Kidnapped by Pirates

I post this from the floor of the Chicago Airport Southwest Airlines ticketing... what do you call this? Ticketing area?

I've never been to Chicago nor did I plan on visiting it tonight. That may strike you as a bit unusual. How often do you not mean to be sitting on a cold floor on the other side of the country only to find yourself twelve hours later doing just that?

-Unless you've been kidnapped, you might not expect it. But I guess I've been kidnapped today by Southwest. How jovial.

On with the post.

Here's what I wrote joyfully today on the plane to Denver, before all the trouble happened. It is now 3:04AM and I am still in Chicago. Rock on.

HOW I BECAME NOT A SCIENTIST

Why are Children expected to be scientists? Honestly, the ratio of scientists to not scientists in the real world is staggeringly disproportionate to the ratio in public schools. I'm not sure they're aware of this. As important as scientists are in our world, why was I expected to be one? More specifically why did I have to come back to the school on a Thursday night after already being there all day? And of course, What was I supposed to do my project on?

I don't know why Science fairs are such an established tradition. I suppose many a top scientist found his (or her. We do need to be politically correct afterall. This is my public school experience we're talking about.)

Anyway I'm sure many got their first taste of the fame and glory to be had in scientific inquiry from gatherings like these. The road to Nobel prizedom begins in elementary school.

Mine however did not.

I don't remember how this became my project, but I ended up with one of those stupid tri-fold poster boards, a rubber band, a chicken bone, and a penny.

The only marker in our whole house at the time was an old dried out whiteboard marker. It was brown. Scratched in what looked like disappearing ink at the top of my board was the word "acid".

We were supposed to come up with an experiment to test our hypothesis, which happened to be a big word for "what you think will happen." I think we spent three days learning what it meant. There was a test. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire science fair was really just a ploy to make sure we didn't go through life not knowing what a hypothesis was. How glad I am to know its definition now.

I decided a good experiment would be to soak each of the items minus the tri-fold in a cup of vinegar for a week. My hypothesis, scribbled in pencil because the marker didn't work anymore so I put it back in the junk drawer, was something like, the bone will be rubbery because that's what someone said would happen. The penny was supposed to corrode and the stupid rubber band was supposed to get brittle. That's pretty much what happened but a lot less of it than I'd expected.

I had each item sitting out on my table in front of the dumb tri-fold board . By the time things got going, the bone had dried out and wasn't really that bendy anymore.

I stood there feeling like an idiot while trembling grandparents and civic minded citizens came around to pretend interest in my presentation and tell me I should try the same thing with coke.

I was actually quite surprised and somewhat disturbed to discover how many adult members of my community had taken to this unusual activity apparently effected by some mania in decades past. All I could imagine were pre-TV age children running around splashing coke on things and then waiting in stunned silence to see what happened. I thanked them each for the advise, but began to wonder if I looked like the kind of kid that did this sort of thing for fun.

"You do realize I'm at school right now." I wanted to say. "You don't seem to understand. It's 7:30! I was here all day. And in exactly twelve hours I'll have to be here again. I have to because someone decided to make it against the law for me not to..."

At the end of the night they handed out ribbons.

I didn't get one.

My teacher did come around and snap a Polaroid of me. She handed me the photo and walked away. As I watched it develop I realized how stupid I looked standing in front of a presentation on how to break rubber bands over the course of a week.

Isn't science a glorious thing.