Reinventing myself (every week or so)

“You can always assume one thing about your clients; and that is that they are doing their best. Always assume everyone is doing their best. And if they’re having a day where their best just isn’t that great, or their best doesn’t look like your best, you have to be okay with that.”

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

“It’s not about the Cheerios.”

This was in reference to a story about a kid flipping the HELL out into a full-blown panic about running out of their favorite cereal. Not a tantrum, not a whine-fest, but an all-hands-on-deck, code-red, world-is-ending blowup.

The kid had originally come from a very unstable situation and experienced food deprivation. The new adoptive parents were stumped, because look at all the other food! You’re safe! We can get the Cheerios tomorrow!

But it wasn’t really about the Cheerios, it was about that first flicker of unease triggering all the old trauma. From the outside, it looked ridiculous. To the trauma-trained reaction of the kid’s brain, it made perfect sense.

Human brains are weird, and we’re all out here trying to survive. Sometimes our brains do this in socially acceptable, convenient ways. But not often.