Elsa: I’m about to learn a new word!
The Fella: What is it?
Elsa: It’s from this review I’m reading: imbricate.
The Fella: Embercate?
Elsa: Im-bric-ate. It means… to arrange scales, sepals — ooop, I’m about to learn two new words!
The Fella: I love you.
Elsa: To arrange in an overlapping fashion, like petals, scales, or roof tiles. I love you too!
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about partnership and marriage, and especially about being married to The Fella, which is, y’know, awesome.
This Ask Metafilter comment gets to the heart of that awesomeness:
You know when you were a kid, and you’d get excited about sleepovers because you could stay up all night watching movies and talking to someone who just cracked you up and really understood you? Remember how special those nights felt?
Every day is like that now. Except we get to have really good sex, too.
Yup, that sums it up: I get to spend every day and every night with my very favorite person from now on, and we get to express that favorite-ness in every way we wish.
But I still haven’t really internalized that this is a two-way street of Awesome — that my very favorite person’s very favorite person is me.
Let me digress.
I had a rotten morning. You don’t need to know the details, but I made a small error that caused the not-sane part of my brain to castigate me and call me names (which A. is not productive and B. is NOT ALLOWED) while I flailed around trying to get dressed and out of the house in a hurry.
During this ridiculous few minutes of blistering self-loathing, The Fella kept interjecting helpful comments like, “You’re not stupid, you just made a mistake” and “How can I help?” and “Are these your pants?” When he should have been sleeping peacefully (and could very rightfully have been giving me grief over my meltdown), he was cheerfully pitching in to soothe me, to help me, to solve my problem.
And later in the day, I added some of those things together. I did the emotional math: I am married to my very favorite person, the person whose opinion I value more than anyone else’s, the person who I think is the downright AWESOMEST person in the whole wide world.
And he thinks I’m THE AWESOMEST, too.
I think he must be right. You don’t argue with the transitive property.
In a crowd of friends at the local bar tonight, The Fella and I met a friend’s beau.
Friend: These are two of the smartest people in town.
Elsa and The Fella in unison: Nooooooo. No no no. No.
Friend: This is Elsa. She knows a lot about bananas.
Elsa: [wincing] … that’s fair.
From the Symphony of Science website: “The Symphony of Science is a musical project by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.”
“We Are All Connected” compiles clips of Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye to create a lovely and lyrical music video.
I just learned a new word from a piece of spam: sintering, to heat a powdery material (like ceramics or metal) below its melting point until the particles adhere into a whole.
Why did I open the spam? Because my Gmail’s gone wonky and won’t let me “mark as spam” from my inbox, only from the email itself.
Why did I continue reading it?
A) They didn’t actually indicate any way for me to throw large fistsful of money at them, and I wondered where the hook was buried;
B) sintering, dude. Strange words catch my eye.
Just a heads-up: H.P. Lovecraft and H.R. Giger may have been less spinners of cosmic fantasy phantasy, and more prescient marine biologists.
Behold its awesome form.
And, uh-oh, elbows.
via.
At a post-Thanksgiving family gathering, my almost-18-year-old niece A and I are watching 3-year-old K play tirelessly with her blanket. K lays the blanket on the floor, lies full-length in it, and rolls herself up like a little burrito. She sits in the center and folds the corners up around her, over her head. Standing, she rolls herself in it head to toe and jumps with all her wobbly might. She lays it out on the floor, climbs onto a chair, and launches herself out into space, landing with a striking thump in the center of her blanket.
I turn to A and say speculatively, “I just want to sit her in the blanket, wrap it up over her, grab it by all four corners, and swing it around over my head.”
A nods sagely and says, in a considering tone, “We learned about that in my psychology class. It’s called giving voice to the id.”
As a reasonably bright child raised by people who valued intelligence, perhaps to a fault, I spent much of my early life thinking I was smart. The most valuable revelation of my adulthood was the simple idea that I don’t know everything… or, indeed, very much at all.
Some little things I learned this week which overturn what I thought I knew:
- It’s Sir Walter Ralegh, not Sir Walter Raleigh. Oh, I see. I learned to spell it from a children’s book at age 8 or so, and never investigated further, apparently assuming (without much thought) that all those historians and art historians were, what, making typos?
- baleful means menacing or hostile, not sorrowful or miserable. Apparently, I’ve been using its obsolete meaning my entire life.
- Christopher Marlowe wrote The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, not John Donne. I suspect that, somewhere around age 12 or so, I confounded one poem with another, and never bothered to straighten it out.
In the words of The Fella, “Yay! You’re smarter now!” And he’s right… but the exposure of little-but-big lifelong misapprehensions fills me with a healthy mistrust of other things I think I’ve learned.
Which is all to the good, I think. It’s wise to be skeptical of one’s own knowledge. That much I have learned.
I had a nice moment in my Renaissance lit class this week.
Our professor spares his voice by asking students to read the longer passages. Sometimes it’s painful: students stumble over the unfamiliar language and the syllables accented or elided unexpectedly, or make it clear they’ve never read the assigned passage before, or simply flush at the attention.
Or maybe they don’t see that the language is the play. The words are more than information conveyed; they pack power and rich hidden meaning.
This week, the professor asked me to read a passage.
And I read it.
Silence dropped over the class, and when I finished, I looked up from the page to see eyes turned toward my corner. One girl clapped silently. Another breathed “Wow.”
I’m not pretending any dramatic gift, oh no. I think it’s simpler. I think when you hear Shakespeare read without stumbling and stammering, without embarrassed hesitation and by someone who understands the content and the context, you hear the words.
And such words:
from Antony and Cleopatra
Cleopatra: His face was as the heavens; and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course,
And lighted the little O o’ the earth.
…
His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear’d arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tunéd spheres — and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas
That grew the more by reaping: his delights
Were dolphin-like; they show’d his back above
The element they lived in: in his livery
Walk’d crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropp’d from his pocket….
…
Think you there was, or might be, such a man
As this I dream’d of?
Dolabella: Gentle madam, no.
Cleopatra: You lie, up to the hearing of the gods.
But, if there be, or ever were one such,
It’s past the size of dreaming: Nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with Fancy; yet, to imagine
An Antony were Nature’s piece ‘gainst Fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.
According to our class custom, my reading skipped the incidental lines interrupting the speech; in their place, I have put ellipses. I include here Dolabella’s “Gentle madam, no” only because, to my surprise, the prof uttered it, prompting me to read another section.
Finally, our long transnational nightmare comes to an end: researchers at Leeds University have perfected the bacon butty.
Scientists have created a mathematical formula of how to make the perfect bacon butty. [...]
Four researchers at the Department of Food Science spent more than 1,000 hours testing 700 variations on the traditional bacon sandwich. [...]
The formula is: N = C + {fb (cm) . fb (tc)} + fb (Ts) + fc . ta, where N=force in Newtons required to break the cooked bacon, fb=function of the bacon type, fc=function of the condiment/filling effect, Ts=serving temperature, tc=cooking time, ta=time or duration of application of condiment/filling, cm=cooking method, C=Newtons required to break uncooked bacon.
Just a little something to get you revved up for this weekend’s Sandwich Party.
