Humidity
The beautiful is everywhere.
Sometime I have to look very hard, and for a long time, and I forget what I am looking at, and what I’m looking for, and why is a stack of post-it notes, or a cheap blown-glass desk ornament so enthralling? It’s because they didn’t just arrive on my desk; they have a story. Everything is a story.
I bought the ornament in Yale, BC on my way to see the Old Alexandra bridge just north of there on the Old Caribou Highway. I could tell several more stories from the subjects in that one sentence, and I probably will, sometime. The purveyor of the glass ornaments had quite a long winded tale to tell about he procured a veritable wagon load of the baubles, a tale peppered with unpaid warehouse rent, dank alleys, mouldering canvas tarps, and creaky, slivery crates. There was a somewhat shady air of illegality in Port Coquitlam that night by the sounds of it....but I digress.
I bought several of the ornaments. Globular, with a flattened face that has either been cut or ground (possible both) into a bottom, they’re all really pretty, and have a nice, hefty weight to them. I like to stare into them, the ones I didn’t give away, and consider the bubbles. One of the bubbles is obviously a feature, and, I must say, looks fantastic, but there are several other, smaller bubbles scattered throughout the clear glass, and I wonder if the person who made then was concerned about them. I like them. I look at them as if they are little water droplets in motion. They are all perfectly round, so not feeling the effects of gravity nor friction too strongly. The one under the flower petal has just fallen off, another is touching a petal, but so lightly that it hasn’t yet flattened, if it’s even heavy enough to do that, and the third’s arrival is imminent, and the odds are even as to whether it will collide with the flower, or fall right through it, between the petals. There are other, smaller droplets, like humidity, borne upon the whim of air until they all come together, and fall.
It’s the cutting of the post-it notes that really sets me to wondering. Have you ever tried to cut 50 sheets of paper at once, or even ten? It’s hard, and they scoot out from the blade, and everything becomes a big, unsightly mess. Maybe it’s some type of vibrating blade apparatus, and they cut a stack of thousands of pre-glued notes at a time and then split it up. Maybe, and more likely, there’s a giant roll of coloured paper slowly unrolling a single layer into a highly accurate dissection system after which, the perfectly sized notes are licked by some glue salivating entity with great sorting skills. It is a near certainty that someday soon I will watch a video on how post-it notes are made, and there will be no magic, there will be no actual licking, but there will be engineering.
I am fascinated by how things are made, how things stay put against all apparent odds. I am blown away (Side note, people who learn English as a second language don’t really appreciate the 2-word verbs; they’re weird. The 2-word verbs are weird.) by the strength of steel cable, and ancient concrete, I am astounded that, thousands of years ago, without the aid of complex instruments, a Roman engineer who’s name I can’t recall got slaves to dig two tunnels, one from each side of a mountain, with a very slight angle of slope, that actually met in the middle. That’s pretty impressive engineering. I’m sure the slaves enjoyed every moment as well.
So I like engineering, but I know enough engineers to accept that it’s probably best to not know everything.
