It was 6:30 am on a Sunday and I was at work. It was a typical Pacific Northwest winter morning. In other words: grey, rainy and raw. Seattle was all but silent, because no one in their right mind would go out in that crap if they didn’t have to. (And yet, here I was, out in that crap.)
Even the water below my drawbridge was grey. You’d think I was looking at a black and white photograph, but for the fact that the steel girders of my bridge were their usual drab mental institution green, interspersed with ever-widening patches of rust. I almost wished the bridge looked grey, too. Anything but that green.
I’ve been trying to get people to sign this petition to repaint my bridge in the official colors of the University of Washington, which is practically nextdoor, but the number of signatures seems to have plateaued, and I’m starting to lose hope. I thought, “Good God, even my mood is grey!”
(Incidentally, you could really cheer me up by signing that petition and sharing it on your social media. It will only take a second. Thanks.)
Normally, I’d start my day by reading the news, but let’s face it: these days that’s not going to lighten the mood. So I was sitting there, staring off into space, contemplating my boredom.
That’s when I decided to lean into it. Really own my boredom. Embrace it. Take in the full experience. Learn everything I could about how boredom manifests itself within me.
So, what was the most boring thing I could think of? Listing to White men complain about how unfairly they are treated? No. Actually, that just pisses me off. Anger isn’t boredom. Having someone mansplain something comes closer, but still… annoying.
Boredom in its purest form, should not bring out stronger emotions, in my opinion. At its worst, it should make you contemplate your life choices. Or maybe take a nap.
Casting about for something boring enough to allow me to deeply dive into said boredom, I decided to go to my blog and search for posts that include the word “boring”. And that’s when I found something I had (understandably) forgotten all about.
The Pitch Drop Experiment holds the Guinness World Record for the longest-running laboratory experiment. It has been going strong since 1927. I wrote about it in December, 2016, in a blog post entitled, My Latest Obsession.
That post goes in-depth about the history of this experiment, so I won’t get into all the details here, but in broad strokes, pitch, under most circumstances, seems brittle and can be shattered with a hammer, but in reality, it is the most viscous fluid on earth. To demonstrate this, a professor put pitch into a glass funnel to observe how long it would take for a drop of pitch to come out and detach. On average, it was dropping once every 8 years, but then the building got air conditioning, and slowed the process down even more, to about once every 12 years.
When I wrote about it in 2016, the last pitch drop had detached in 2014, so the next one, the tenth, is due to drop in… hang on! 2026! That made me rush over to the live feed.
Yes. They have a live feed. The only way you can tell, really, is by seeing the clock advance. Or, if you’re willing to get up during class hours in Queensland, Australia, you’ll see the occasional indifferent student rush past.
If you are a total nerd like me, and want to learn all about the exciting developments that have occurred since my last blog post on this subject, check out this article, entitled Explainer: The Pitch Drop Experiment. Quite a bit has happened. It just hasn’t happened quickly.
It would be really cool to see this tenth drop detach, because no one has ever been present when the last 9 have decided to do so. (Although the last one was finally, finally caught on camera! Check out the video below.) I describe the series of mishaps that prevented each sighting in my earlier post. Suffice it to say that it’s almost as if the universe has a cruel sense of humor.
While casting about for ways to remain in the Pitch Drop loop, so to speak, I discovered that they have a Facebook page which I now follow. But the last time they posted anything was in April, 2021. I suppose it’s hard to generate news while watching pitch. It’s like watching paint dry writ large.
But it was cool to find out that, for a brief shining moment in 2016, the experiment had a mascot. It was a little “pitch droplet” with the university’s logo on it that would pop up in various places on campus. But it was shy, and at one point it said in a post that it feared having “resting pitch face.” It ceased communication soon afterward, and I can’t find it for sale at the campus store. That kind of made me sad, but I’m sure the shipping from Queensland would have been prohibitively expensive.
As I write this, it has just dawned on me that the events that led me to write this post about an experiment have inadvertently caused my own experiment to fail. In my effort to lean into my boredom by finding the most boring thing I could think of…
I was no longer bored.
DAMMIT!
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