Strontium

[cosmolinguist]

Ring ... Ring.

Hm, maybe she's not there...

I'm not going to leave a message for this! It's too silly.

Actually, it's too silly for me to be doing this in the first place.

Ring.

Pause. Oh well, too late now.

"Hello?"

"Hi, Katie. I have a question for you." She sounded a bit like I'd distracted her from something, but at this point I could do nothing besides hope that it wasn't anything too important. Besides, I could just be imagining things. "If you have a sec ..."

"Okay," she said.

"So, atomic mass, that's the protons and the neutrons put together, isn't it? Because, the electrons don't really weigh anything, right?"

"Um ..." I knew it was unfair of me, asking gen-chem questions without warning when it'd been so long (a few years, but it feels like forever) since she studied this stuff. Still, she is the one I think to ask when I'm presented with a question like this. "Yeah, I think that's it. Yes."

I smiled. "Okay, good. I thought so, but I wasn't sure." It's been even longer since I last had to think about chemistry, and I certainly never did so with the intensity of my biology-major friend. "And I realize I could've just looked it up myself, but this is easier. And more fun."

She laughed a little. "Okay. Is that all?"

"Yep, that's all I wanted to know. I'm just helping my mom with something. Thanks."

"Okay. Bye."

I hung up the phone, still smiling, wondering if Katie was wondering why I'd just done that.

But I think I have a certain standard to uphold, a certain number of random things to inflict upon my friends, just because I seem to be good at them and I relish them, the way basketball stars are with their slam-dunks or mathematicians are with their equations. I am random, because I'm built that way.

Anyway, tonight I was random because my mom had asked me for help, which this time involved looking at a couple of pages of notes and write down 20 facts about strontium. (My mom's job is making high school make sense to an autistic boy, and I guess this was part of some project his physical science class was doing.)

So I learned that strontium was named after the town in Scotland where it was first discovered (though as much of the information on these pages was repeated, strontium was said in other places to have been "founded" and "invented," both of which amused me greatly). It's responsible for the red colors in fireworks. One isotope is apparently used to detect bone cancer and another is found in nuclear fallout.

Mom came back and said, "Done already? You're fast." Then she looked over what I'd written, which made me feel nervous, because she seemed to be expecting more than I'd given her, which was of course just simple regurgitation.

But immediately we ran into problems. "HS?" she said. "What's HS?"

"What?" I said.

"High school!" my dad answered helpfully from the other side of the room.

"What?" I repeated, leaning over to look. I do not disagree that HS is sometimes "high school," but I knew I'd written no such thing on that piece of paper, so I didn't know what she was talking about.

"Right here ..." Mom said. "Oh. Its."

I didn't know I was being graded on my penmanship.

After that all was fine until she got to the last word. "What is this?" she asked me, pointing.

But then she actually showed me the page, which helped a lot in me being able to see the word and answer the question.

"Oh," I said, thinking Handwriting troubles again?, "inert?"

She just looked at me. "E-N-E-R-T?"

"No, I-N... It means, y'know, they don't react with other stuff."

She held out the notebook. "Write that, then." I took it and grabbed my pencil. "This has to be so Ben can understand it. And if I don't even know what it means ..."

"What, you don't know about noble gases?" I asked, erasing.

"No!" she said.

I always liked those, myself. The periodic table gives elements such character and personality.

Comments

[cheesyamoeba.livejournal.com]

I have just finished skimming your journal and reading your info and came to the conlusion that:

If I were a lesbian, you'd be my #1 crush.

[cosmolinguist]

That is definitely one of the cooler compliments I've received. Thanks.

[cosmolinguist]

A different kind of nerd, surely, but "more" is such a difficult word to apply in this case. :-)

[stealthmunchkin.livejournal.com]

That's what it always reminds me of.
Of course, the reason Johnny Alpha and the other mutants were called Strontium Dogs was because their mutations were caused by radioactive Strontium-90, as any fule kno...

[greenflower.livejournal.com]

oh, it makes more sense now :)

[cosmolinguist]

Sorry to confuse you so. :-) I didn't think it interesting enough to be worth explaining on the phone.