Layered cake

The cake came out great. It suffered a little on the drive over and my piping technique leaves a lot to be desired, but all in all it had the desired effect.








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There is tired and then there is sleepy. Tired is when you need to take a little break before returning to your work. Sleepy is when your chin slowly moves down to your chest, your eyes roll back into your head, everything goes dizzy-blank for a couple seconds and then a little squirt of adrenaline suddenly jerks you back to consciousness like when someone unexpectedly wakes you out of a nightmare. You repeat the cycle over the course of several minutes until your beeping computer alerts you to a string of “aasaasaasaaaaaaaaaasaaaaasaa” on your screen, your pudgy little fingers spreading over a couple keys. Cycles.

In a moment of semi-conscious lucidity (neat oxymoron) you realize this was only part of the larger cycle of coming to work every day, of waking and sleeping, living and dying. These cycles—some short, some interminably long—all combine and layer to form a sort of composite sound. Somewhere in a physics, math or music class you probably came across the notion that all periodic waves can be expressed as the sum of simple sine waves. For example, a flute and a piano sound entirely different though they play the same note. Graphed on an oscilloscope the flute sound looks like a smooth sine wave. The piano plot shows the same repeating wave, but it’s scraggly, not smooth. Why? Overtones—the higher frequency waves, the sum of which combine to make the unique “shape” of the piano’s sound.

So that’s the metaphor. The happenings of our lives are almost always periodic (they repeat) and vary in frequency and intensity. Individually they can seem boring and routine (a simple sine wave), but collectively they make a sound that is complex, unique and audible. Just take a step back and listen.