Vickilicious

The title is from the refrain of the Santigold song "L.E.S. Artistes," and it should tell you something that I've been quoting it since she was Santogold to talk about my feelings on like, school and life and adulthood and the following heavy stuff.

(Before I dive into that nonsense, I feel obliged to point out that this is still an excellent song for when you're getting dressed to go out, especially this remix. I pretty much always have it in my head, in some way, along with a cast of Muppets and an unhealthy and possibly carcinogenic amount of glitter.)

And for the record (ha, see what I did there?) I would much, much rather talk about music for a couple hours and pretend that none of the rest of the stuff on my mind, is. But that's kind of the problem.

The end of this semester was very similar to most others, in that I procrastinated a lot of big projects and went into finals already behind, was in no way prepared for the extra curve balls my professors threw ("Oh hey guys, sorry, I accidentally gave you the wrong final, for a much harder graduate class, and I realize it was twice as long and you were totally not prepared, but it seems like you worked it out alright?"), and predictably, I really, really couldn't deal with the life and family events that were going on in the background.

So I say background, but really I mean the forefront of my mind. From the school's point of view, nothing is more important than a lab practical or some asinine paper because that's all they've got to do with you. Obviously professors have their own lives and mortality to address, so it's really nothing personal, but it feels that way when you are eighteen and interpret everything as all about you (oh really, Vicki? Just when you're 18 huh?). For the first couple years of higher education, I was scared enough to believe that school was the most important thing too. I literally cannot count the amount of times I've said to myself that I'll just put my head down, get all this stuff done, and then deal with whatever thing I can't handle.

But I'm thirty years old. I can't get behind that ostrich mentality anymore because I've spent the last decade or more of my life ignoring or second-besting my family, friends, and health... and like, for what?

So now I go to funerals and deal with grief when I don't want to. I have protracted and incredibly upsetting conversations about family members' health and friends' mortality. I pray for peaceful deaths or short-term suffering, I make bargains with God that if I can just get through this month without anything else tragic happening, I will become a better person, for real. I've stopped what for years was my instinct to say "no" to everything and then making exceptions if I could.

Going into my Biochemistry final, which was the last of this semester, I was half-listening to a classmate expressing his frustration at the way the grading system would work out for him. I should mention that this professor is incredibly generous because he drops the lowest of your four exam grades, so only the three highest go into the average. With the exams as 60% of your grade and the lab as 40% it's possible to calculate really precisely what your grade will be, and as intensely nerdy chemistry students, every single one of us knew the cut-off points for various final grades. My poor classmate was so exasperated because, as he put it, "If I get a zero on this exam, I will get a B- in the class. If I get a hundred on the exam, I will get a B. I have studied for the last three days straight, to try to go from the minus to the flat B... what is wrong with me?!"

A week earlier, I had hit my absolute breaking point (and I'm sorry I can't really get into details about the instigating incident right now, both because it's private and because I will start crying again and never finish writing this). It was in one of those sleep-deprived crazy states where I was stretched too far in every direction and couldn't make my brain operate anymore, when I heard this soft, barely perceptible little "click" somewhere near the base of my skull. The frantic voice that had been working out schedules and panicking about things I didn't understand shut up completely and was replaced with a firm, even-tempered utterance, "None of this matters."

I felt like my heart had turned to liquid and seeped into my chest cavity, as it was getting both harder to breathe and strangely effortless. I literally became incapable of caring anymore, and I went sort of numb all over. "I'll do what I can," I told myself, "but I'm not stressing out about school anymore, ever again."

These past few days my mindset has felt so foreign and abstractly calm that I wonder if I've actually overcorrected and become some emotionless automaton only resembling my former self. Is serial killing next? I mean surely this is what sociopaths feel like, right?

I have invested all of my emotional energy in school since I can remember. It's an ironic form of displacement because I don't even particularly like school - I just keep doing it wrong and feeling like maybe this time I can get it right.

I started this degree with enormously lofty intentions. I would immediately go through to the PhD in Chemistry in polymer science and materials chemistry. I would integrate my background in painting and art history and go straight into art conservation science. Somehow I would gain access to multimillion dollar spectroscopy equipment and government-funded projects in Italy, without having to put in the decades of work as a chemist that everyone for whom I've worked as an assistant needed to do. I honestly think that I told myself if I just put my head down and concentrated on it, the logistics and opportunities would sort themselves out because, well, they always have.

I don't want my whole life to be a trajectory toward my career goals. (Especially when I keep changing them and they are all over the place to begin with.) I don't want to give up getting married or having kids or seeing friends for like, all of my thirties, just to try for a more interesting job.

It doesn't feel like a sacrifice if you don't really want to marry the person you're dating, or if you keep going back and forth on having kids because, again, the person you're dating would make a terrible parent (no offense intended to my exes because I'm sure the version of me you dated would have been a dreadful mother too). Several times in the past few years, I've had to recognize which people in my life were toxic and distance myself from damaging situations. So it's reasonable that weddings and home ownership and children were way out in another galaxy from my day-to-day thinking.

But the problem with pulling yourself out of one area of life is that you also pull yourself away from the opportunities for a different life. I work in hyperbole and overcorrect constantly, so when I get my heart broken, I swear off romance forever. (I mean, until someone with lovely eyes and a gentle smile kisses me and my heart gets all fluttery again, I'll change my mind, but I carry a big cynicism albatross and sabotage everything, and I must stop doing that.) I have had a number of crap jobs that don't pay well and treat me poorly, but that doesn't mean that all jobs guarantee misery and soul-sucking demoralization (If I am wrong about this, please do not correct me).

I think at this point in my life, the smartest move is to finish this degree and get a real job that pays all my bills. A large part of why I am getting the bachelor's in chemistry is because it's one of the few remaining undergraduate degrees for which job options (however limited) still exist. I don't really need to make a ton of money right away (I mean, I feel like I do because I owe hundreds of thousands in student loans, but that's not actually the case). I need to just find something I can do for 40 or 50 hours a week that doesn't suck my soul out with boredom or the feeling that I am wasting what few talents I may have.

I need a substantial amount of time where I can live my life without it pointing toward something. I want to paint without worrying about working my way into a career in art. I want to go to work and come home and not think about work all the time while I'm at home. I want to allow myself to care about boyfriends and dating and get emotionally invested in things that I currently dismiss as frivolous wastes of time.

For better or worse, I think my brain has already gotten started on divorcing my emotions and priorities from schoolwork. It's ludicrous to care as much as I do for little points on a transcript that mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. If I get an A- or an A, or a B or whatever, it's kind of all the same after a point, and I've spent too many years of my life sweating for As and still feeling empty afterwards. I just can't and won't do it anymore, but that's not to say I'm not going to work hard. I just need to stop viewing the entirety of my self-worth by academics and start focusing on what's actually important.

I've also done this burn-out thing so many times already that I know the frustration and crushed feelings I experience have nothing to do with school, beyond the surface preoccupation. I'm not upset because chemistry is hard and requires a lot of work (I mean, duh). It's that I am capable of doing this whole shebang smarter while preserving (or creating?) some semblance of an adult life.

So in what I know has been a repetitive, rambling, poorly thought-out diatribe (see? Chemistry is making my writing go to crap too), I hope I've communicated the tiniest fraction of what turmoil lurks in my stupid, insipid little heart. A year from now, I hope to be a dramatically different person in a totally different place in my life.

I think it starts with breathing, picking my head up, and opening back up to everything in life, good and bad. Paying attention to beauty, following joy, and caring for people, because that's really all that matters.

2012 is going to be the year of saying yes to everything. I intend to be a markedly happier, healthier, more open and living version of myself, and I look forward to sharing it with you.

I have a lot of escapist fantasies that come in handy when my current life feels like a litany of foolish and expensive mistakes. Over the years, I've tried to refine them beyond renting a car and disappearing into the desert because eventually I will have to deal with food, shelter, and massive student loan debt, not to mention who will feed my cat. So now my escapist fantasies sit somewhere on the outermost reach of feasibility (but oh, the moon colony was a sweet one) yet not completely outside the realm of possibility. You know, in case it's time to switch tacks yet again.

(See if you can spot the themes.)

7.) One-way ticket to somewhere tropical that does not have bugs or snakes. Discover some magical power to heal wealthy white women by yelling at them, or innate talent for cooking or writing or, I don't really care what so long as it makes a lot of money for a while and I can return all pseudo-enlightened and sanctimonious and not have to work when I get back.

Look, I know this is like, some weird vengeful anti-Eat Pray Love, but I haven't hashed out the details yet. That's why it's at the end of the list for now. Also because it can only be short-term, like two or three years max. I would just miss my family too much.

6.) Get a job for a travel company that includes weeks and months of going on their vacation packages, so that I can write about them and recommend them accurately.

Similar fantasies include becoming a National Geographic photojournalist, writing silly travelogues on my blog that get picked up and optioned as a series of travel books requiring me to go around having Bridget Jones style adventures all over the world, or I dunno, doing something so meaningful in science that I am asked to constantly fly around consulting on projects. If you just imagined me in a lab coat with a jet pack, then I think we're on the same page.

5.) Buy a pecan farm in Georgia, export pecans to China, and sell homemade pecan pies locally.

I don't know anything about agriculture, but I read an article about the price of pecans skyrocketing because they are quickly becoming a luxury item in high demand in China. I also really like pecan pie.

4.) Move to Iceland, and work as an adventure travel guide for American tourists.

I am perfectly willing to marry a handsome Icelandic man if it would give me appropriate tour guide cred. If I get exhausted with adventure tour guiding, I could also be really happy piecing sweaters in one of those wool factories. This fantasy also applies to Costa Rica, parts of the Amazon, and basically anywhere I've ever traveled.

3.) Discover a country, also preferably Iceland, that has government grants to support artists. Paint all the time, struggle daily to suppress maniacal laughter in public.

The reason why this isn't my #1 fantasy is because I'm too afraid that the possibility actually exists for such a Utopian paradise to be out there in the world, but the thought that I've lived this long without discovering it makes me too sad to go on.

2.) Move to Hawaii and make paintings of flowers for tourists. Make exactly enough money to live comfortably, without worrying about being a "real artist" or not. Have a spectacular tan, but not skin cancer.

I'm not gonna lie, this is my constant Plan B.

1.) Move to Venice, start out running a small antique shop or furniture restoration business. Sell little paintings of my own here and there. Get discovered by some enormously influential German art dealer, who wants to represent me internationally, without me having to leave Venice. Never ask where the money comes from, only worry about rolling around in massive piles of it and occasionally attending galas that I actually enjoy. Spend all my free time sailing and fishing and traveling around the rest of Europe until I get tired of speaking Italian and move back to a house on the Navesink. Continue as in Venice, but with handsome Italian husband and children in tow.

I mean, they're my fantasies, right? Might as well go for it.

Bonus: The Escapist Fantasy That Really Shouldn't Be a Fantasy:

Get a job that comfortably pays my bills, allows generous vacation time, and about which I literally don't care at all.

Show up, put my time in, and don't think about it again until the next time I'm there. If the task is menial, repetitive, and mindless, so much the better. I actually tried to do this for a while when I got a data entry job at a clothing store, but they sucked me in to all these other tasks in the finance office and all these other aspects of the store ranging from inventory and receiving to becoming the head of A/R. Most critical in its flaws was that it didn't come anywhere near covering all of my expenses AND I started to care too much. If I had it to do over again, I'd pretend not to speak English well and insist on getting paid fairly from the start.

I'm willing to accept partial credit if the first two criteria are met but I have to care a little bit. In exchange, I would like a kind and funny husband who loves me for exactly who I am, and I would like us to have children who aren't too sticky or grow up to be jerks.

As I'm sure this entire blog evidences, I've never been shy with words. I joke with friends that I can and will talk about any subject for as long as permitted, and probably a little longer, because I really love thinking about things and finding out what other people think about them. It's not usually the ideas themselves (although I do love a good idea), so much as the exchange of them, the stuff that happens in the brain during conversation and interpersonal engagement, and that spinning reverberation of reflection that happens for hours/days/months/years afterwards. I think that energy of new perspectives is our most potent fuel, in the libidinal sense, and I am delighted to get utterly lost and charged up in revitalizing thought.

I've been an oversharer since well before the internet or social media. I think of my body as the semi-permeable membrane by which my subjective experience is barely contained from spilling out all over the world. It's extraordinarily hard for me to resist sharing my thoughts or opinions, or to refrain from expressing myself, and it's only through a terrific act of decorum and self-control that I can manage any semblance of politeness or quiet (though I am a compulsive interrupter, and I do feel bad about that). It's never that I'm not listening to other people (I do, very carefully), but that everything they're saying is triggering new whirlwinds and thought trajectories, and if I don't sputter out a few words here and there, I'll lose them entirely (maybe that's not a bad thing).

I've always thought it was an artist's prerogative to be a more open version of humanity, to live in a transparent enough way that others can recognize the familiarity and sensitivity of experience. I tend to be terrible at hiding my thoughts or emotions (one of my exes said I wear my heart on my face), but I think it's to do with not seeing the point in repressing all the things that make me human. I also may be unusually attuned to people's body language and small facial movements, so I frequently can tell most of what people are thinking and feeling, even when they're making a strong effort to "not say anything" and cage their reactions.

With that openness comes a sort of unraveling undulation, a turning inside-out of the core self so that the experiences at the surface become among the deepest. I think this feeling used to make me incredibly self-conscious - people weren't just reacting to my shoes or to my gait, but to my very essential self, which they could obviously sense and dislike just by the way I walked (I've lived enough to know how absurd this thinking is; most people don't care at all about anyone they see, and it's just idle gazing and rote response). I pay a lot more attention to other people than anyone has ever paid to me (thank God), but I do so with empathy and concern. Even when I'm being bitchy and judgmental, I try to think of what a person's life is like, how a woman used to look when she was younger, or how a grumpy old man felt when his daughter was curt with him and didn't care that he was lonely.

I used to write stories (I guess I still do, just not so much on paper) about other people's lives, imagining what their apartments looked like or the faces they made when they were in love. I was like a fiend for other subjectivities and sensibilities, wanting so badly to understand all these different versions of the Human Experience that I encounter on a daily basis. It gets utterly overwhelming, quickly, when you make yourself too open to everyone else, being possessed by all their ghosts and worrying that one or two will linger after the seance. But it's rewarding, to really think, well past the cursory examination, into what someone's entire life is like, to try to see the world the way others do, to understand why we were both born with similar bodies and sensory capabilities yet focus our attention in such dramatically different ways.

Something I have always known, which is becoming more prevalent, is that the more specialized one's knowledge in a given subject, the more difficult it is to have conversations with laypersons on the topic. Parenthetically, I have always gauged a person's intelligence not by how jargon-filled and technical the description of a subject is, but rather how capably it is simplified and brought to the level of the audience without losing the significant complexities. I know for a fact that physicists and mathematicians can lose me in several seconds flat, but frankly so can teenage girls talking too much about makeup or boy bands, if they use enough unfamiliar terms and don't bother making sure I'm following.

The problem I am having lately, the more I study chemistry, is that I am finding fewer and fewer people who are willing to talk with me about all the magical little things I learn everyday, without saying "all that stuff is beyond me," or tapping out before I've gotten into anything even remotely complicated. I think people have a slightly higher tolerance for discussions about art or literature, even if I know that I'm speaking on a very different level of theory than they ordinarily encounter, because paintings and books seem tangible, accessible, and even friendly. But our society seems to have such a strong aversion to math and science, and people seem so quick to believe they are stupid or incapable of understanding it, that no one wants to talk about it, and they roll their eyes and wait for me to finish speaking if I do bring it up. I honestly can't count the times I've watched someone drift off in the span of ten or fifteen seconds, then wait until I finish talking and say, "Wow that's... interesting." Often they add, "I don't understand any of that stuff."

I have to believe it's also a fault of my own, that I'm not able to articulate the things I find so beautiful and luminous about science, yet. I recently had occasion to attend a lecture by one of my personal heroes, Oliver Sacks, and in introducing him, the moderator emphasized that he is above all a storyteller. I saw through the course of his talk that the most consistent driving forces for his work were curiosity and the impulse to share everything he learned about humanity with others. He is a conduit, I think, giving access to the far-stretching iterations of experience we could not previously imagine, and bringing back profound insight into ordinary existence. I have always been impressed with his ability to break down incredibly complex, interwoven concepts from neurology and psychology, and make them not only accessible, but palpable and engaging to others. Along with a handful of others who are equally brilliant in their writing as their science (Rachel Carson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Carl Sagan among them), Dr Sacks let me find the essential relevance and captivating beauty science can hold in my daily life. He gave me new things to dream about, new terrains to explore in my imagination, and from the time I was eight or nine to present day, his writing literally fills me with wonder.

So I keep struggling to find a way to integrate all the things that I am so passionate about, in art and writing, in science and music and history and philosophy and biology and on and on, in a language that is not just palatable, but exciting to others, without my tendency to just breathlessly gush in a staccato symphony of all my most recent thoughts.

I had thought the key was compartmentalization, which is why I have been trying to frame posts here around some specific theme or loosely-organized topic, but they are all of a part, talking about experience and existence. I think it may be more useful to free associate if necessary, to risk saying the extraordinarily dumb things I know I say all the time, and more than anything, to write more frequently, so I can keep a map of that wandering that keeps me alive. Please do let me know if I'm losing you.

In one of the first lectures for my Analytical Chemistry class, my professor showed the classic Ray and Charles Eames short film "Powers of Ten," which is always a nice mind-blowing experience, even if you've watched it dozens of times, say, on Wednesday nights in college. Though my professor's intent was to introduce orders of magnitude, in the beginning of a discussion about uncertainty in measurement, error propagation, etc., one line from the film stuck out for me this time (at 5:16ish):

Notice the alternation between great activity and relative inactivity, a rhythm that will continue all the way into our next goal: a proton in the nucleus of a carbon atom beneath the skin on the hand of the sleeping man at the picnic.

The idea of this rhythm, a sort of tide of matter and being, has stuck with me since that class, and I keep thinking about the scale of people, events, and time, and the relativity of all these experiences.

Considering meaning and what meaningful feels like, the question of significance may come down to a high/low center of "activity" versus the emptiness of "inactivity" or a sea of apparent inactivity that is still teeming with indistinguishable energies at this scale. One of my favorite concepts from psychology has always been cathexis, the handiest illustrations of which were metaphors from photography. Cathexis is the fixation or significance a person experiences toward something or someone that causes everything else to go blurry and fade into the background, the cinematic equivalent of spotting one's object of desire in the middle of a crowded room. That intensity of energy and focus, I think, relates to a period of high activity on the radar of consciousness, but what gives that activity any more or less significance than anything else?

Facial recognition is another insanely fascinating area of science for me, particularly considering the energy the brain expends in forgetting so many of the faces and objects we encounter in a day. The best example I was given for why forgetting was so important was actually the function of the brain deleting all the faces on a subway car or a crowded sidewalk that proved to be unnecessary background information; if instead the brain tried to maintain and recall all these faces, we would become unable to recognize our loved ones or even distinguish between faces and objects with similar spatial arrangements. To be able to attach significance to targeted objects, it's critical for the brain to forget and disregard the rest.

Recent devastating losses (which honestly are still too painful to talk about) have made me think a lot about family and the significance we attach to this collection of people who share our genes. Obviously there is a biological imperative toward preservation of lineage and the paradoxical altruism of kinship, but this significance does not transfer automatically to people we choose for ourselves, to love. Yet once the bond is formed, the brain regards significant others, adopted children, and so on, as family, and by extension, an integral part of self. Similarly for friends, neighbors, other people's spouses, the mind makes room for fondness to develop into importance, for affection to translate into protective instincts and attachments. The people that populate our lives regularly, or to whom we've ascribed meaning, elicit intense activity in the mind and heart, whereas perfectly nice strangers, with all kinds of wonderful characteristics that would make them effortless to love, remain insignificant, inactivity, simply for want of introductions or common acquaintances.

This rhythm of experience repeats at internal levels, with feelings that become overwhelming, when the scale of experience becomes too great in proportion to their tenability. Some projects - even terrific accomplishments - become just too important, so big that they are bigger than ourselves and we can no longer wrap our minds around them. I think this point is where my personal commitment peters out regarding politics and global, economic, and social issues. I have a lot of beliefs about how I think things should work, but I don't know how those beliefs can be adapted and implemented at the scale appropriate to every single person's specific situation and needs. And I shouldn't have to worry about that, I guess, because that's the scale where they operate, and questions of policy are at a different, fuzzier magnitude.

The subjectivities and sensibilities of others remains an enormous, mind-boggling mystery for me, probably because I am so frequently wrapped up in my own head. I think of all the observations, analyses, judgments, memories, associations, predictions, and interpretations that go through my mind during even the simplest conversation with a friend, and I realize that everyone around me is (presumably) spinning around in the same way in their minds. Even when I see someone slack-jawed, appearing to stare without a thought in their minds, I have to assume there is much more going on under the surface, that even the seemingly dullest people are whirring with thoughts they aren't expressing (maybe? Maybe I'm wrong about that though?).

I think one of my overarching themes in art is pattern recognition, achieved by examining organic shapes and systems at a variety of scales, from the intimacy of macro vision to the abstract impossibility of microscopy and telescopic views. Taking on life, from the comfortably proportionate dimensions of familiarity, through vast and anxious infinities, the patterns and rhythms coalesce into beautiful sameness and elegance, those fundamental characteristics of being.

All this, though, does not fully account for meaning, only a recognition of scale and pattern. I realize that to seek explanation for meaning is akin to asking why we love who we love, but I have to believe it is something bigger than activity and inactivity of attention in the brain. What forces are responsible for the attenuation of attention in the presence of something we just sense will become important to us? Do we only perform that task in retrospect, once the brain catches up on processing and creates memories that present us knowing in the moment that an experience is a big one? Or are we capable of grasping, despite the limits of our scale, when something big is happening to us or around us, that electricity in the air that reminds us that life is happening right here and now?

I guess all I can do is pay attention, as much as I can.

When I was younger, I could tell my girlfriends had fallen head over heels in love when they dropped off the face of the planet. When we reestablished contact, it seemed like every other word out of their mouth was this new guy's name, and everything we talked about reminded them of him. It was so charming and fun to share in that flush of excitement and anticipation that comes with new love, when a person is so smitten she can't help it.

That said, I have a new love, named Chemistry. And my God, I can't get enough.

I think in the past, I had a crush on Chemistry, admiring it from afar, the way I might look at an incredibly handsome and intriguing man across a bar and figure he'd never be interested in someone like me, who tends to walk into doors and gets excessively excited about talking animals. I flirted with Chemistry in my job as a research assistant, performing measurements in an art conservation context and wishing I really intimately understood what the spectroscopy was telling us. I even got fair at interpreting and explaining data in very specific contexts, but it nagged me, constantly, that I couldn't apply what little I did understand to anything else.

My first proper encounter with Chemistry really didn't go well. In the middle of two master's degrees, while struggling to stay on top of my job and my art history thesis, I tried to jump into a condensed summer semester of Organic Chemistry, having taken the prerequisites ten years prior. I was a terrible student, I stayed up all hours of the nights talking with a friend of mine about boys and job frustrations and gossip, or complaining that I was frazzled and had so much reading and work to do instead of hunkering down and doing it. I think, as with many self-sabotaging situations, if I'm afraid I won't succeed, I don't apply myself, or I stunt my efforts, and I did a bang-up job of getting in my own way that summer (in all regards). I passed the class, but I didn't get what I needed out of it, so it comes as no surprise that when I went to take Organic Chemistry II nearly two years later, this time as an actual chemistry major in a second bachelor's program, I really wasn't prepared.

One of the harder decisions I've made, financially and personally, turned out to be blindingly easy after all. I talked with my professor before the final exam and felt that even if by some unfathomable miracle I did well and passed the class (which I did, but barely), I really didn't feel comfortable going forward as a chemistry major with the level of understanding I had. She agreed that organic chemistry is fundamental to the rest of what I would be learning, and that if I were starting out with such a shaky foundation, it was only going to get worse.

I retook both semesters of Organic Chemistry this summer, and I have to say, from the very first day, I knew it was the absolute right decision. Everything started clicking and making sense in a way it really never had before. I completely understood the reading, with a rich fullness that I never thought possible, and the more I learned, the more incredibly fascinating and illuminating I found the material. I used to treat labs like a cooking class, where I followed along with the procedures and stumbled through a half-assed summary in my reports, but this summer I found I really got what we were doing and why, that I could envision the reactions and explain why things were happening the way they were.

It's not an exaggeration to say that this summer was an epiphany, and I am thrilled at the prospect of moving forward in this field.

Chemistry feels a whole lot like the love of my life, an incredibly beautiful and rewarding pursuit that certainly tests my patience and challenges me at every turn, but keeps me breathlessly excited and anticipating the next encounter. It perfectly marries the ideas I was trying to pursue philosophically and materially through art and writing with an unbelievably satisfying glimpse into the order and nature of the universe, in a way that I find nothing short of electrifying. As with most loves, I imagine, I believe this level of enchantment and admiration will last forever because it is based in the purity of an empirical science, the intellectual equivalent of loving a person for exactly who they are. I might not always be so delighted with jobs or the interpersonal hurdles that come with any profession, but at the heart of what I'm doing, I truly love and believe in the sanctity and loveliness of science.

To bring my whole self to it, without hesitation or insecurity, to give my all and become a better person in the process, to rush in head over heels without fear... feels downright spectacular.

So I hope you'll forgive me if I talk a bit too much about Chemistry after a long time without contact, or if I steer every conversation toward its charming habits and tendencies. The thing is, I've just fallen madly in love, and I can't help it.