Astrophysicist In Need of Really BIG Lens Cleaner
from Christy D.

Hi Ed! Thanks for all your advice! I got a new Westcort script last week and it seems to be helping. I've made the transition from Possible Burn Victim to Possible Rosacia Case, which is much more socially acceptable (how come the Rosacia people have commercials? Where are our commercials?)

I went up to Cambridge last weekend to arrange an apartment. Everybody I met was awesome. They were so into my work that I didn't get asked about my skin once (and I even wore shorts!) I'm in the engineering dept (I have a BS in astrophysics — I want to design big telescopes when I grow up) and everyone there is more interested in the various projects going on than what people look like. (More so than the tutoring center where I work now.  Some of the parents look at me like I'm going to infect their children with something awful. God forbid little Britney be exposed to something like me!)

I love your website.  Being able to laugh with other people who get the joke is great.  -Christy D.

*****

Ed’s Response:  First, please forgive the headline.  I don’t know what’s gotten into me today.

Astrophysics!  Wow.  I just this very day finished Stephen Hawking’s most recent physics-for-the-mathematically-challenged heavily illustrated read, The Universe in a Nutshell.  I love to read physics for the lay-person, but I’m usually left so zombied-out that I must immediately turn to something by Joyce Carol Oates (current antidote, Middle Age). 

As for our commercials?  At the moment the pharms seem to think web sites are the way to go.  Every few years we get a wave of commercials, usually about OTC remedies.  They make us all mad and for a few months we fume about the snake-oil salespeople and their voodoo cures.  Then the commercials subside and eventually, rising up out of the quiet is a wee voice wondering where our advocates are....  It’s a cycle, you see.

And your exposure to parents of your charges at the day care center is probably toughening you up for a life full of challenges you won’t ever have to face.  You’ll probably look back on those day care center times as the toughest.  Or at least we can hope so.  As the female astrophysicist who designs the largest-ever terrestrial telescope, a biographer might someday mention that, oh-by-the-way, she had psoriasis, too, and a fan of yours will put palm to chin and think, “How quaint.  An imperfection, like in the first set of lenses for the Hubble telescope.”

And while this musing is going on we, the elders of FlakeHQ, will straighten our backs and say proudly, “Oh yes!  We knew her even as she was entering Harvard, before she built the big spy glass.  She was one of us.”  Or, perhaps with backs not so straight, we’ll say, “We were just like her.”  Hmmmmm — <smile>.   -Ed

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