I do it ’cause it’s hard (ooh, ah, missus)
Ever Since Increasing my Daily Writing Goals, I’ve Been Thinking about My Granddad the Rocket Scientist and Old “Cold War” Kennedy
Which is sort of like…or, well, is exactly like comparing my 2,500 words of output to the Space Race.
’Cause they’re similar.
Hey! I heard that harrumph of ill-concealed laughter. None of that. This is serious talk. Serious faces, please.
Starting the serious talk that compares rocket science and writing.
Neither is easy. We don’t do either of these things because they’re easy. The numbers can be similar. For both writers and rocket scientists, a variation of one could spell the difference between landing with satisfaction or sailing into the void. And for both of us, to be blasé about hundreds of thousands is a daily assumption. The art in either field comes by the proper composition of intricately balancing usually unstable elements.
For Granddad the ones and hundreds of thousands applied to chemistry and physics. While for me it applies to words.
Apropos of nothing in particular, “The Mission (M is for Milla Mix)” by Puscifier rocks my socks today.
Granddad worked for NASA.
Did some work on Apollo 13, in fact. He was on the team that brought them back, not the one that sent them up. He got a medal for it. He talked physics a lot. I have never had the right background to understand all of it…. Any of it. I shall be honest. It was like talking Egyptian with an Egyptian who only spoke Turkish when I only knew the hieroglyphs from a bag hanging on my girlfriend’s closet from when she went to the museum once. Just as puzzling as that metaphor.
When talking to Granddad, I did notice the numbers. You know, that there were any. Kind of blew my mind. Star Trek space stuff has fewer numbers than NASA space stuff. If I ever become an astronaut I want to be a Star Trek astronaut.
Granddad would talk about some physics thing or other, and he’d casually drop numbers like “10 to the i” and “24 trillion” as if they were just handing these numbers out. I sometimes felt like telling him that numbers aren’t cheap. “Granddad!” I wanted to say. “Careful how you sling those around. We’ve got to make those things last. Do you know how many dinosaur skins the poachers had to harvest make those?”
Like I said, sketchy with numbers.
I empathize more with mathematicians now.
I eventually learned the truth about numbers: they’re technically imaginary.
Years! It took me many years to learn that one piece of math trivia. Hundreds of years, at least. (Maybe. I don’t know. Still so-so with numbers.) That’s one of the few pieces of “useful” information I got in those years. (Centuries? I don’t know. Could have been.)
During the same time-space I made progress with this writing gig, and I started to think about numbers differently. Any dedicated writer reading this will understand the heartache that goes with laments like, “I only did a thousand today!” and eye-rollers like, “It’s not that big at all. Only a hundred fifty thousand. That’s, like, an afternoon. Pssh. Cake.”
After growing a bit comfortable in the landscape of writing-related numbers, I sat on my hands and had a think. After my think, I made the following deep and profound observation to Granddad:
“So Granddad.”
That’s what I called him. Granddad.
“So Granddad, here’s an interesting thought. Two kinds of people who deal casually with large numbers, as if they’re hardly exciting, are rocket scientists and writers. Well, that’s us.”
Maybe not the deepest thought, or (at the opposite end of the Sliding Scale of Quips labeled — oddly — “useful” at both ends and going fuzzy in the middle) the most hilarious. It made him laugh. That was a win.
And it’s made me think constructively. Which is another win.
Someday…
I’m going to write a story about members of a choir gathering themselves for a concert.
The story will read like the movie Zulu. It’ll be like they’re preparing for battle. It’ll be unclear what sort of battle they’re preparing to do, only that they’re dedicated to it. Some of them will have to leave family gatherings. Some will have to wrap their legs, because they have blood pressure issues that make it difficult for them to stand for the required length of time. Some will get soused, because they’re nervous. Then they’ll all arrive in their tuxedos and their evening gowns, and the room will echo with that livelier silence of waiting…
I’m going to write that story partly because it sounds like it’ll be a good story and partly because Granddad suggested it.
See, Granddad did something important. He did something that society at large would call important, I mean. He used the Power of Science (similar to the Power of Greyskull, they tell me) to aid the cause of exploration and to save lives. And he was good at it.
I didn’t hear about that part of him very often, though. I think he was proud of it, but Thomas L. Blakemore, Jr.: NASA Scientist was not the man that Granddad made a point of introducing his grandson to.
The man I knew spent a lot more time talking to me about music. We were both in the choir that inspired the story idea above. And he talked to me about art. And history. Words too. He once asked me, calling me a word guy, what the words “ontology” and “deontology” had to do with each other, considering their spellings are so similar. Another time he told me that he never had much luck keeping history straight in his head until after he started learning church history. He discovered that well into his later adulthood, because he had never been contented with relaxing his mind.
That was the Granddad I knew. Musical, interested in beautiful things, and eclectic, with occasional bursts of science so he could keep his hand in.
We decide for ourselves what to make important about ourselves.
Granddad taught me countless lessons. Some of them on purpose and many of them by being himself around me. One of the things that he taught me most thoroughly is that the pushy nature of the world ought not dictate what you judge valuable. He taught me that without ever saying it to me, as far as I can remember. Granddad never got a medal for being capable of singing all four parts in a barber shop quartet. (At the same time!… No, that’s stretching the truth too far…and so a legend is born…) He never got an award for it, but that’s one of the things I remember about him most, because that’s what he decided to make important about himself.
Therefore…
I increased my writing goals from 2,000 words a day to 2,500 words a day. It kind of hurts, that extra five hundred words. This stuff ain’t easy. It’s hard. I didn’t decide to be a writer because it seemed like an easy way to cope with life. I do this because it’s hard. It’s rewarding; sure as hell it’s rewarding. I deem it valuable, in spite of all them horse impersonators. (Neigh-sayers. Naysayers. It’s an onomatopoeia pun, so it’s funny, and…never mind.) But it’s hard. (Say no more.) And It’s an old sob story that, by and large, the world will accuse me of spending my time and imagination frivolously.
I mean, maybe, sort of, kind of. That’s one read on history. If you agree, and you think that my Granddad is the type of guy who ought to be remembered as “decorated scientist” first and “encourager of the arts, including imagination in science” only as an afterthought, you go ahead and do that.
Meantime, dude, I’m going to be remembering the history I know. My Granddad didn’t pick the easier thing. He didn’t get good at music theory because it was easier. Not in him to do that. He put as much work into understanding the difference between C sharp and D flat as he put into the work he did to help design the air conditioning systems in the space suits of astronauts. It’s not an easy thing to understand the difference between C sharp and D flat, but there is a difference, and I know it (hint: can’t prove it with an accordion), because Granddad decided that was the important thing to tell me.
To Granddad, it was more important for me to know what S.P.E.B.S.Q.S.A. meant than what makes them little astronaut EVA whirligigs go, even though he knew that too. He decided what was important. NASA didn’t decide for him.
See. It turned out to be serious talk in the end.
p.s.
Ontology
Is the philosophical study of everything, which they started doing and calling by this word before Socrates learned to talk and walk.
The word “ontology” pretty much means “this is about everything.”
They weren’t good at specializing back then.
Deontology
Is a system of ethics — suggestions for behaving well as a member of a sentient specious — that’s similar to the ethical ideas that Immanuel Kant came up with. Because people who like Kant are those kind of people they named it “deontoloty” after ontology, but with a “de” in front of it.
Because word roots, that’s as much to say “this applies to everything you know about anything.”
Never trust anyone who claims they’ve got it all figured, that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
p.p.s.
This message has been endorsed by Grandmother Blakemore. That’s the most important endorsement it can get.
