Rattle My Hair

I spent a week and a half with most of my hair pulled up in a ponytail, and in that time my hair grew out what seems like a lot. It is very cool to suddenly notice how much longer your hair is. It’s one of those things like foot size. There’s not really a noticeable difference between one day and the next, but suddenly! BAM! There it is. Richard Dawkins used a similar analogy to explain evolution, and I thought it was very apt. Why I have stolen it to talk about my hair, I honestly don’t know.

If I were loading a steel box onto a truck without a tailgate or handrails, I would make sure I wasn’t loading it on to flat ice. I would also probably tie the box down with bungee cords. I understand that it makes sense to word physics problems as “real world” scenarios, but honestly, who would load a steel box onto an ice covered truck and not attempt to secure it in any way? That’s just stupid. Although I have on several occasions set my backpack (complete with laptop) on my passenger’s seat while driving, and once it fell off while I was on the freeway and knocked me into neutral. If I leave the story at that it sounds very scary, but I was only going twenty miles an hour, downhill, at the time, so it wasn’t really a very big deal. Perhaps I’m not much more intelligent than someone loading the steel box into the truck after all.

I’m reading The Princess Bride (the abridged version, by William Goldman) and it is thus far almost exactly like the movie. I am surprised because that is almost never the case, ever. Most of the time, the book is butchered on it’s way to the silver screen. The Golden Compass was an extreme example of this. An extreme, heart wrenching, frustrating example of the phenomenon. I have not heard what Phillip Pullman thinks about the damage done to his story, but I can’t imagine that he was happy with the results. I will admit that the movie was visually stunning and that there were some wonderful parts. Overall, though, I think it comes down to the extreme difficulty of condensing one of those densely populous fantasy worlds down from a thousand plus page trilogy into a two and a half hour film. They weren’t written to be experienced that way, and often, it doesn’t work. There are a lot of exceptions, of course, and even though the odds are against me, I still go out of my way to see the film adaptations of my favorite novels. And my second favorite novels. And so on. (By the way, anyone who has ever read Michael Crichton needs to see the movie version of Congo. Pure B-movie camp, all the way through.)

People on campus smoke. Not all people, obviously, but enough for it to be noticeable. It doesn’t really bother me (unless they’re being rude about it, and no, spitting and flicking your ashes onto my backpack does NOT make you look feminine and mysterious, it makes you look like a pig), especially when the people smoking are far away. On my way out of math class today, I realized that I kind of like it because from a distance, the smell reminds me of campfires, and I loved camping when I was little. There is something about eating macaroni and cheese out of a metal bowl with a plastic spoon that just appeals to me. It’s also quite hot today, and the smell of hot pine trees is also a smell that makes me want to walk up creek beds bare foot, looking for little critters and new plants. This summer, I’m so there.

When I was younger, before his ankles got so bad, my dad really liked to go gold panning. I loved to go with him, but not because I really like swirling dirt around in pan (although finding gold and garnets is really a lot of fun). No, I liked it because of the swimming and snakes. I know that sounds funny, but we would swim in this little fork of this river with the dogs while my dad would pan, and we must have seen about a bajillion snakes, lizards and fish in the process. Once, I was off on my own a little farther than was really safe, and of course I was barefoot, and I hopped up on a wide, flat rock atop another wider flatter rock. I simultaneously put my eyes and foot down towards the second rock, and came within a couple seconds of hopping on the most beautiful baby rattlesnake. I probably would have heard the little guy, but the river was only about a foot to my left, his right, and that drowned out any sound he could have hopped to make. His little rattles looked like miniature pearls. Fortunately, my mom showed up and startled him away, but it was literally breathtaking.