baths, archimedes, square one, & other tangents.

{little pond reflection in the Jardin du Trocadero}

Last night, I was evading paper-writing, by sitting around in the bath, not really thinking about anything in particular... or at least trying not to mull over my paper... when suddenly I had a whole story in my head. Fully, completely formed, all unravelling out of my head in a way that was as linear as a decidedly-less-than-linear story could possibly be.

This is really quite odd for me, considering I've been working on this same short story for over a year... but in about three seconds, I knew the whole story. It was all there, well-wound yarn. Everything I didn't know, all the things I was unsure about (reasons why this story remains in a cocoon instead of being written) suddenly were quite apparent. It was rather odd, but it struck me as highly amusing, because this whole having-brilliant-idea-in-the-bath made me think of that story about Archimedes, & you know, yelling 'Eureka!' & leaping from his bath-tub when I finally had the revelation about floatation...

& I didn't run naked through the agora of Athens or anything, but remembering Archimedes, instantly reminded me of a television show of my childhood, Square One, because they had a song about Archimedes, that got stuck in my head then & surfaces sometimes...

& in fact, they had a lot of songs, educational ones about math, you see. & really, I've never been terribly interested in math at all... math, for me, is much like a constructed language like Esperanto -- certainly a feat to create & develop a system like that, but ultimately it can't hold my interest because it lacks a culture, a history behind it... etc etc. It's just a system. It communicates something, but it doesn't express a lived reality. Well, maybe for some people, mathematicians, yes, their entire worldview is coloured by math. But not me. & not most people.

Anyway, before I further digress, Square One was rather clever. & it did teach me some things about math that I still remember (like the magic number nine! & that 'a million is big, but a billion is bigger! one thousand times one million, that's one billion...') in a way that is even more humourous now because I understand the jokes better now, the intertextual cultural references. Like MathNet. & MathMan, & all the parodied music styles & videos they used... (like Late Afternoon with David Numberman, etc.)

which, I discovered, are archived here... the picture quality isn't amazing, but the songs are there, & that's the important thing. So I can relive how "it all comes back to nine!", or maybe re-watch part of the MathNet episode where the little budgie bird squawks out the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence & helps solve the mystery.

& that's the story about how having a bath not only inspired me to keep working on a short story that's a year old, but also brought back childhood pop-culture nostalgia. Sometime I'll have to write about Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, because that show/game had a far more compelling effect on me as a 10-year-old, as you probably already know... I wanted to be on that show so badly! But you had to be American... bah.

I need to write my paper...