Spinning a pen on my thumb

and other hyper-specific, impossible things.

A girl I went to high school with spun pens around her thumb.

I won’t say her name. For privacy; also because I don’t remember it. But like most things about her, it was precise and (seemingly) effortless. She started in a handwriting grip, and with a flick of her fingers, the pen would spin about the space between her knuckle and thumb nail. It always ended in the same handwriting position, which was great, because there were a lot of notes to take on Civics.

I tried to replicate this dozens, maybe hundreds of times. Starting right then and there in the classroom. On my first attempt, my pen clattered along the desk top. On the second, I flung it across the tile floor. On the fifth, my teacher told me to stop whatever the hell I was doing. In hindsight I recognize the tone in his voice — when you have bills due and you went to bed too late and woke up too early and you aren’t paid enough for this shit. At the time I thought he was being mean about it. Now, a decade later, I deeply understand.

I didn’t know her well enough to ask her to teach me. Only well enough to watch from across the room in fourth period, seething with fascination.

Every so often I tried again. Always when I was alone. You don’t realize how loud a pen hitting a tabletop is until you do it several times in rapid succession. The university library did not appreciate the sound. The attempts were frequent, but aborted quickly. I was so far from any kind of success that I would lose interest. The striking and subsequent dimming of a match. The seven seconds of hope you feel when you pick up a Rubix cube, before you realize it’s an Investment. You are filled with determination, until you aren’t. Or maybe that’s just me.

And a decade later, I was holed up in a conference room. I was attending a week long technical training class — virtual, so I was effectively alone. A pleasantly excitable but demanding lecturer spent five days teaching us about spacecraft navigation. A very interesting class, where ninety percent of the content flew so far over my head it could have been in orbit.

“This is rudimentary stuff,” the teacher said, while I opened Google tabs to figure out what the hell he was talking about. During our fifteen minute breaks I tried frantically to make sense of our notes, and tried frantically to do the rest of my day job (just because they were paying for my training didn’t mean they were paying everyone else to stop talking to me!)

In some ways, going back to the lectures was a relief. Just me, my notes, and a pen. And when I realized that trying to write down every letter and symbol was a waste of time and finger muscles, I spun my pen. It wasn’t really spinning at first. Just falling, over and over and over again.

It had been years since the last time I saw someone do it. I considered watching a tutorial. I did not. I forced myself to remember what a partial derivative was while slinging this pen around. I let my muscles do the thinking, or lack thereof. Hundreds of failures were drown out by the overwhelm of a topic I only understood a fraction of, but listened to with rapt attention.

At time of writing, I have an estimated twenty percent success rate in spinning a pen around my thumb. This is not very high, but higher than zero. To do that, I just needed to fail at something bigger and more distracting than a pen. But I wasn’t failing — there was no quiz or test. Admittedly, if there was, I would have left the call on the spot.

I was added to the class as a learning opportunity, so that’s what I did. I didn’t follow every derivation and every block diagram and every integral. Maybe I never will. But maybe some day a long, long time from now, I’ll hear something and say hey wait a minute, I learned about that. I know what those words mean. I didn’t back then. And I can go back to my course notes and it will all seem less daunting.

And maybe I’ll ask her to teach me how to do it before we graduate and never see each other again. Or get my own Rubix cube. In the meantime, I’ll drop some more pens on the floor.