Some Various Things & My New Best Friend

But you can't really have a best friend if the person has no idea you exist, can you? So I'm sort of living in a fantasy world here, one where My New Best Friend comes over and hangs out and lets us look into his amazing brain, while I hang on every word and am just blown away. I'm kind of like the geeky guy in high school who believes the head cheerleader has a crush on him but is keeping it secret to spare her star quarterback boyfriend the embarrassment of a breakup. Or--maybe a better analogy: I'm like the weird old farmer guy who believes he's getting secret messages from his friends on CironD. You know, in the next galaxy over.

But first, some random stuff that may or may not make sense. My own brain has been hijacked, along with the rest of my body, by Drugs. You may have heard me rant a time or two about The Evils of The Misuse of Antibiotics, wherein I liken people who abuse these drugs to people who are helping the Martians take over Earth by hosting them in their basements. But I have finally given up and given in and am now taking a round of Sulfa Drugs, which actually have a name but are so much more fun to label that way, as if they're something from some 1960 sci-fi movie. "Sulfa Drugs: The Hope of Tomorrow, The Scourge of Today." (Isn't "scourge" just the best word ever?)

Because "scourged" pretty much sums up how I feel. Oh, sure--my cough is WAY better, and my ear is better, and I firmly believe that some bacterial infection was making me miserable. I haven't felt like me since the end of April. You know: coughing, sore throat, taking naps every day (naps! NAPS! I don't nap! But, yes, it turns out I *do* nap, and rather a lot.)

Anyway, so I sucked it up, went to The EGE's doctor, of whom I am not a fan--no, he is not My New Best Friend--and started the RX. And honeys, while the cough and stuff is way better, this stuff is not making me happy. It would be a most excellent diet drug: it takes away your appetite (well, it does mine) and makes you queasy, so eating anything is like walking through a minefield. Will you make it safely through? Or will you make a misstep and feel like crap warmed over for the rest of the morning?

But that's not my point. No! I actually have a point in telling about that:  since I've taken the big leap and am Doing Drugs, I figure the least I can do is help out by Resting, which is right up there with Napping on my list of Things to Put Off Until I'm Old.

So Saturday I spent a ton of time--literally! I weighed it=very, very heavy--watching TED talks. In fact, that's about all I did this weekend.

No. Wait! I did so something else:  I went with The EGE to his 40th high school reunion. And it was way, way more fun for me than I would ever have imagined. I say "for me," because my definition of "fun" is probably not a lot like everyone else's. Other people were flirting and impressing each other and drinking rather a lot of beer. The EGE was catching up with old friends, some of whom told me, like I didn't already know, that he was kind of popular in high school and that all the girls liked him. Duh.

Me? I interviewed people. Cos, you know, "interviewed" sounds a whole lot better than "asked a whole bunch of nosy questions." And guess what! Turns out people at reunions love to talk about themselves, and the whole reunion thing makes them think about what they've done with their lives and how they feel about that, and it spurs many, apparently, to think about what they'd like to do in the next 40 years. Like I said, big fun for me! And the people I talked to seemed to really enjoy it. An OB/GYN in a big-city hospital who has always wanted to be a writer. A minister who has set up a program to give subsidized-lunch kids snack bags as they get on the school bus on Friday afternoons so they'll have something to eat on the weekend. A guy who made money in oil, then retired, moved to San Franciso and got into real estate but was most animated in talking about an photo he took of a dust storm, a photo that made it into National Geographic and from which he still gets occasional (tiny, he pointed out, but who cares?) royalties, decades later.

So, in between reunion events, I "rested," meaning I sat here in this chair and watched TED talks while I beaded. I saw some cool ones and skipped over some boring ones, but the one that grabbed me so thoroughly that I dragged The EGE out here to watch it and then read the guy's online auto-biography and then ordered two of his books was "Jack Horner: Building a Dinosaur From a Chicken." The world's best title, obviously.

Omigod. If you read the comments and some of the blog posts that have linked to this, you get some snarky comments about how foolish this is and what a waste of time and money and blah, blah, blah. But if you listen to him tell about his dream as a kid (both of them, actually) and what he's done even without a college degree (because he's severely dyslexic and flunked out. More than once.), you can't help but be entranced, even more so because he explains everything in terms you can understand, which, in case you've never thought about it, is huge. Smart people can explain stuff they know; really smart people can explain it so anyone can understand it. I had a conversation this afternoon with someone our age who's gone back to school to get another master's degree and who took time from homework to explain to me Why Physics is Fun.

I now know why the wind blows more when it gets hotter, and this explains why The EGE is right when he claims that West Texas, windy as it has always been, was not *this* windy when he was a kid.

Anyway. My new best friend, the person I want to hang out on the front porch with for DAYS, just listening, is Jack Horner. Here's his fascinating bio. Some of his books. And here's his TED talk.


Enjoy, sweeties. And do yourself a favor and skip the wings. Have some tofu for dinner.