Struttin'

In the fifth grade, Adam Zweiback was my math teacher.  He was a middle age man, tall (over six feet, definitely) and slender, with longish curly dark hair.  He went on sabbatical to Italy and upon his return told everyone to call him Adamo.  In the seventh grade he taught me social studies and in the eighth grade he taught me science and about time-space worms.  The class was asked to try to picture a line made on a map by our movements around the globe.  We were given some time to ponder what this would look like and what all of our time-space worms would look like all tangled together.  How many times had each of ours crossed?  How many unknown interactions had we had with the people in our lives and those that someday would be?  How far had our line extended?  How much of this earth had we traversed?

I was in the car, unknowingly on my way to a goat farm and Jerome, Arizona (population 446), on the Monday of Spring Break 2013 when I was told about an app called Strut.  Once downloaded to your phone and opened, Strut marks the tile (I’m not sure what unit of measurement this is, I’d guess a square quarter mile) where you are and unlocks more tiles as you move.  I started strutting as we left Jerome and watched, fascinated, as my time-space worm grew on the little screen of my phone.  It had been quite a while since I’d thought about Adamo’s kooky ponderings but here it was in real life.  While I still do not know all of the intricacies of my worm’s relations to those of other people’s, I have learned a couple cool things from Strut.  I have strutted 5,702 tiles so far, all in Arizona, and 4 of them have been over water (on bridges and such).  Of the 5,021 players registered, I am #162 worldwide.  I have the top score in Scottsdale, Show Low, Payson, Fort McDowell, and Heber.  Most importantly I’ve been able to see the size of the space in which I have not traveled relative to the space in which I have yet to venture.  I now have a fresh motivation, even if it’s absurdly driven by a lust for more tiles, to go explore new land and see more places.  And so a struttin’ I shall go…