deeplyshallow // bah

bah

Ahh, sick days. Right about now I’d be at work, designing web sites designed to destroy the world, but instead, I have been home all morning, sleeping late, sneezing at such high decibel levels that planes flying overhead are rocked back (only a little, though), padding around in sweatpants and socks, blowing my nose until my poor sad skin resembles that guy in The Last Crusade who drank from the wrong cup and shriveled up like Barbara Bush.

Christmas gift from the folks this year was a couple of DVD sets — the second season of SNL, and the fourth of The Wire, which I have watched off and on today between naps and sneizures. I’d forgotten just how damn good this show is, and I catch myself wishing, sometimes, I could pick David Simon’s brain to find out how he keeps everything straight. After four seasons, the number of plots and subplots the writers are weaving together has increased dramatically. In the beginning it was the cops and the drugslingers; then it was the cops, the drugslingers, and the dockworkers; after that, the cops, the drugslingers, the dockworkers and the politicians; now it’s the cops, the drugslingers, the dockworkers, the politicians and the educators — every group with its own tangle of stories and cast of dozens. There are those who like to say that The Wire is the best show that’s ever been. I can’t say I’d argue with them. If nothing else, it’s the most ambitious and groundbreaking.

A couple of days ago I finished reading Cosmos, and I’d be sad about that if I didn’t have four or five of Carl Sagan’s other books lined up to take its place. Some mornings, long before I have to be at work, I have breakfast in town, and for an hour, sometimes a little less, I just read. I don’t get as much time to read as I’d like, so this time is precious to me. And it’s always hard to yank myself away from the book to go to work, especially when something captures my imagination the way Cosmos did. An excerpt that was particularly interesting to me:

Stars and their accompanying planets are born in the gravitational collapse of a cloud of interstellar gas and dust. The collision of the gas molecules in the interior of the cloud heats it, eventually to the point where hydrogen begins to fuse into helium … Suffering alternate absorption and emission by the overlying matter, gradually working its way toward the surface of the star, losing energy at every step, the photon’s epic journey takes a million years until, as visible light, it reaches the surface and is radiated to space. The star has turned on. The gravitational collapse of the prestellar cloud has been halted. The weight of the outer layers of the star is now supported by the high temperatures and pressures generated in the interior nuclear reactions. The Sun has been in such a stable situation for the past five billion years. Thermonuclear reactions like those in a hydrogen bomb are powering the Sun in a contained and continuous explosion, converting some four hundred million tons of hydrogen into helium every second. When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shining because of distant nuclear fusion.

I wasn’t the greatest student growing up. I was in advanced classes until middle school, when I pretty much gave up on being the smart kid, and just got by. But I wish like hell I’d had a teacher who had been passionate about things that I find myself passionate about now; back then I was interested in these sorts of things, but not to as intense a degree as I find myself involved in them now. A good teacher, I think, might have sparked this a little sooner, and maybe I could’ve done something more interesting with my life.