This is my Brian...🧠😔 · The Big Brain Club

This is my Brian...🧠😔

Okay, let me explain with a story... how my brain works... and how it has prevented me from finishing anything in the last... 30 years...

Let me tell you a story about little Pablo when he was 16... (Back then, I could afford to spend my time doing nothing... It was the 90s, a wonderful decade, without phones, or gurus telling us how special we were, or anyone trying to "bring out the best in us." There was no internet either...).

At age 16, Pablo wanted to be an astronomer (another "lifelong dream" that year). So Pablo...decided to build his own telescope. That's right, back then we used to make them ourselves...

So I started polishing the future lenses of the telescope. Let's say that doing that would achieve 99.9999999999% of what a telescope means, right? Well... I'll continue...

I polished the first circular glass...shaping it into a parabola through the circular movements of my hand and my body (as we were turning around the table). Once the parabola was made, achieving the focal distances we needed, it was almost done.

Now comes the flat mirror. A perfectly flat mirror that we polish and measure with "interference circles" (when the mirror is flat, the "circle" takes on an infinite radius value, which produces lines instead of circles...).

I almost had it... I had achieved the other 0.0000000001% of the telescope, a concave mirror, and a flat mirror...

Well, and that's when my brain came into play...the same one that's with me today...

All that was missing was the frame... simple, right?

For the mount, what do most people do? Since they already have the most important part of the telescope, they just buy the mount, right?

No, Pablo didn't...so there I went, looking for PVC pipes...to cut them, to fit the mirrors, and to assemble the telescope...

The reader might think that this was the "problem," the "detour"...nope...not at all, it was just the beginning...

I said to myself, "To assemble the PVC pipe, I need the axles to hold it up, the structure..."

Well... then I should get some pipes to assemble the PVC tube to put up the mirrors I had made!

But of course... it can't end there... since the PVC pipe is mounted on a structure... which ends in a steel structure... which rests on... legs, of course!

There I would be...making the legs of a structure that I would assemble to hold the PVC pipe that would ultimately house the mirrors that took me so much effort to make, and that is ultimately what making a telescope is all about: making parabolic and flat mirrors.

But not Pablo...

Remember...we're trying to make legs!

So, how do I make the legs... hmm... I could make them out of cast aluminum to create the legs that will support the structure, which will hold up the PVC pipe that will house the mirrors...

Poor reader, how naive...you think that's the end of the story...

No, we continued with months and months of "planning," and I realized that those legs needed aluminum to melt!

Anyone in their right mind would end up here, buying the aluminum at least, to melt it down, to make the legs that will support the structure, which will hold the PVC pipe and house the mirrors!

No, Pablo and his brain... no.

Pablo had to get the aluminum somehow...

And so, one summer night (actually seven), Pablo was walking through the streets of Buenos Aires at night, wearing safety gloves and carrying two trash bags... picking up cans from the ground... like a beggar... to collect aluminum, which he would then melt down to cast the legs that would support the structure, which would hold the PVC pipe that would house the mirrors...

And of course, at this point, the rational, emotional, and cerebral burden is so great that the story ends in the worst (or obvious) way....

Three trash bags full of aluminum cans on my balcony for three weeks...

Until my mother said, tomorrow I'll throw them away...

The next day, I threw them away, leaving me without aluminum, to melt the legs, to support a structure that would hold a PVC pipe, which would house some mirrors, thus building a telescope made with my own hands.

A telescope that never existed.... :(

That's how my brain works...and that's how I manage to get nothing done. This isn't just the shiny object syndrome anymore...it's a one-way trip down a rabbit hole from which there's no escape... :(

35 years later... I still dream of finishing the telescope, and all the "telescopes" in my life...

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