Wrecking The Curve

We spend our days doing the best we can with whatever gifts, talents or insight we have been given. We strive to make our little personal world, and the people who inhabit it, as pleasant as possible. We succeed daily, in greater or lesser measure, and move on to the next day with the general expectation that we will rise to the challenge of whatever comes next. That challenge is usually pretty moderate on the Grand Scale Of All Things: will I have enough milk to go with my Cheerios? Will I make someone at work laugh with me and not at me? Will I trigger the 30-second fast-forward button on the DVR this evening so perfectly that I skip the commercials in the show I recorded without going even a nanosecond into the show itself (which, if not done correctly, will trigger a back-and-forth with the rewind and fast-forward buttons that takes longer than the original commercial break)?

Then there are the people that make us all look like chumps.

This article tells the story of a fascinating kid who just happens to have figured out how to create nuclear fusion. In a garage. The really interesting kicker is that he has come up with a way to adapt his work to create a bomb scanner for cargo containers. I don't think I would want to be this boy, or his parents; his brain seems to work at speeds and levels that are scarcely recognizable. If he can harness his frighteningly powerful mind to work for good in the world, and he doesn't become a bizarre hermit along the way, more power to him. From my perch on the couch, I will gladly raise my TV remote to him in tribute.

And then there is this guy (video link). Unless you are a tall, tanned, muscular Adonis-type who could make Renaissance sculptors weep at the perfection of your abs, with a peerless sense of drama and timing, you cannot approach the sublimity of his marriage proposal.

Thanks, pal. Now I'll have to pick up an extra dozen roses at my next anniversary just to retroactively make up for not proposing marriage with such awesomeness.