Dude. I can’t sleeeeep! You know what ridiculous thing is going thru my mind?

In Physics my senior year of high school, we had a project to design and build a small bridge using ONLY flat wooden toothpicks and Elmer’s white glue. For every Physics project, our teacher ran a contest for extra credit points. The bridge’s contest is to see which bridge could hold the most weight in proportion to the bridge’s own weight. I remember Vicky (who had Physics in another period) and I ditched a class or two to leave school early the day before the due date to finish (i.e., start on) our bridges. I even remember that before I met up with Vicky at my house, I’d stopped by The Wherehouse to buy the cassette single US3’s one-hit-wonder “Flip Fantasia” for Vicky cuz she thought it was a cute song. Hence, I was late getting to my house and she’d beat me. Random details. Oh, and I remember Vicky had bought those expensive strong “Diamond” brand toothpicks in the blue and white box and I bought the cheap flimsy Thrifty store-brand toothpicks, and that I’d bought my toothpicks some days earlier when I watched Schindler’s List with Sandy since she got extra credit for watching it, and I had to walk out of the theatre during one of the more violent scenes, so I walked to Thrifty. (I’ve known these two bridesmaids forevah!)

Vicky’s bridge design was this intricate assembly of boxes with a diagonal toothpick inside each wall of the frames for extra support, and she even cut all her toothpick tips at 45-degree angles so that all the edges would match perfectly together and make flush corners. When she put her bridge on the table, it made a solid “thwack” sound. That bridge had substance and presence.

My bridge design was less design than just gluing toothpicks together, keeping in mind that the strongest geometric shapes are arcs and triangles, and then bringing those glued sticks closer and closer until they connected on top. The arc of the bridge turned out surprisingly high, I don’t even think the structure stood solidly on the table but was a tad wobbly the way an uneven kitchen table would be, and it looked flimsy compared to Vicky’s. I noted that the support was a bit thin between where the legs connected to the upper surface of the bridge, but was too tired to reinforce it because cutting and gluing toothpicks together took surprisingly long. It was very late that night when we’d finished. We prayed that the white glue had enough time overnight to dry before our bridges would be tested the next day in our respective Physics classes.

Vicky’s Physics period was before mine and her bridge ended up being the second-best in her period, taking a lot of pounds of weight before it broke. When my period came, the teacher put each person’s bridge on the counter/table at the front of the class, and one by one, carefully put small bags of weight on it until it broke, and then recorded the results as the class watched. When it came to my bridge, he put a weight on it, and my bridge did not budge. Surprised, he took the weight off, put a small bucket on my bridge, and then dumped sand into the bucket. I watched my bridge’s legs start to spread as he kept adding weight in the bucket. Running out of sand, the teacher took a metal dumbbell ring and put it inside the bucket. The class was awed, and whispers of “Daaaaang…” echoed throughout the students. Finally, the bridge broke in the EXACT PLACE I knew needed reinforcement! I could kick myself, cuz I could’ve done something about it, but was too tired to. My bridge held the most weight in proportion to its own weight in the class, so I got the extra credit points, but Vicky’s bridge was able to hold more weight. Her downfall, why she only got #2 in her class, was that altho her bridge held more, it also weighed more. I think both our bridges (mine for sure) were displayed in the glass case in the Science Building’s hallway for a few months until the next project.

This is what’s keeping me awake… why didn’t I build an “m”-shaped bridge instead of an arc bridge? The middle leg in the “m” would’ve totally supported the sag. Was it part of the rules that it had to be an arc bridge? Somehow I don’t think so, I think the only rules were in the materials we were allowed to use. But even if it were written that the bridge could only stand on 2 legs, I could’ve designed an “m” with the middle leg NOT touching the ground, but when the two outside legs separated as the bridge sagged, the middle leg would then get low enough to touch the ground and support the sagging weight so the bridge legs wouldn’t break. Of course it would’ve made the bridge slightly heavier, but I think I could use minimal toothpicks to make the small increase of weight well worth its increased strength.

I wanna call Vicky and ask if she remembers the rules to the bridge project.