Adventures In Adaptation

Now leap with me a small distance into the future. It's three weeks into the class and I'm sitting at my desk at work when I have an epiphany. A full on, hands in the air, saviour-calling epiphany. My epiphany is that the first three weeks of classes are complete and I have forgotten to attend any of them. I begin to loudly pray until some co-workers come by to see what's going on.

When a course is only eight classes long you can't really skip the first three classes and hope to make up the lost ground, so I vent the frustration in a healthy burst of verbal callisthenics, write the money off as lost, apologise to all of you for not bettering my writing abilities (I'm sorry) and get on with my life. This is, however, the point at which I come to the realisation that advance preparation is a vicious fallacy. This is the magic moment where my hypothesis of the month crystallises into a flawless gem. Bask in its brilliance for a moment. Go ahead, bask.

There, how was that?

...advance preparation is a vicious fallacy

Doubtful? Of course you are. Not having lived it yourselves you aren't likely to be so easily swayed from a lifetime of conditioning that says preparation is key. Allow me then to ply your senses with further examples, that I might share with you this wisdom.

Consider dry ice. Consider a thirty-pound bag of it. A sack, actually. A sack of dry ice purchased several days before our annual Halloween party. Obviously, no good Halloween party could be held without a sufficient quantity of dry ice to produce that creepy, Hollywood-calibre, sinister ground fog. Not wanting to be caught short on creepy ground fog, Flipperson goes out two days before the Halloween party and buys the previously mentioned sack of dry ice. We stow it in the basement freezer and rush off to continue macabre preparations for the big night.

Now leap, pell-mell, with no regard for safety, two days into the future. Leap to my basement where Flip and I are hanging glowing cobwebs from the ceiling in frantic preparation for the night's festivities. While I'm locked in active battle with an adversarial compound of duct tape and synthetic webs that is looking less and less like authentic cobwebs every second that I wrestle with it, Flip goes to the freezer to fetch the dry ice, opens the lid and freezes in his tracks.

I immediately sense trouble and wordlessly make my way towards Flip, my forearms powerfully ensnared in an angry ball of fibres and tape. Flip remains motionless, staring into the freezer. I join him, look in, and don't see what I expect to see. Which I suppose is exactly what I should have been expecting. In my own defence, I had things on my mind.

At the bottom of the freezer is the dry ice sack, right where we left it. Except that it appears to be empty. This is roughly thirty pounds of dry ice shy of where it should be. The two of us stare quietly for several more seconds.

"Huh." I comment.

"How cold would you say the freezer is?" Flip enquires, eyes never leaving the deflated sack.

"I dunno, maybe three or five degrees below freezing."

"I guess that's not cold enough to keep dry ice frozen."

"No. I guess not."

Flip sighs, resigning himself to a last minute rush to the dry ice store, then looks at my arms. "What are you doing with those cobwebs?"

Screwed you see; screwed because rather than follow our natural instincts and leave things until the last minute, we blindly rushed ahead and stocked up early.

So, convinced yet? No? Dear God, when did you people get so cynical? Fine then, but this is the last story and then lights out, understand?