October: 10.10.01
Is the Answer, is the Reason, that Everything Happens.
More and more, I'm becoming convinced that most of what I know, I know thanks to my completely excessive viewing of public television between the ages of 4 and 14. We didn't have cable, and we still don't. Good old mom and dad didn't let me watch much, but they let me watch PBS. I caught a few cartoons, but otherwise stayed glued to Boston's WGBH channel 2, until 6 pm when the frickin McNeil-Lehrer News Hour came on and ruined everything.Let's be specific. I watched Sesame Street for years, and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood too. My mother used to joke with her mother while I'd watch it, referring to Fred as, "Mr. Fruit". I didn't get the joke for, like, 12 years.
Those to shows exposed me to plenty of imagination, stories, social interaction, and all kinds of basic concepts. I remember being particularly fond of Picture Picture movies about factories. On Fred's wall, Picture Picture usually read "Hello". I was also a big fan of Mr. Rogers seldom used sand table out back. I was scared of Lady Elaine. And I had a crush on Lady Aberlin, which is weird, because I think she kind of looks like my mom.
In the good old neigborhood of make believe, Prince Tuesday was a whiny little bitch. I found a complete list of cast and characters, and it all really started to freak me out. Chef Brockett, with his endless supply of tapioca pudding? Bob Dog? Cornflake S. Pecially, the tweaked asiany squirrelly man who lived in the pink factory? The Purple Panda, from planet purple? I remember all of this too well. Man. Henrietta Pussycat sucked.
More importantly, however, I watched 321 Contact, Reading Rainbow, and Square One TV obsessively when I was young. At an early age, I understood how to tell a story, how to connect books to my life, evolution, the two kinds of lava (aa and pahoehoe), the concept of combinatorix, the definition of a google, light refraction, conservation of energy, the equivalence of fractions to decimals and percents, and about a bajillion other science, math, and reading concepts.
But you don't have to take my word for it, or Paco's, or Miguel's:
Nine, Nine, Nine
Fantastic number Nine
Times any number you can find
It all comes back to Nine.
I was way ahead of the game, if you ask me. All those concepts made learning more complex math and science and language comprehension a snap. I just wish I had learned to program Java at age eight.
