mathbabe

I’m often accused by my family members of having no imagination.

I really don’t think that’s fair, I think it’s more that they have outrageous amounts of imagination, and I’m normal. My husband will say something at the dinner table along the lines of, “hey I was thinking about what it would be like to live on a planet that’s attached to another planet by a weird system of ropes,” and without skipping a beat one of my sons will start asking questions: “Are they going straight up in the air or slanted? Can you climb up to the other planet? How far away is it?”. Pretty soon they are, and I’m not kidding, arguing about how thick the ropes are and the question of traveling between the planets and the different civilizations that would evolve on these two conjoined spheres. I’m an observer.

When one of them says something directly to me along the lines of, “mom, what if we lived on a spaceship going to Mars and we could only eat a liquid diet and there were no books, only videogames?”, I am usually pretty stumped (fake example, I just made it up, but you get what I mean). It just doesn’t make sense to me, and I’m constantly going back to one of the assumptions and asking why – why no books? Can’t we get books if we have so much technology? This is when my kids roll their eyes and walk back to their room.

I can’t help it, I’m just a practical-minded person. I want to solve problems but I want those problems to make sense.

In pure defense of my own ability to imagine, I came up with the following thought experiment. For some reason, which doesn’t matter (although it can be fun to come up with ridiculous reasons), we are all put into the witness protection program, and have to move to a tiny little town in the south or the midwest and we have to blend in with the townspeople, and figure out how to make a living and how to make a home. Or at the very least, if we don’t blend in exactly, we have to come up with a good story to explain our eccentricities, and it can’t be, “we’re in the witness protection program!”.

The first question is how we can make a living. I usually imagine waitressing at first, then learning how to be a car mechanic. I think of being a car mechanic as the coolest, nerdiest thing you can count on being able to do in a small town. Plus I love those jumpsuits with the grease stains, I would totally rock my jumpsuit, kinda like these guys:

My husband is a bit harder to place. He’s kind of a huge math nerd, with no actual practical skills, so the best we’ve come up with is that he can be the guy who goes around to people’s houses and helps them with their computer set-ups. But as people are getting better at computers, and as wireless systems are getting easier to set up, this plan is becoming increasingly weak.

Then there’s the issue of his Dutch accent. The idea that our story is that we’ve just moved like 60 miles, so we’re supposed to be heartland Americans, and the accent totally messes up that story. Sometimes (in my mind of course) I make him mute, other times we explain it with some weird speech impediment or maybe a stroke. I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s a toughie!

Finally, there are my kids. They are going to have to play along with the story too, but the problem there is that they’ve been raised (intentionally) to be pretty smart-assed. I’m trying to imagine them going to some random school and not giving away that they’re from Manhattan, watch the Colbert Report every night, and have strong opinions about the GOP race (and those opinions are not positive). Put on top of that the atheism thing, and I’m getting worried. I haven’t spent enough time in little towns (say, in Iowa) to really know how weird that would be, but I’m guessing pretty obviously not-from-around-here weird.

This is one of my favorite dinner topics, I suggest you try it.