The Zen/Flow of Scav

Aside from the obvious road trip items, I only really got to do one item this year. Last year for the party we had used a strobe light, and the strobe light had been given to me for safe keeping until the next Scav. How convenient, then, when one of the items turns out to be a contraption that uses a strobe light to make a stream of water seem to freeze in midair, little droplets suspended in space.

I arrived back from road trip at 4 in the morning (the judges always do the complete road trip themselves ahead of time to make sure everything works just so, and they disclosed that on their dry run they got back at 6 a.m.) I had been planning to sleep and things, since we needed to be at judgment at 10:00 to get our items judged. Of course, though, the spirit of the night - the last night before judgment the next day - drew me in and I ended up not sleeping at all. Instead I focused my energies on the frozen water droplets.

I knew exactly what they were going for - I had seen it on one of my many trips to the local science museum. Luckily this year they had basically emptied out the Searle chemistry laboratory, and Scavvies quickly took up all of the supplies. So there were stands and flasks and tubes. I got a box - darkness was going to be needed - and a plastic water bottle and started putting holes in things - holes in the box, holes in the bottle, eeerything. I nailed tiny nails into plastic bottle caps, seeing if they created the disired effect when water was poured in, and then tapping the nails more when the wholes weren't ever big enough.

It was a simple project, really, emulating something I had seen a million times before. And we had all the materials; getting the right materials is often the hardest part. But for an hour or so, I drilled and hammered and cut and twisted and tested. Over and over again, I tested, trying to get the water to break up into droplets but still flow freely. And during that time I didn't notice anything or anyone. I walked into people, stepped over friends on the floor. I had achieved what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow", where the passage of time is distorted, where self-consiousness melds into the activity itself, etc. That's what Scav is, it's flow. It's a timeless endeavor with clear goals - to win - and relatively immediate feedback that gets people immerse themselves in that kind of embarrassment. It is about blending the ego and the self with the work itself.