Round Pegs, Round Holes

Is your career what Studs Tercel called "a Monday to Friday sort of dying"? Then launch into something new and exciting. Options abound, as Harvard's just-announced Ig Nobel Awards show.

You could, for example, invent prosthetic testicles for neutered dogs. Or monitor the brain cell activity of a locust that is watching "Star Wars". Or measure the rate at which congealed tar drips through a funnel. (You'll need to set aside half a century for this.)

If those don't do it for you, how about calculating the pressure at which a penguin shoots waste out of its anus?

Real, live, just-like-you-and-me people have done all these things. Well, not quite like you and me. 

Most of us learn to bury our idiosyncrasies. In an effort to fit, we become grey, conventional, conforming. Not overnight, mind you. "A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away," Mark Twain noted. "He must have time to modify his shape."

By contrast, the Ig Nobel Award winners have applied a heretical principle for living: Since I was born round, I'll find a round hole.

All power to them. The path they've chosen isn't easy. As ee cummings wrote: 

To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

Hold it. I've just seen my neutered cat walk past. That's given me an idea...

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