAT exam about 2 years ago for some extra cash, and I was looking at the test in the aching silence of the room as these poor students are having meltdowns and panic attacks about their future, and sine and cosines swim in their graphing calculators. It was actually fun. To feel these very old creaky wheels in the back of my brain trying to remember the formula for triangles and circles. I didn’t remember the harder stuff, but there was an inner perking up of, hey, I know this stuff, and hey, do we get to do this. (I actually did better on my SATs in math, twice, than I did in english, so…)

I don’t know what it means, but in keeping with listening to my inner nudges, and knowing that this math/science thing has come up several times over the last 4 or 5 years, maybe it’s time to listen. I actually looked to see if I could do one at my school, but they are waaaay advanced, and I need like algebra 1 again! Not lecture and lab. Math can be fun. Science was way fun the way my brother and I used to talk about it. The way that he would explain these concepts to me, and we could converse about them.

Keep ‘em coming, little nudges. I don’t know what yet to do with you – but I have utter faith that I will.