The Isle of Marm

***

Here is a secret, which you should never tell her. 
It is a point of Salieri-level agitation for my little sister that I have “perfect pitch”.  This was reported to her while I was in college by our former mutual piano teacher and reiterated by the music teacher she kept in touch with from our elementary school and the violin teacher in our school district, the latter of whom noted it as a negative thing, because it aided my (in retrospect, incredibly stupid) policy of not practicing as much as I should have, and led to my consequent near-illiteracy where sheet music is concerned.  (Which comes back to why I would approach tablature with cautious intrigue.)  It is the focal point of fairly regular “why are you wasting your gifts doing science” conversations.  I hate those conversations, for an assortment of reasons.  But that is unnecessary context.

The delicious secret truth is that I just have solid relative pitch and intermittent tinnitus, which happens to come in at around 440Hz. 

I’m thinking of telling her as a birthday present.

I have an oddly similar S-M relationship with an overseas scientist better who actually looks like Tom Hulce.  Tom Hulce who, despite having made this mental connection about before, I just learned did the voice work for THoND, which is extra weird as the scientist doppelgänger is the reason it is speculated that I have a scoliosis fetish.  (I would argue I just wanted to touch it—the it being his spinal protuberance—BUT less in a sexy way and more in the realm of taking advantage of an opportunity for tactile learning. I haven’t, and not just because I am extremely cautious about the etiquette and propriety of casual touching.)

I wish I could say that Curious Giorgio and the Infinite Discoteca was a result of a cold medicine or some such, but the fact of the matter is it was an idea that was soberly conceived in an airplane bathroom (the mile-high clubhouse!) last week and birthed at my desk while waiting for a crane to cease its looming over my laboratory causing safety to lock us out of the whole corridor.  LOOMING!

I should think the fluid dynamics papers (or even the postcards from tattooine/papyrus stuff,) were a lock for “probably my best work this year”, but my work as a powerpoint* ranger makes a weirdly compelling last minute case for itself sometimes. 

(*Technically this is Keynote based.  It could have just as easily been a powerpoint file.  Determination of “the best tool” is mostly based on capability and proximity.  Mostly.  My laptop was right here.)

Some less disorienting variation of CGatID would probably appear in the cutaway view of my “undivided attention”, c.f.:

…just so you know.

(Source: vimeo.com)

Percentage of my day I spent pointing at my reflection and saying “SABOTEUR!”: 4.68.  The day is still young!  Which I mean only to imply that it’ll go down!  The percentage!

During one such pointed heart-to-mirrored-heart moment, I realized what had been missing from my recent work-playlist as the proposal that I have been struggling with for weeks continued to go unfinished.  AND THEN, I remembered the existence of the video on the left.  So I switched monitors to look it up.

And then, around 1:40, I remembered “Fat Lee” and the noodles quip from before one of the best scenes in all of sciencey fictiony TV when the Galactica drops out of the sky and it is ridiculously awesome.  Ohman.  I feel like the guy who used to write TWoP recaps for BSG had written something glorious enough that one of my eyes wept a little as I paused the video to laugh at a memory.  Not even a clear memory: a hazy memory of a pleasant feeling induced by someone writing years ago about television that I watched years ago. Not so long ago that it was live, but at least before I upgraded from the 2003 tivo.

Anyhow, the point of that was I ALSO remembered exactly how much time I used to spend reading about TV on any given day (not even the watching: the READING about TV, lordy,) and was amused to find that, in that sense, I actually self-sabotage a little less now than then.  But not enough less.  Unless I stop.  For a little.  On the other hand, I heard that the network is going down here this coming weekend.  Maybe I’ll plug in the old tivo and be the old me, watch some of the best of 2003.  That’s what I’m going to look forward to now.  Looking forward to looking backward. 3 deep breaths and B2W. 

Now is the time on Sprockets when we work.