Mad Science

I was talking the other day to Baddie and Midget about the classes they have this summer, when a thought occurred to me. They are taking two science classes during the summer, which is somehow more than I have taken in my entire college career (although one class is something called primate behavior, which apparently involves just watching videos of monkeys). Not that I am complaining mind you; not taking science is one of the reasons I became a journalism major.

The only real science classes I’ve taken were astronomy and geology. Sure, I took philosophy of science, but I am almost certain that doesn’t count. In the parts of the class I was awake for I only remember us arguing about what a chair was. Anyway, geology was my favorite science class, because all we would do is go out and look at rocks.

Professor: “Mitchell, what is this?”

Me: “That’s a rock.”

Professor: “Yes, but what kind of rock?”

Me: “A gray rock.”

I eventually learned to just answer “granite” all of the time on tests, including the name and date section. As you can see, science is not one of my strong suits, and it never has been. The part of my brain that most people must use for understanding science I think I use for remembering the lyrics to every single Eagles song. (Why is it that I can sing “Desperado” on demand but I still have trouble remembering what my own apartment number is?)

So science was always one of those subjects I dreaded in high school. For one thing, I have never understood the whole table of elements thing. I mean, none of the abbreviations make sense. The symbol for gold is Au, and the last time I checked, neither of those letters are actually in the word “gold.” It looks like somebody came up with the table while playing Scrabble drunk one night, and they started to run out of letter tiles. Also, not to be a nitpicker, but the table appears to be missing key elements, like cheese.

Plus, I never liked labs. Like every other science student in high school, I was made to dissect a frog. Now, I didn’t get all squeamish because I was cutting open a frog, but it was really confusing. We were supposed to identify all of the frog’s organs and determine whether or not it was male or female. But I think that our teacher should have returned our frog, because something was clearly wrong with it. On the diagram we were looking at, all of the organs were color coded with bright colors and in easy-to-find spots. The inside of our frog however was just a pile of gray muck, and it definitely didn’t have anything that helped me tell whether it was a male or a female. In the end I just guessed that it was a male, since only a male frog would have been stupid enough to end up dead in a jar of alcohol.

Speaking of biology, we need to do something about the whole animal class system. It’s way too confusing. For one thing, it tells me that spiders are not related to cockroaches, which is clearly not true, because they both live under my refrigerator together. So I propose a new classifying system with only five classes. First are humans. Then, anything that swims or lives in the water is now a “fish” (sharks, whales, hippos, Michael Phelps, lobsters). Anything that has less than two legs and more than four is now an “insect” (worms, spiders, snakes, lobsters). Anything that we can eat is called “food” (cows, pigs, onions, lobsters). Everything that doesn’t fit into those four categories is a “mammal” (elephants, lizards, certain birds).

Since we are on a roll here, I say we just completely do away with physics. This is one of those cases where ignorance is bliss (the other would be what goes on into Spam). I lived for 15 years without knowing why anything in the world happened, and I was completely fine. I thought that was why they came up with religion. But no, some people just couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to actually go find out why things happened. Take gravity for example. Whenever somebody used to ask “Why don’t you float off into space?” my answer was “Because I’m fat.” Now, it involves a whole bunch of math and quantum mechanics and apples or something.

See, this is where you can tell that scientists are not normal people. Isaac Newton would drop an apple off a building and ask “Why?” A normal guy would drop an apple off a building and instantly start looking for bigger things to drop off the building, like sofas. Newton tried to come up with theories about why objects at rest remain at rest. Normal guys would proceed to test that theory by remaining at rest, preferably on a sofa. Newton would look at a fire and wonder what chemical reaction were taking place. A normal guy sees a fire and starts to light things on fire, like sofas. (Pop quiz: Guess where I am sitting right now?)

So you can imagine how worried I am that my sister might go into science. But if she does, I have just one piece of advice I’ve gained in my extensive college science career: The answer is always “granite.”