Da Vinci After Dark

11 I Will Follow You into the Dark

Yesterday, Patrick came up from Austin to go to the Fort Worth Science Museum to see Da Vinci After Dark.  The museum was open from 6-10pm with drinks, snacks, live music, and no children.  I wished they would have been giving rides in the popcorn wagon, but I settled with just a picture.  After getting an over 21 bracelet, we went inside the museum and it looked like Pleasure Island from Pinnochio.  Grown-ups giddily played with pipe cleaner, and glued feathers to balloon animals.   They crawled inside the mirror booth, splashed in the outside water area, shot water guns and played with fake plastic fruit.  So really there were children there, they were just tall and intoxicated.  On a normal day at the museum I wouldn’t have been able to play in the cow exhibit because I would feel guilty for stealing away a fake horse from a small child.  That is just about as grinchy as knocking them out of the way at the zoo to get a clearer view of the tigers.  But last night, I was free to pretend I was 6 years old and I took full advantage of that.   Want to play in the cow exhibit?  Don’t worry, you can because there are no children playing in your way.   I climbed on a pretend horse and tried to steer my cattle into the pen.  I think my horse was broken because sometimes he would just stop moving and I would pull left and right, but sometimes nothing would happen.  So I either suck at simulated horse riding or I picked the diva horse.  The horse riding got a little X-rated when my butt crack flew out (note to self, do not wear low rise jeans on a horsie), and thanks to Patrick I have a photo of that.  But you’ll have to wait until I’m rich and famous before I leak that to the press.  The brands on the wall prompted a discussion about modern day branding, which can be done by slicing the skin and pouring salt in the wound.  It has a fancy name of scarification and thank goodness there was no demonstration of that.

Mr. Leonardo da Vinci re-enforced what Dr. Joseph Jones has been trying to tell me all week:  that the geniuses of yester-year never slept and did more in one day than I do in a week!   Da Vinci really makes me look bad.  He wrote backwards to keep his notes a secret and managed to create useful inventions all the time, while painting elaborate masterpieces.  Walking through the exhibit, I have to admit I was very impressed.  I wasn’t sure I’d be interested in looking at a bunch of gears, wheels, pulleys, and levers, but thinking a life without any inventions really won me over.  How did he get the idea to make a pulley?  Did he see someone trying to transport water and think, damn, there has to be a better way to do this?  Or was syphilis eating his brain?  After working on my thesis, I assume it was so horrible brain disease, tumor, or parasite combined with mental illness, otherwise known as a genius cocktail.  Like Da Vinci, Dr. Joseph Jones was a wonder kid.  By the age of twenty, Jones had studied theology, medicine, was on the Savannah Board of Medicine and had written several volumes of medical instruction, which he called his memoirs.  Twenty seems a tad early to be writing about your life, but he had done everything and was sitting around playing with viles of human blood all day to prove the connection to diabetes and malaria.  He was a physician and researcher by day, and a speed writer by night.  In my mind I picture him having bloodshot bug eyes drooling over a yellow fever victim, but I’m sure his appearance was much more respectable.

How did these men find the time to do all of these things?  While I don’t know how to prove it, I’m pretty sure that the number of hours in a day hasn’t changed.  What was their secret?  My hypothesis is that they spent less time on grooming and travel.  Let’s compare based on facts I can’t confirm.

1.  Da Vinci and Jones did not drive 20 minutes to and from their place of work.  It took them longer to travel but they traveled less often.  And I assume that their mode of transportation let them scribble and invent  while they rode/sailed. Da Vinci and Jones plus 40 minutes a day.  Merry minus 40 minutes a day.

2.  I spend lots of time grooming.  15 minutes in the shower in the morning, 15 minutes putting on my makeup and drying my hair, hair appointments, trimming my nails, etc.  I think Da Vinci and Jones were stinky and put on a hat to cover their matted, oily hair crawling with lice.  Merry minus 30 minutes a day plus interspersed grooming sessions.  Da Vinci and Jones plus 30 minutes and several more hours.

3.  Da Vinci and Jones didn’t have to spend too much time dressing themselves.  I do. Merry down several minutes a day.  Da Vinci and Jones for the win!

So if I stop leaving the apartment, quit bathing, and become a nudist, perhaps my thesis would go faster?  Maybe I would have invented the 3D printer?  All right that’s doubtful, but if I was a reclusive, smelly weirdo I think I would get more done.  Being a genius wouldn’t hurt either.