You can’t give up, you don’t know why you care so much but you must properly explain your research if it’s going to take all night. Words and lectures might not do it, but a well crafted diagram just might do the trick.
You take an empty plate and start spooning over a healthy dollop of mashed potatoes and stuffing. You create a channel of mashed potatoes guided by lines of stuffing. Next you start cutting up pieces of turkey into various sizes where the dark meat pieces are all smaller before piling them up at the beginning of the mashed potato pipe.
“Okay, so say you want to know the proportion of dark meat to white meat,” you watch as your family’s attention is split between who’s passing the rolls and butter and your starchy diagram.
“Now it doesn’t start moving until we add the gravy,” you drizzle a steady flow of gravy on the channel. Now this forces the turkey through the mobility phase until all of a sudden the white meat starts travelling a little faster than the dark meat and it starts to separate. NOW! You shine light through the potato mixture to reveal the true proportion of white to dark!”
You begin poking the white and the dark around with a knife looking to see if your family was still confused.
“Do you see, we can analyze the turkey now mom!”
“Yeah, but I don’t get where the colors come from,” your confused mom replied.
“I liked it better when you were working with those beakers and those garage experiments you used to do,” your dad added. “Remember when you won the elementary school science fair, that was really something.”
What do you do?
The mashed potatoes and stuffing weren’t making an adequate diagram, look for a white board