Of course my favorite number is 3.14. I mean it’s a number that’s also a food. Asides from being a number that makes me hungry, 3.14 is my #1 because on the 14th day of the 3rd month back in my middle school days, I was immortalized as a numerical nerdlinger in a competition that was the spelling bee of numbers. My mathlete mentality carried over into high school when I created a movie trailer over a book written by Twitter’s favorite astrophysicist, @neiltyson. Reminiscing on these accomplishments has me beginning to think I already peaked.
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March 14, 2009. Pi Day at Cheyenne Middle School. There we were. 3 pubescent tweens in the hallway, nervously standing around our math teacher. Onlookers gathered. Shit was bout to go down at the school’s very first pi memorization showdown extravaganza. Who could recite the most digits of the world’s most infamous infinite number, pi?
First up was an unexpected contestant who met my expectations and recited a mere 50 digits or so. I spat out 163 digits. Sounds impressive until you realize a 163 out of infinity is 0% memorized. My mortal mathletenemy (a boy I awkwardly slow danced with at a Church dance once) went next. Even though he memorized over 170 digits, he incorrectly uttered the 161st digit, crowning me as champion. His mistake cost him a skip-the-lunch-line pass and a shout-out by the principal on the next day’s morning announcements. I basked in my “the limit does not exist” Mean Girls moment. To rub it in, I cruelly made him write “I lost to you in the pi memorization contest” in my yearbook. And yeah, we both became engineers.
A braggadocios nerd, I memorialized my accomplishment by naming my first electronic mailing address: moviemaniac3.14. An email address I continue to use to this day as a fully grown adult who pays for her own health insurance. An email address that got me an engineering co-op. An email address that… I used to email Neil DeGrasse Tyson with.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
A tale as old as time, this is one of those “high school book report assignment leads to corresponding with a celebrity” stories that you’ve heard time after time.
Mr. H’s English lit class was to pick a nonfiction book and pitch it to the class. I came so close to selecting Bossy Pants by Christina Fey but instead chose The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet by People magazine’s “Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive,” Mr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. NDT as I’ll call him (not to be confused with NPH, Neil Patrick Harris) is the Director of the Hayden Panettiere. Oops I mean The Hayden Planetarium. The planetarium of course being part of the American Museum of Natural History, which is of course the museum in the Ben Stiller movie, Night at the Museum. I digress. Or should I say, I deGrasse.
Back to The Pluto Files, it’s a book who’s thesis is: Pluto is not a real planet, it’s a dwarf planet (or to put it in layman’s terms: petite planet, planet mini me, planet Jr, snack size planet). The book also details the societal backlash and hate mail NDT received from furious children and toddler trolls who want to believe in 9 planets, not 8.
In lieu of a traditional class presentation, I chose to pitch my book report in the form of a movie trailer. What a fun experience it was to make this lil trailer. I crafted a tombstone for Pluto the regular, big boy planet and poetically layed a rose on its grave. I dressed up a blue bouncy ball to look like Pluto. I casted voiceovers, edited the footage, and scored it with music from 2001: A Space Odyssey. For some reason, even though I wasn’t friends with anyone in that class, I made them all blue rice krispy treat Plutos to eat during the premiere of my trailer. Both the food and film opened to rave reviews.
Proud of my work, and craving validation on a larger scale, lil ol me submitted the YouTube link to my trailer in some sort of comments section I found on the Hayden Planetarium website. Shoot your shot I thought. Slide right into those DMs. Much to my surprise, moviemaniac3.14 received an email back from the man himself. NDT generously took the time to watch my lil video, email me twice, compliment my moviemaniac3.14 email address (lol) and mailed me a signed picture of himself. People magazine may think he is the Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive for his physical exterior, but I think it’s because of his kind interior.
