Vickilicious tag:www.vickilicious.com,2010-07-23://2 2012-04-28T22:49:37Z Movable Type Pro 5.02 Meet Mustafa tag:www.vickilicious.com,2012://2.654 2012-04-28T22:15:19Z 2012-04-28T22:49:37Z Below is the text of a paper I wrote for a class called the History and Geography of New York. The assignment was to interview someone who had immigrated to New York as an adult and to present their... Vicki Below is the text of a paper I wrote for a class called the History and Geography of New York. The assignment was to interview someone who had immigrated to New York as an adult and to present their oral history in the context of the history of immigration. Conveniently, I happen to be dating a lovely man who immigrated from Jordan to NYC in 1999. He was thrilled to share his story, and when I read it to him before I handed it in, he got all teary and emotional (as did I). Since then, he's been singing a take on an old reggae song, "This is my stoooory, I love my stoooory..."

I figure maybe you'll enjoy a story about immigration and pursuing one's dreams in New York City. Or at least, you can see some of why I love and admire Mustafa as much as I do.




When Mustafa Ikhmaies imagined New York City, it seemed like a dream from the movies. His mind swirling with visions of celebrities, glamour, excitement, and fun, he pictured himself walking down the streets of Manhattan as an American, with limitless possibilities. Looking out the window as his plane arrived in JFK, his heart raced with excitement and breathless anticipation, but as he rode in a car through Queens to his first home in Brooklyn, Mustafa realized his experience in America would be a much starker and more difficult reality. Through many hardships and challenges in his thirteen years living in New York, Mustafa has maintained a rare optimism, integrity, and perseverance that characterize the spirit of immigration in pursuit of the American dream.

Born May 24, 1981 in the capital city of Amman, Jordan, Muzafar Faroq Hafez Ikhmaies is the eldest son from his father's first marriage with one sister and seven half-siblings. Muzafar uses the name "Mustafa" with Americans, saying they find that name somehow easier to pronounce, if only because it is a more common Arabic name.

"I love my real name," he says, explaining that Muzafar means "victor in war" or "triumphant one" and Ikhmaies means "lion's den." "Together, it is the one who faces the lion's den and comes out the winner," he laughs. This courage and fortitude in the face of danger and uncertainty has been an accurate prediction of Mustafa's unshakable character.

As descendants of Palestinian refugees in the Jabal Anzha neighborhood of Amman, the Ikhmaies family had a pleasant life, although it was tempered with a sense of displacement. Mustafa's father had gone to college for surveying, but worked mainly in importing and exporting in Asian countries. When Mustafa was eleven months old, his father took a second wife, which the family found distasteful even though it is considered an acceptable practice in Jordan and under Muslim law. His marriage with Mustafa's mother soured, and by the time Mustafa was eight years old in 1989, his father had divorced her and left to seek a new life in New York City. His mother taught knitting and piecing sweaters so her children could continue to have spending money and luxuries while living in her father's house. Mustafa remembers these years fondly, spending most of his time with his large family and friends, playing soccer in large teams of 20 on 20 or 40 on 40, "because we only had one football among all of us, you see."

Most of his childhood was spent playing in nature, inventing games outdoors. "No one had video games or computers like American kids," he said, "we used our minds to make fun." This love of nature and connection to the natural world became central to Mustafa's values and would later inspire one of his greatest dreams.

In 1993, Mustafa's father returned to Jordan from the United States, briefly reconciling with Mustafa's mother before the relationship became violent and abusive. The disgust Mustafa felt watching his father mistreat his mother caused him to question much of the accepted Muslim treatment of women, and he vowed to do right by his mother and sister. By the time Mustafa was seventeen years old, his father had returned to New York and married an American woman. Mustafa's new stepmother sponsored the older children who had finished secondary school for their green cards, and on July 16, 1999, Mustafa arrived in New York with two half-brothers and one half-sister. The decision to come to New York and live with his father was difficult given their tempestuous past, but Mustafa's mother urged him to pursue his dreams and seek a better life.

"When I was coming here, I thought I would complete my education, that I would go to college and be a boxer, that maybe I would study and become an airplane pilot," he mused, "but nobody would help." It quickly became evident that Mustafa's father intended for him to begin working immediately to help support his half-siblings and the father's second wife in Jordan.

"He told me I was the eldest son, I had to help them, and for my family, I would give anything - I would die. But I felt like these people weren't my family. They were just my father's other kids and he was giving nothing to my mother or my sister."

Heartbroken and crushed, Mustafa quarreled with his father and struggled to find work. "I didn't speak any English, not a word," he said, "and honestly, I was still a kid. I didn't have any work I knew how to do." He began working for an Arab plumbing company, for $20 and eventually $40 a day. "I worked like a slave," he sighed. His work closely resembled the 18th and 19th century Irish and German immigrants' experience, taking on unskilled labor at low wages in unsafe conditions and slowly learning a trade. Mustafa's unflappable charm and congeniality helped him make friends and gain opportunities, but he continued to struggle.

After nine difficult months, Mustafa and his father had a great falling-out and in March 2000, he left his father's home. After several nights sleeping in the park and rinsing out his one change of clothes at work, Mustafa ran into a fellow immigrant from Jordan, who insisted he come stay at his apartment. "I am so forever grateful to him, to keep me from being homeless. I felt like I really could make it on my own."

Over the next few years, Mustafa worked long hours in plumbing with gradually increasing pay, and he learned to speak English from his coworkers and friends. "Sometimes I think I speak English very well, like maybe I sound like I was born here," he says, "but other times, I feel like there are animals in my brain." To this day, he laments that he cannot read or write English well, having never had the opportunity to take ESL classes while working erratic hours. When the marriage between Mustafa's father and stepmother fell apart, she became angry and refused to help the children keep their green cards. Because Mustafa was already 18, Immigration Services took his temporary green card and denied his case for permanent residence. Over the nine years of legal entanglement to eventually gain a long-term green card, Mustafa continued to work and pay taxes. "Thank God, I had a social security number that said I was eligible to work, and I love this country. I was proud to pay taxes."

Focusing primarily in new construction plumbing, Mustafa learned the trade, taking on more and more responsibilities at the work sites. He encountered difficulties with corrupt bosses who paid him as little as $2 an hour, and he has never had health insurance. In 2002, while working on a project for the city, he was injured badly and couldn't work in plumbing for several months. "I didn't know about the laws," he says, regarding his employer's dismissal without compensation, "I wish I knew I had rights." He took a short-term job working for a kosher butcher in Brooklyn, taking advantage of skills learned at his uncle's butcher shop in Jordan as a boy, and he began to think of how to establish better job security and pay.

Mustafa found it was initially difficult to find work in New York in the wake of the September 11th attacks, which was a distressingly common experience for Arab men. "People wouldn't say it to me or make fights with me, but I could see it in their eyes: they didn't trust me." He saw friendships crumble, previously cordial work relationships dissipate, and long-time customers saying they'd feel more comfortable with an American doing their plumbing. Mustafa was hurt and stunned. "When I was first working in the city, I would look at the towers in Manhattan and think they were so, so beautiful. They were everything, they were the city." His voice breaks as he continues, "When I looked and they weren't there and so many terrible things happened to people, I felt my heart breaking right open, like these guys took everything from us." Twenty years old and already fully devoted to his home city, Mustafa was taken aback that his fellow New Yorkers should lash out at him with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab sentiments while he was grieving beside them. "I remember one guy on the subway, he glared at me and just said 'F---ing terrorist,' and I felt like he spit on my mother, like he was taking away my home from me again."

In 2006, Mustafa started his own business, Malaak Plumbing and Heating. He was enormously proud of the venture, named after his beloved niece, whose name means "Angel." Business was good for a time, "Thank God, I had a lot of work. I worked hard, and I made good money." Mustafa remembered the bosses he had had and made sure to treat his workers kindly and more fairly. He paid them well and went out of his way to drive them to and from job sites. At 25 years old, Mustafa felt he had succeeded, "I was so happy I made my own thing for myself," and he fondly recalls a used van he bought for $400. "It was a piece of junk, but I felt like that thing was a Mercedes - it was the first car I bought from my own pocket." Mustafa was able to bring his mother from Jordan to live with him in Brooklyn, and he was thrilled to eventually give her the home and support he felt she deserved in Staten Island. When asked about the experience of living with his mother, he is quick to clarify proudly, "No, this is a very important difference. My mother lives with me."

Unfortunately, Mustafa's business would not last. He began losing money from customers defaulting on payments or cheating him entirely. He made liens but nothing happened and when pushed, people threatened to call Immigration Services. As the economy faltered, collecting bills became even more difficult, and many customers revealed surprisingly cruel anti-Arab sentiments toward him that either betrayed their true prejudices or were put on as a guise to rationalize dishonest dealings with him.

In 2010, frustrated and disheartened, he was forced to give up his business and begin working for another company, struggling with long hours on a relentless 7-day-a-week schedule with no health insurance or benefits, unreliable pay, and uncomfortably frequent mistreatment. "I'm so tired of construction," he says with a heavy sigh, "People treat you terribly. They expect you to do the work for free and you give all your time and your whole body for nothing."

Now nearly 31 years old, Mustafa feels he has not come anywhere close to achieving his goals. He wants to become proficient in English and finish his education. He badly wants to become an American citizen, saying that after thirteen years and his entire adult life, "This country is my home. I love it so much, the fairness, the way people are so open and accepting of each other." Because he came when he was young, he says, "In my heart, I feel I am already an American because I am a New Yorker." Like many New Yorkers, he feels disconnected with the rest of the country on national politics, "I hate what the government or these people try to make it."

Mustafa's experience is very different from the Syrian and Turkish merchants and peddlers that typify Arab-American immigration at the turn of the century but parallels the post-1960s wave of approximately 200,000 Muslim Arab immigrants currently in New York City. As the son of a displaced Palestinian family, Mustafa's immigration wave joins with the tide of Palestinian immigration to the United States. Though he grew up in Jordan and loved it dearly, he never felt it was his true home, and he is happy to have settled in New York. Like his deceased grandfather who wished that one day his bones would be returned to Palestine, Mustafa dreams of visiting his ancestral home and seeing where his people are from, but he knows that until the Middle East is stabilized, he cannot live there. He has strong feelings on international politics and deep concerns about Western manipulation of Middle Eastern lands for corrupt motives. Like many New Yorkers, he has found a sanctuary in a city that is so tolerant of the many cultures and beliefs that comingle, mostly harmoniously.

Mustafa exemplifies the values upon which New York was initially founded. He demonstrates an enterprising spirit, while maintaining community-minded, open and accepting relationships with others. "I try very hard to be friends with everybody," he says, "I like people and I want them to like me. I don't know any other way." Building himself up from a penniless teenager sleeping in a park, he learned a trade, founded his own business, and even experienced the crushing defeats of the American economy before he was 30 years old. He believes in hard work and fairness, and he shows that with sufficient willpower and optimism, a man can make his own fortune in New York.

When asked what he most wants to do now, Mustafa shared a dream of an organic, all-natural, free-range farm for lamb, chickens, cows, and goats, with fruit orchards and fields of crops. "I know I live in the city but in my heart I am a farmer," he explains, "and I want to help people, to make the life better for them, not only for me." He passionately describes the benefits of organic foods, more natural sustenance, and an alternative to factory farming and pesticides. "I believe you can make the life better, with the food, and make the animals' lives better too," he says, painting a bucolic picture of sheep grazing in the fields of upstate New York and organic meats and produce imported to trendy restaurants in Brooklyn. As he describes the steps he is taking to team up with his brother-in-law, a former farmer from Israel, Mustafa's infectious enthusiasm spreads and his vision becomes palpable. Meeting with New York-based organizations for organic farming and city organizations that assist small business owners with financing, Mustafa is encouraged once again.

"The beautiful thing about New York," he says with shining eyes, "is that anything you can imagine, you can do it here. In New York, people help each other with their dreams."



BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arab American Association of New York. Web. 2001-2012. Accessed March 2012. [http://www.arabamericanny.org/].

Benson, Kathleen, ed. Community of Many Worlds: Arab Americans in New York City. Museum of the City of New York. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Print.

DiNapoli, Thomas P. and Bleiwas, Kenneth B. The Role of Immigrants in the New York City Economy. New York State Comptroller. Report 17-2010, January 2010. Web. Accessed March 2012. [http://www.osc.state.ny.us/osdc/rpt17-2010.pdf].

Elaasar, Aladdin. Silent Victims: The Plight of Arab & Muslim Americans in Post 9/11 America. Chicago, IL/Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2004. Print.

Encyclopedia of Immigration. "Arab immigrants." Web. June 6, 2011. Accessed March 2012. [http://immigration-online.org/351-arab-immigrants.html].

Ikhmaies, Muzafar Faroq Hafez. Face-to-face interview. 23 and 25 March, 2012.

Immigration Direct. US Immigration Online. Web. 2007-2012. Accessed March 2012 [http://www.immigrationdirect.com/].

Jackson, Kenneth T., ed. "Immigration." The Encyclopedia of New York City. New Haven: Yale University Press and New York: New York Historical Society, 1995. Print.

Klein, Milton M. The Empire State: A History of New York. Cornell UP, 2005.

Millard, Rachel. "Arabic Immigration to the U.S." Voices that Must Be Heard, Edtion 338: 11 September, 2008. New York Community Media Alliance. Web. Accessed March 2012. [http://www.indypressny.org/nycma/voices/338/briefs/briefs_1/].

Naff, Alixa. Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985/1993. Print.

]]> I'm not running off to the farm... yet. tag:www.vickilicious.com,2012://2.653 2012-04-09T09:03:00Z 2012-04-09T08:05:15Z I have always loved a good refrain. My family and I have our favorite expressions that we repeat regularly, and my dad and I especially return to apt metaphors again and again. For me, it is sailing, choosing and... Vicki I have always loved a good refrain. My family and I have our favorite expressions that we repeat regularly, and my dad and I especially return to apt metaphors again and again. For me, it is sailing, choosing and adjusting a course, and for my dad, it is a boxing match.

One of my father's refrains used to be, "Everything worth doing costs a fortune and tends to be a giant pain in the ass." The trick, of course, was deciding if it was ultimately worth it. One of my dad's remarkable talents is setting his sights on a goal and doing absolutely everything in his capacity and then some to achieve it. When he switched gears from a career as a mason to studying physical therapy, he decided that if it was remotely possible for a human being with a brain to succeed in these classes, he was going to do it. And if he could succeed, then damn it, he was going to excel. (My mom was the same way, and when she went back to school, she had a staggering GPA while working full-time, graduating summa cum laude etc.)

The advice my dad has been giving me, for decades now, is that a student cannot let down her guard until the fight is over. Education is a boxing match, he says, and you have to take the hits, roll with the punches, jump at opportunities, and above everything else, stay in the ring fighting until you've delivered the TKO. Both of my parents and my brother did that, and while I've finished three degrees, it feels more like I've done them by accident or default than through any sort of perseverance or integrity on my part.

Every spring, and probably every fall, I get into a whiny self-pity party like the one I just posted. I question what I'm doing, I loll about in existential crises, I rationalize becoming a terrible human being because I get overwhelmed with cynicism, self-doubt, and the exhausting fear that I've made too many mistakes and can't possibly turn my life into what I intend. I overuse sailing and hiking metaphors, I glorify days gone by (and wasted) that seem easier through the filtered lens of memory, and I yearn for simpler, gentler paths. I'm sorry that it probably makes for awfully dull blog-reading, and I know it's old hat, but it always feels genuine and urgent when I'm going through it.

Thankfully, I also know that I will finish whatever apparently insurmountable task was wearing me down, I will get through exams or projects or what have you (or I fall on my face and realize the sun will still come up the next day anyway), and I move forward. Round won or loss, I stay in the ring.

So I know that I've made decisions about what I want to do with my education and my career. I have a plan, and it's a solid, feasible, good plan. When I get derisive and want to berate myself, I tear it all down and call it a farcical pipe dream, but honestly, it's fine. I remind myself of the lyrics from the Ani DiFranco song "Pixie" (embedded below):

Maybe you don't like your job,
Maybe you didn't get enough sleep.
Well, nobody likes their job,
Nobody got enough sleep.



(direct link)

So basically, all this silly self-doubt and anxiety and what all is nonsense of my own making. I do it to myself in all cases, whether I'm studying painting or chemistry, and no matter how much I convince myself that I'm talentless, stupid, and incapable of learning, I get through classes, I learn, I grow, and one day, I'll develop some sense of confidence in what the hell I'm doing. (Knowing me, I'll get downright arrogant about it, provided I don't have to do too much math.)

The goal here is to get a job I do like, to feel like I'm doing something worthwhile. I want to be happy because of how I spend my day, not in spite of it. I really have to believe it's possible, and I gotta get my head back in the game.

Meanwhile, my boyfriend has gotten inspired by my dad's transition from masonry to physical therapy to pursue his own dream of starting an organic, all natural, free-range idyllic little farm. He's obsessed with it, and I have to admit, it is mighty tempting some days to accept his proposal to run off, get married, and live a simpler life surrounded by grazing lambs and fruit trees.

But I've got these dreams of my own I have to get in place first. I'm not giving up the boxing match I've got going with chemistry until I have at least a BS and a job. As much as I am able, I'm going to try to stop stripping all the joy and pleasure out of the experience. I mean, I might not always like it, but I don't have to be constantly down at the mouth and miserable about it either.

]]> How to Know What's Right tag:www.vickilicious.com,2012://2.652 2012-03-25T20:59:33Z 2012-03-25T20:12:41Z I've been thinking a lot lately about how we decide what's right. I don't necessarily mean right in the sense of truthful, factual, or accurate (although that is a truly fascinating area of philosophy that boggles my mind in... Vicki I've been thinking a lot lately about how we decide what's right. I don't necessarily mean right in the sense of truthful, factual, or accurate (although that is a truly fascinating area of philosophy that boggles my mind in the most delightful ways) -- I mean more... how do we know that what we do or believe is the right thing? What is the most sensible or wisest course of action? What are the kindest, fairest, or most egalitarian policies? I guess I'm talking about those sticky areas of faith and morality, but more directly, visceral instincts that guide life decisions and beliefs.

(The photos, by the way, have basically nothing to do with this post, but I think best when surrounded by magnolias.)




In part, these questions stem from the agonizing national over-analysis of social policy brought on by what I consider fairly ridiculous Republican primary debates and alarmist responses to measures in government. I used to try not to talk about politics because I realized it would alienate people who held different beliefs - and that's the thing. No matter how strongly I feel a sense of "this is right" and "those guys are crazy and wrong," (most notably lately when we start talking about health care, contraception, etc.) I am trying my hardest to respect that at the end of the day we are still talking about systems of belief. I would not presume to say that one person's religious beliefs are more valid than another's, so why am I so comfortable blasting their political ideology? Just because I think I'm right?

With politics, I have strong beliefs about why government exists and what it should do for the people. I am deeply skeptical of underlying motivations and special interests being represented, and I can acknowledge that even when something seems clear cut and straightforward in the best interests of the common good, there is probably some aspect of it that makes other people recoil or wonder why I am so deluded. That's okay. We can all believe different things, if our goals at least approximate one another. I'm going to resist opening this particular can of worms any further (when I do so, I'd like to do it specifically and intentionally), but I guess the gist is that I think some people can have beliefs that I find reprehensible, disgusting, and truly wrong, but they're not necessarily bad people. Most aren't, anyway.




So let's move to a more personal level, since it's all about me all the time anyway (isn't it? don't tell me if it's not). How do we know that the day-to-day decisions we're making are the right ones?

I'll start with love because I am terrible at it. I have always believed that the way to find true love is to open your heart and your life up, to make a space where you are comfortable and sure of who you are, and see what the universe throws at you. I've seen that when I try to force love into the wrong space or time, it has disastrous, heart-breaking results. Similarly, when it's with the wrong person, however much I'd like it to be the right person, I can't change who I am to make them fit.

Almost everyone I know seems to meet their significant other online now. I went to a wedding last fall where literally every couple at my table had met online and they had even met the bride and groom online. I think that's terrific, and I'm thrilled when it works, but something about the idea has always rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it feels like shopping, or it seems to elicit in men my age a sense of entitlement and ego-mania. More likely, it's because it doesn't happen naturally, organically in the course of one's everyday life (I feel compelled to add a disclaimer that I am only talking about my own experience and realize it can happen naturally for other people who aren't so neurotic and obsessed with literal signs from nature and the universe). The few lackluster attempts I made at online dating were at a time when my life was in such disarray and chaos that I didn't have time to go out and meet people. Essentially, there was so little time or space for love in my life that I was trying to force it and squeeze it into weird places on my Google Calendar. Not surprisingly, that makes for disastrous results. Who wants to wait a month between dates, or deal with someone who can't commit emotionally because her entire heart is wrapped up in a toxic job?




When I met my boyfriend, it was an unseasonably warm sunny day. I decided to sit outside, I was relaxed and even dressed nicely (I was on my way to the ballet), so when a handsome and charming guy came over and said he'd never forgive himself if he didn't say hello and tell me how beautiful he thought I was, everything felt natural and right. Guys hit on women on the ferry all the time, and usually it's a somewhat awkward clenched-smile 20-minute conversation, with uncomfortable goodbyes and the realization that it's not meant to be by Manhattan. I was surprised to find this guy so different, such a refreshingly open and warm person that I actually wanted to talk to him. He has a fascinating background (I'll talk about him more another time) and he is literally like no one else I've ever known. So I mean... that feels right. It feels like there was room in my life and in my heart, and the universe pushed him into it.

When I first chose to do this degree in chemistry, it seemed like I was getting similar signs that it was the right thing to do. I stumbled into chemistry through studying art history, and I started to really fall in love with materials science and the technical analysis of art that gave insight into how artists thought and worked. I worked at my dream job at graduate assistant pay, and I slowly came to the realization that if I wanted to keep doing it, I would need to get the education and credentials of my colleagues. Unfortunately, I was working with a team full of people with PhDs in Chemistry and Physics, and when we presented our research at conferences or got it accepted for publication, I was the only author without a PhD or even a BS in a hard science.

I wasn't sure exactly what I expected, and I've already exhaustively documented my floundering, flustered responses to studying chemistry here. When I feel like disparaging the experience, I say it takes beautiful and amazing, wondrous things, then ruins them by saying, "Let's do math about it!" I promised myself this semester that I would get over my math-aversion and stop letting the nausea that sets in when I see equations ruin a good plan. I have not succeeded so far, and when I withdrew from my Calc II class, I was so full of joy I felt inclined to run down Broadway singing and twirling.




I know that there was a time when art and history seemed unfathomably hard and over-complicated to me. I can literally remember days in seventh grade when I was furious that I had to memorize so many stupid dates and names and Acts that didn't add up to a big picture yet. Many years later, as I filled in gaps in political history with paintings, I was happy that I built that foundation and forced myself to stick with it. The politics and social history drilled in by AP Modern European History proved invaluable in understanding the mindset and machinations of European painting. Tying the dates of art projects with what was happening, knowing what skirmishes and territorial disputes were setting people on edge, gave a full, fleshed-out context from which I could really get at the art. Over all that time and to the present, I've been learning to draw and paint. The only reason I feel even remotely comfortable expressing myself in art is because I've been doing it for what feels like my entire life. I drew in the sand before I could talk or had any grasp of language or writing. I obsessively find patterns and see so much it overwhelms me, so art feels like it comes from within.

Perhaps there is such a thing as innate talents or proclivities. Perhaps in my soul, I am meant to be an artist and any attempt at other pursuits is just deluding myself. I don't really believe that's why I paint. I think more likely, I stuck with art because I enjoy it and consider it worthwhile. I've spent close to 30 years practicing and struggling with it. I've had whole days and weeks where I work on learning how to shade or mix colors. At this point, art is the thing I know best in the whole world, so of course it feels right.

Science - and more specifically math - has never felt completely natural to me. Actually, that's not true. I believe every child is a scientist, exploring, gathering observations, testing ideas, and fleshing out a sense of wonder about the world. I cling to that version of science in the most sacred depths of my heart because it is the basis for much of my world view, sense of spirituality, and faith in the universe. Science in the big picture is astoundingly beautiful and exciting, and it still strikes me as some kind of wizardry.

Science in the step-by-step, tiny mathy details, confounds me. I don't understand the terror I feel about math, and all through grade school and high school, I even did really well in it. Something happened in AP Calculus where I just stopped enjoying it and saw it as a huge chore. I didn't use this expression back then, but my brain flashed a big "F THIS NOISE!" and checked out. I withdrew from the class and switched into the morning section of Statistics that my boyfriend was taking (and I got a 115 average, thanks to generous extra credit), realizing it was the only non-honors/AP class that I took in high school. Even though I was still planning to major in Neuroscience in college, some part of my brain was boxing out math, rapidly.




What I desperately want to believe is that the level of this chemistry degree is the walk-before-you-run phase of what could still be a fascinating pursuit. I never liked Chemistry in high school or any of the false starts I made the first few times. I found the big picture ideas amazing, but the method frustrated me because it just seemed so full of equations and drudgery. I hate stoichiometry with the type of passion I usually reserve for genocide, but then again, I was never wild about learning perspective in drawing class either. It was a chore to learn to measure human proportions in life drawing (I'm still crap at it), and it was a pain in the neck to learn by abysmal failure how not to mix paints. I've done tireless studies and sketches and projects over the years that I considered annoying and a waste of my time, but they added up to the ability to walk into my studio and test out whatever idea I'd like, discover things about being human and the universe in the process, and maybe make some beautiful stuff too.

What I want to feel is that chemistry - however tedious this phase - is still right. That I'm meant to do this, that these struggles are only temporary, and that I'm not totally stupid, or some aptitude will eventually kick in. That feeling seems miles away from my daily experience, and whenever I step back from the mountains of textbooks and frantic work, I ask myself, "What the hell am I doing anyway??"

Last week I went to a panel discussion by three scientists who had taken an academic/research track in their careers. They all agreed on the amazing rewards and excitement of pursuing research, as well as the common downsides (most notably grant-writing and constantly scrambling for money and opportunities). The most surprising part to me was my Advanced Biochemistry professor's revelation that he had spent a year in art school because, "I quite liked painting." His advisor had assured him he would hate it, that he should stick with his instinct to go into veterinary medicine (he eventually switched out of that to molecular biology research), and so on. "He was right," my professor said laughing, "there were maybe two days where I didn't completely hate it."




My professor knew he was in the wrong place, and he was able to course correct and get back to where he felt he belonged. It was reassuring that he and the other two well-established researchers had all switched tacks a few times and struggled to find what they really loved, but it was also disquieting in a weird way. I was shaken by the feeling that the way my professor felt about art school is in a nutshell how I feel most days about my chemistry degree. There are glimmering moments when I am amazed and delighted, when something clicks and I get glimpses of the cleverness of the universe that things work the way they do. But most of the experience has been scrambling through lab reports with utterly loathsome dread, failing to remember equations correctly, and feeling hopelessly stupid and ill-prepared on a daily basis. When I leave campus in the afternoons, my first few breaths are accompanied by the feeling of a fist unclenching in my chest, as if I am escaping the tension of floundering, followed all too quickly by the fist closing back up as I know I have to face it all again as soon as I get home.

I want to believe the issue is confidence and poor study habits. Art and history - and generally anything in the humanities - comes very easily to me. As a consequence, I'm a terrible student. I skim through a history chapter once, and it all sticks, with fully fleshed-out details and nuances of analysis forming effortlessly. Science - and God, especially math - just doesn't work that way for me. I haven't figured out how to study science yet, and even when I wrack my brain and drill in everything I can imagine, I get panicky and make stupid mistakes. I forget details that I was able to make into a song the day before. When asked to do a math thing that I had literally done four hours prior, I blanked completely and didn't even know where to begin, as if I'd never seen it before.




A very dear (and stunningly brilliant mathematician) friend said that one of the things he found so amazing about math was that the more a person did it, the markedly better that person could become at doing it in future. "It's like sports," he gushed, "you just have to show up at practice every day, and one day you're dramatically better!" He enjoys problem-solving the way I enjoy drawing, and we talked about all these parallels with testing yourself to do harder problems (swim a lap faster, set a new personal best) or do them in more creative or elegant ways (grace in dancing, effortless line drawings, purity of tone in singing). It made perfect sense, and he and I concluded that I don't have a "problem with math," so much as a lack of experience and the accompanying lack of confidence of someone who has just stepped on a track next to Usain Bolt, wondering if her shoes are even tied.

So do I drill myself in math and relearn all the areas of chemistry where I feel stupid? Do I keep doing problems and reading and trying harder, the way I had to do years ago with history or foreign languages? I know there was a day when a passage of Lorca looked so impenetrable to me I never thought I'd be able to even read it, but years later I could still recite it back, in the middle of surprisingly fluent conversation with a friend from Argentina. Somewhere between "Me llamo Vicki" and Spanish forensic competitions, I had to learn the nuts and bolts of grammar, and I want so badly to believe it is the same case with chemistry. Is it possible to put in the right amount of practice, to develop actual discipline, and get comfortable with chemistry? Even math??




And the bigger question, which I still haven't answered, is.... even if it is possible, is this right?

Am I banging my head against the wall trying to change my life into one that fits around math and science, when the universe knows I belong in art and history? Am I Hitler trying to make paintings, or van Gogh trying to be a preacher? (Strange and psychologically questionable parallels, sorry). Maybe I can force myself to become a chemist, to change my tendencies and inclinations... but will I enjoy it if I do? Will my whole career be one of feeling endlessly stupid and out of my depth? Will it ever feel natural, or will it always be a struggle because at heart, it isn't right?

I know that only time will tell, but I also know that I have a history of staying in destructive situations way too long. Do I tap out, or double down? And what do I do with my life if I'm not meant to be a chemist on track toward art conservation science?

My perennial sailing metaphor relies on setting a course and sticking with it, such that every decision is made in terms of how best to sail that course. I've set my course, I've assessed the blustery areas that are throwing me off my game, but at the end, I am still left wondering if I actually want to get to the destination I chose from across the sea. As I asked in my last post, am I sacrificing the years when I could be getting married, having children, being (relatively) young and creative, to punish myself and try to do something that's just not meant to be?

How do we ever really know what's right?

]]> I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.651 2011-12-22T10:50:53Z 2011-12-22T10:54:22Z 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... Vicki 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.

]]> My Top 7 Current Escapist Fantasies tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.650 2011-12-15T10:11:24Z 2011-12-15T11:10:56Z 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... Vicki 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.

]]> Sharing Subjectivity tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.649 2011-10-23T12:39:39Z 2011-10-23T11:46:28Z 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... Vicki 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.

]]> The scale of experience tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.648 2011-10-04T10:14:45Z 2011-10-04T09:15:25Z 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... Vicki 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.

]]> Falling madly in love tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.647 2011-09-01T07:52:48Z 2011-09-01T06:53:06Z 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... Vicki 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.

]]> Not exactly new art, but probably new to you tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.646 2011-07-23T04:25:47Z 2011-07-23T04:36:05Z In case you don't read my Studio Blog (and why don't you, by the way?), I've finally quit dragging my feet and made a few updates to my art site. The most notable art additions include: Burgeoning, my MFA... Vicki In case you don't read my Studio Blog (and why don't you, by the way?), I've finally quit dragging my feet and made a few updates to my art site.

The most notable art additions include:

There are also some administrative and behind-the-scenes changes, with which I won't bore you needlessly.

As always, I hope you like it, and I welcome any feedback you may have!

]]> Naturaphilia tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.645 2011-07-14T23:34:34Z 2011-07-14T23:00:28Z I think I have a tendency to make life a lot more complicated for myself than it actually is. I invent problems and conflicts where there are none, and I allow my perceptions to skew toward the disastrous or... Vicki I think I have a tendency to make life a lot more complicated for myself than it actually is. I invent problems and conflicts where there are none, and I allow my perceptions to skew toward the disastrous or traumatic, while neglecting the reality that the universe, and specifically nature, is giving me all the information and patterns I need to be happy.




I decided this spring that I was going to retake both semesters of Organic Chemistry. I didn't actually fail either semester, but I felt like I was flailing about, mystified and befuddled, occasionally stumbling into correct answers with no inclination of how or why. I knew, in my heart of hearts, that it wasn't supposed to be that way, that nature is not so clumsy and inexplicably full of exceptions and outliers.

This summer has been the opposite (I should say inverse) of that frustrating and demoralizing experience. It turns out that when I get the rest of my life together and focus, chemistry is endlessly full of pleasure. Most of all I am finding, to my extraordinary delight, that at long last (and please forgive my probably excessive exuberance, but this really is an occasion for caps lock): I UNDERSTAND ORGANIC CHEMISTRY!!!




I mean, I get it, intuitively, predictably, intimately. Something in my brain clicked, and this fundamental truth started emerging: things act the way they do because they are what they are. I knew that, or I believed it at least, but that's really the simplicity that underpins the entire fabric of the universe and our existence in it.




At every level of nature, it's true. Everything paradoxical and strange about anatomy, biology, physics, and so on really does happen the way it does for a reason, and the more I piece these reasons together, the more fascinating and exhilarating the mysteries I uncover.

In that way, in the perfect elegance and order with which this bafflingly weird world is created and governed, comes absolutely exquisite beauty and intrigue. Nature breaks its own rules with astonishing cleverness, evolving and inventing new orders. When you look mathematically at the patterns that emerge from systems and events in nature (oh, by the way, I decided I'm also going to minor in math, and I have a lot more to say about it, in another post), it gets even more incredible, the major and minor variations on a theme and the dazzling, infinite possibilities created by one seemingly insignificant, binary decision.




To have the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional capacity to see, feel, and more than anything, understand what is going on in nature seems, to me, a gift that evidences truly magnificent benevolence in the universe.

I always say that I started painting because I was intensely in love with nature. I obsess over music because the smarter part of my brain is hopelessly enamored with math. I study art and science because they are the interface between humanity and the natural world, and I put my faith in beauty because it is how nature reminds us we're on the right track.




I keep taking photos of the same plants and flowers in my mom's garden or the same river that I was born on (literally, the hospital room faced the Navesink, and I am quite sure my mom walked me over to the window to make that body of water the first bit of nature I ever saw). Part of it is that whole "you never step in the same river twice" aspect of evolving personally, subtly changing the way I see the same things. But I think in truth, it's more of a compulsion. Something in my chest seizes, like an involuntary gasp, and my head floods with an ecstatic rush. My grandmother used to talk to plants and flowers, saying, "God look at you, you lovely thing." At face value, her words were truly spot-on, and I think she knew it.

]]> Browsing Alphabetically tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.644 2011-06-12T06:23:32Z 2011-07-14T22:55:18Z I recently read this post on the always entertaining Not Martha, and I thought it would be amusing to see what my browser alphabet looks like. I have no idea how Chrome decides which sites to pop up first,... Vicki I recently read this post on the always entertaining Not Martha, and I thought it would be amusing to see what my browser alphabet looks like. I have no idea how Chrome decides which sites to pop up first, but like Megan, I agree that this isn't necessarily the most accurate reflection of where I spend my internet time because it doesn't include the sites I read daily in Google Reader. Oh well.

A - Amazon - I shop for and occasionally buy a ridiculous amount of books.

B - Bowery Presents - excellent NYC area concerts

C - CNN - I'm surprised C did not stand for "cupcake" or "cookie."

D - Dictionary.com - I've considered making this my homepage before, for how frequently I look words up.

E - Wikipedia - Ditto.

F - Flickr - I remain steadfastly devoted to what I think is a lovely photo hosting site, probably the best.

G - Gmail - I am still stunned when I meet people who don't use Gmail.

H - Hulu - I reckon this is a necessity for anyone without a television.

I - isoHunt - Bittorrent without the viruses, a pretty likable site.

J - José González - a phenomenal singer-songwriter, about whom you may expect to hear much more from me this summer

K - Vickilicious Knits - my knitting blog. But since I don't like this result, we're going to go with the second site that popped up, The Knitting Factory - a terrific concert venue and bar in Brooklyn.

L - Last.fm - which I also call the Audiostalker. I've long felt that musical compatibility is one of the true paths to lifelong love and friendship (it's also why I meant to look into Tastebuds, the only dating site I think I'd ever consider).

M - Google Maps - I think I look up an address or directions every day, often many times a day. If I didn't have Google Maps on my phone, I think I'd still be helplessly wandering the Lower East Side.

N - New York Cares - a spectacular volunteering organization that I seriously adore.

O - PBS - I guess I didn't have an O site? (Let me show the internet my lack of O-face).

P - The Pirate Bay - Now why can't PBS come up under P? Why's it gotta be a malware-infested bittorrent site that makes me look like an angsty teenager? Ehn, whatevs, I can't pretend I haven't gotten about seven hundred albums from here.

Q - I got nothin'. It shows a recommended Google search for "quotes."

R - Ravelry - the internet's loveliest knit and crochet community (and oh so much more).

S - Sigma-Aldrich - a chemical manufacturing site, from whom I download thousands of MSDSs for everything we use in lab. It's a much more advisable way of finding solubility information or melting points than say, Wikipedia (not that I would ever do that, ahem).

T - Twitter - I am a certifiable Twitter addict. Go ahead, follow me - @vickiboardman!

U - United Teletech - my credit union, which is actually amazing.

V - Vickilicious - This site! But because you're already here, allow me to suggest the #2 for Vs - my art site.

W - The Weather Channel - I check the weather compulsively, and I think about it way more than could possibly be healthy. Nina Garcia wrote, "Stylish women must always consider the weather." It goes so much deeper than that though.

X - the control panel for my website, the link to which I will not be posting.

Y - YouTube - Cat videos and 90s rock. Is there anything better? I think this 1997 Radiohead concert is still my favorite thing on there, but you can check my profile for the rest.

Z - Zappos - Yep. Let's get some shoes...

Now I find I want to read other people's lists to determine if I am, in fact, the most boring internet user of all time. If you've got a spare few minutes, I encourage you to make a list and send me a link, for I am both voyeuristic and easily amused.

]]> Memory transportation tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.643 2011-05-18T13:36:24Z 2011-07-18T21:48:44Z I've been thinking a lot about memory and the literal, biological function of it. So often when I am on auto-pilot it feels like my brain just recycles memories in response to sensory stimulus: oh, the scent of fresh... Vicki I've been thinking a lot about memory and the literal, biological function of it. So often when I am on auto-pilot it feels like my brain just recycles memories in response to sensory stimulus: oh, the scent of fresh lilac, that's heavenly; feel of my cat's feet in the small of my elbow, soft paws; smell of rain, kissing under street lamps. It feels reactive instead of immediate, and the more I traipse through memory in the present, the more strange and depersonalized I feel going through life.





I am, I fear, one of those people who lives too much in my head, overwhelmed with the past and ideas, in place of living in and with the world. Sometimes.

Other times, memory is such an intense pleasure, for its nostalgic and comforting qualities. It's as if I've been practicing for life experiences, and I am relieved by knowing how to respond to them. It startles me to realize I have complete control over the lens through which I view my past, and I can choose if a memory will break my heart all over again or become something fond and warm. We did love one another, didn't we.




© Paul Kolnik, NYC Ballet



This spring I started a subscription to the NYC Ballet, and it's quickly becoming one of my favorite things in the world. Dance is so profoundly evocative and incredibly beautiful, and I am disarmed by how lovely and enchanting I find it. The opening performance in last Friday's program was called Concerto Barocco, and it was a classic Balanchine interpretation of Bach's Concerto in D minor. This particular concerto is so familiar that I am almost certain you already know it or have heard it before. In my case, I had it on record and then on CD, and I used to listen to the three movements the same way I play Radiohead or Rolling Stones albums. I know every note, every flourish intimately, and it's on the order of musical comfort food, the stuff that transports me immediately to a happy, warm, familiar place.

I have a mildly synesthetic tendency to "see" music, which is to say the different mathematical relationships translate into pulses of colors and curving wave-like fields of light. Every time I listened to this Bach concerto as a kid, there was a certain visual dance that happened, which was then projected onto the actual ballet dancers on Friday. In their clean white costumes, they were the perfect canvas so to speak, for the layers and layers of visuals and memories attached with this music, and in an exquisitely rare instance of pure aesthetic perfection, their movements were exactly right. I knew what they were going to do because the music was leading them, the same way the red swoops used to segue into teal hums. It was incredible, and I was so thankful to have had so many years loving that particular bit of music and now adding this ballet to it. Extraordinary.





The next day I went to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which is one of my very favorite places in Brooklyn (If you'd like, you can see lots of photos here). I had a similarly vertiginous traipse through memory, particularly among the tropical flowers, where the scent of gardenia transported me simultaneously through my grandmother's garden in Hawaii and a wrist corsage from my first boyfriend, coupled with all the previous times I had seen this same plant in this garden and had similar travels into my own mind. Remembering memory is a funny trick, but I found, when thinking about math among the succulents, that I was layering everything I was doing with a nostalgic revisiting of every previous time I'd visited this place, thought these thoughts, gone in these circles and come to varying conclusions.





It's easy to think of memory as an introspective trap, the drain-circling, navel-gazing repetition of experience that trades the present for an inaccurate retread of what's already happened. A bit like waves bouncing back and forth across the surface of the same lake, banging one's head against the same wall and wondering why it won't soften.

I watched an episode of Stephen Hawking's Universe when I was visiting my parents over Christmas, to do with time travel (this is a particularly bedtime story level of comfort and nostalgia for me). One of the ideas he has posited relied on the fact that time slows down around hugely massive objects; a spaceship traveling close enough to a supermassive black hole, then, could experience this slowing-down of time over several thousand repetitions. When the astronauts on board returned, their five years would correspond with ten years back on Earth, and they would appear to have time traveled (I'm paraphrasing - you should read the ideas behind this for yourself - they're lovely). Sometimes I worry that my dalliances with memory and reinterpreting my past are little more than circling black holes ad infinitum, making spin after spin and waiting for the experience of transportation or enlightenment, when I might instead have flown out of my loop and discovered something real about living in the meantime.




© NASA



These reverberations of past skew my perspective, and I think I am overly sensitive to the vivid sharpness and clarity of my emotional memory. A song lyric, a certain smell, the day the water turned the color of an ex's eyes put me in a tailspin because I can recall, as urgently and immediately as when it first happened, how it was to love them, precisely. In some small kindness, my brain tends to omit all the ways things fell apart and broke my heart, but it allows for what is probably an undeservedly overly forgiving long view of romance.





Simultaneously, I struggle to forgive. Hurt doesn't stop hurting. I have a problematically strong auditory memory, and I can hear stinging words over and over whenever I need to remind myself why someone doesn't belong in my life anymore. I wish I had a better balance, softening the prickles of negativity with fondness and forgiveness, the fading-out obscuring of detail that I am certain eventually will have to come.

Meanwhile, if I am living so much in my mind, shuffling and reshuffling the deck of what I've already done and felt, I fear that I am not moving forward or engaging in right now. There is literally no sense in comparing exes at their idealized very best with someone new, since "their very best" will only ever exist as a construct in my mind that occasionally haunts me. Friends don't deserve to get compared with older friends or abandoned because the person they are now doesn't coalesce with the person I initially imagined they could be.





And chemistry. My current sadomasochistic, endlessly unforgiving lover is getting the worst of all my memory. Fraught with anxiety of past chemistry classes and my old job, now layered with the memories of struggling to retain it or make sense of it, I am literally going to be revisiting the same material all summer. I know I'm going to remember the first time I learned it, what else was going on in my life at the time, and it's going to be a tremendous effort of willpower to separate my heart from my mind if I am going to stay focused.

I've been saying I need to keep my heart out of my mind's way, but as I've just made clear to myself, it's actually quite the other way around. If memory is my sinkhole, I think it is only an open heart that will serve as my life line.

]]> This is what I do now, maybe tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.637 2011-04-22T08:22:21Z 2011-07-18T21:58:40Z Since starting a degree in chemistry, I haven't had too many terrific things to say about it. I haven't had a lot to say in general, here at least, as the effort of organizing my thoughts in any sort... Vicki Since starting a degree in chemistry, I haven't had too many terrific things to say about it. I haven't had a lot to say in general, here at least, as the effort of organizing my thoughts in any sort of coherent way is just asking way too much on top of all these damn hexagons I gotta draw.

Backtracking for a second, when my cat used to do something outrageously naughty, unabashedly, I used to look at him quizzically and ask, "Oh, so this is what we do now?" He'd usually respond with disarming eye contact and a defiant double-meow to confirm, "Yes, this is what we do now."

When I started at Pace last fall, I just had to accept that "what I did" had to shift. I could not as easily justify staying up all night reading about architecture, claiming it had some tangential educational value (it did), or obsessing over music (good for the soul), without also accepting the foggy, number-inverting slogging in my brain the next day. I started to choose a good night's sleep over the things I loved, and while I was really proud of myself for getting an A- in Calculus, I kind of had to wonder at what cost I achieved that goal.

Now I am just plain wallowing in my own inadequacy in chemistry, and while I've got a whole fistful of excuses at the breathless ready, what I'm doing now is failing, atrociously. For the most part, anything I've studied in the past has basically made sense to me. I could organize my thoughts in a way that contained the information and allowed for further insights. With chemistry, most days, I feel like I showed up to the wrong class, and no matter how much I read or review my notes, it doesn't stop looking like hieroglyphics to me.

(This picture does not really relate to this post yet, but I needed cheering up.)

I took an exam that I thought I'd prepared for. I made this meticulous study guide translating a couple hundred pages down into what I thought were the important details and reactions. I felt I really understood what was significant about the particular types of molecules (aldehydes and ketones, amines, and carboxylic acids and derivatives, if you care), and that when I came across a problem on the exam, I'd be able to see what was happening.

(Still unrelated, but deliciously so.)

Since I imagine few people are less interested in mechanisms than I am, let me give an analogy by way of food. If you understand a recipe, you know that you can add ingredients in the right sequence and conditions to get the desired food item you're trying to produce. If you're making caramel and your milk curdles, you can intuit that you skipped a step in tempering the milk, and you know what to fix after you've thrown out that gooey and smelly mess. With each step of the preparation, you can see the ingredients gradually transforming into something more closely resembling your beautiful pear tarte tatin until voilà, c'est magnifique!

I am not like this in chemistry. I think I see what's happening, as I'm copying down all the stupid steps and fretting every atom, but where I think I'm working toward a pineapple upside down cake, nodding and saying "mmhmm, pineapples go on the bottom, where they caramelize, and it's okay because you flip it over at the end," I am astonished to learn, quelle horreur, that I'm supposed to have made sea urchin ceviche. Why did I add sugar and flour to my ceviche?? Aye me, are these tomatoes? I thought they were maraschino cherries! And so forth.

Except in chemistry, I don't even know what I've done wrong, until I find myself sitting at an exam, as I did today, not only making countless mistakes, but panicking and full on blanking on everything I've studied. I mean, if my life depended on it, I couldn't draw out a single mechanism.

I guess where I'm going with this is... when do you decide that what you're doing now is a mistake? How long do you drive down the wrong road before you turn around and check your directions?

(This image is finally relevant.)

I'm taking this one-credit Hiking elective, to fill out my schedule, because I though it would be relaxing and fun. Mostly, it's wonderful because we get to go to these beautiful places outside on Sundays. But I have learned that what I call hiking, my professor calls "walking in the woods," and that his definition is more like... climbing up big rocks and scrambling around boulders on all fours. The picture above is a view from the top of a frighteningly steep rock - you can't actually see the person below, to whom I was shouting back, "The trail is right in the center. Just climb up that rock, yeah, the one in the middle."

At some point along the hikes, my body gives out, and I have a moment where my mind is too weak or my thighs are too tired to overcome the challenge ahead. "That's it," I declare breathlessly, "I live here now. I live on this stupid rock, where I will have squirrel-bear hybrid children ashamed of their feeble college dropout mom." I convince myself that I can't go another step, as I keep dragging my feet ploddingly, that any moment now, I'll just collapse. Thankfully, my attention span is short enough that I reach a level spot or I catch my breath, I stop scrambling for just long enough to get distracted by the feeling of sunshine on my scraped-up hand, and I decide, "This is kind of lovely, though," and persevere.

I think that as much as I underestimated 1200-foot+ elevation hikes as "easy enough, if they're spread out over a couple miles and not so steep all at once," I had no idea what I was getting into with chemistry. And so far, I've gotten nary a glimpse of the scenic view or exhilarating breeze at the top that makes it worthwhile.

I thought I had this great plan worked out for a fascinating integration of science and the arts, that I was carving out a special little niche in conservation science that would make me happy all my life. I did what I considered the challenging part, in sorting out master's degrees in painting and art history, and now I just needed to get the science out of the way. Easy as pie, because I love science!

But I suck at chemistry. I suck spectacularly, in inventive and elaborate ways. I suck so badly that I wonder how I've ever passed a single exam, let alone the prerequisite for this course, and as page after page of mysteries remain steadfast in their refusal to unravel in understanding, I'm perplexed at why I ever thought this was something I could do now.

Odds are very high that I will fail this class and have to retake it over the summer. I need to pass it, both for my degree, and as a prerequisite of the Biochemistry class I'm registered to take in the fall. When I glibly talk about it with my mother and say I'll probably be retaking advanced orgo over the summer, she asks earnestly, "Vic, what's going to change between now and then?" and I have no answer.

I know that this semester has been unusually tough. Instead of the usual cold to throw me off my game, I had a month of bronchitis and pneumonia. That is the tip of the poor health iceberg, as I've also developed baffling allergies to everything I touch, eat, or think about, and my system seems to be in a constant stress response of one kind or another. I've worried terribly about family and friends who are sick, having problems with their babies, or dying. I got in a car accident. I had crises of conscience with friends and relationships. I fretted too much about the things that don't matter because I was overwhelmed by the things that really do. I've spent weeks at a time a hair's breadth from bursting into tears, while bottling everything up and insisting I "don't have the time" to think about it. I got so good at distracting myself that I went full-circle and didn't worry as much as I should, prioritizing the things that transported me away from my reality instead of those that would improve it.

In the meantime, it's spring. I want to be exuberant at the sheer audacity of flowers returning to bloom and trees bursting into colors that radiate joy. I want to feel happy to be alive, instead of dismal and frustrated because I'm dumb. I want to spend time with the people I care about, with whom - I am crushingly and distressingly reminded - I don't have infinities. I want to stop dreading days, or regretting how I've spent them.

So I don't know what I do now. However much my confidence or ability has faltered in the past, I could still get behind the big picture and make sense of what I was doing. I think about the way I feel, when I am utterly clueless and blind-sided by the vast expanse of Stuff I Don't Understand About Chemistry, and I don't know that I want to spend the rest of my twenties (and probably a good portion of my thirties) pursuing such a cruel mistress. I've had enough destructive relationships in my life that I don't need my education and career path to become another.

I honestly don't know if this is a big rock I've got to get over, or if it's time to admit this path is too hard and I need to turn back. I know I'm supposed to keep picking my feet up and putting them down, but I have no idea where that should be. It feels plainly precarious.

]]> Distressing tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.636 2011-03-24T19:10:19Z 2011-07-14T22:59:37Z My Advanced Organic Chemistry professor was taking my class to task today because she is (rightfully) disappointed in the average performance and apparent level of commitment we are demonstrating. When she asked who was actually reviewing the material on... Vicki My Advanced Organic Chemistry professor was taking my class to task today because she is (rightfully) disappointed in the average performance and apparent level of commitment we are demonstrating. When she asked who was actually reviewing the material on a daily basis, not cramming in ten hour stretches on the weekends, I don't think anyone could truthfully say that they are focusing on organic chemistry every single day.

"You don't want to be toll collectors, do you?" she asked, annoyed, "I mean, you're taking this class because you want to go on to med school, or grad school, to dentistry school...."

She continued by explaining the need to "get used to this level of work" and learn to manage the volume and complexity of problem sets "if you're ever going to pass the MCATs or become a doctor."

I was kind of nodding and accepting my chiding along with everyone else, when I was kind of stricken. Nowhere along the line was she indicating the necessity of... learning chemistry. The more I thought about it, the more it bothered me. I didn't sign up for a crash course in how to overextend myself and scramble around memorizing things. I want to understand carbon-based molecules and their reactions. I want to look at chemicals and be able to predict and explain why they do what they do.

Most of the students in my class are Biology majors, and most of them indicate that yes, they are preparing for med school, to become doctors. I understand that universities need to prepare these students for the types of questions they'll have to excel at for admissions exams, but it truly bothers me that the course, which is a fundamental building block of chemistry, seems to have been altered into an MCAT-preparatory session or some absurd packing-in of chemistry related trivia without the full depth and complexity it deserves.

Just as high schools are becoming increasingly faultier for emphasizing college preparation over actual meaningful learning and development of critical thinking skills and creativity, I fear that undergraduate science programs are falling victim to teaching to tests and sort of glossing over the actual significance of the material at hand.

When I took Organic I, it felt extremely and problematically rushed, but I figured that was because it was over the summer and I wasn't as prepared as I should have been. Even then, though, the professor (who was also the department head at that school) said he felt that Organic Chemistry really deserved three or even four semesters, but universities have to cram it all in since they are already requiring the Bio majors to take Gen Chem I and II before the two semesters of Orgo.

I don't like this idea of stuffing it all in, instead of learning the material for its own sake and getting something meaningful out of it. I think about high school students who don't necessarily go on to college, but who are forced to sacrifice the classroom time that may have been spent developing writing skills, or general knowledge about history and science that would equip them for life, preparing for SATs and practicing college admissions essays. I know I was required to write no less than seven practice admissions essays in various courses, but when I actually applied to college, I used the common app and earned a full-tuition scholarship submitting the first draft of an essay about brushing a Monet with my cheek in the Brooklyn Museum, which, by the way, broke all of my teachers' rules about a "good" admissions essay.

So what will I take away from Advanced Organic Chemistry, if I pass it? The enormous relief I felt when I passed Orgo I, with the private intention to never look at "that nonsense" again? The knowledge that no matter what else I did in life, no one could make me do that again? An experience of not sleeping for weeks or months on end and wearing myself out trying to make sense of the minutiae of hundreds of reactions?

I'm not coming away with an experience of rigor and discipline. It's just extremity and excessive demands, to give the illusion that I've put "enough" effort and time into it and would, I don't know, make a good sleep-deprived doctor? I reckon it's because I'm coming at this material from a different perspective than most science students, but I feel downright resentful that the big experience is in getting through the class, wholly inconsequential to actually understanding chemistry or not.

So like I said, it's distressing. And a little demoralizing. But I don't really have time to think about it, since I've got hundreds of pages of reading to do.

]]> Present tag:www.vickilicious.com,2011://2.635 2011-03-23T06:28:32Z 2011-03-23T07:44:03Z When things get quiet around here, it's probably easy to assume I'm busy being overwhelmed by life, or suffering some ridiculous illness, the likes of which are occurring with distressingly increasing frequency and intensity. And that's not too far from... Vicki When things get quiet around here, it's probably easy to assume I'm busy being overwhelmed by life, or suffering some ridiculous illness, the likes of which are occurring with distressingly increasing frequency and intensity. And that's not too far from typical, though lately, I've literally been lost in thought. It's kind of an amazing feeling.

I started this year on the heels of a pretty intense bout of depression, and I resolved (while sick with the flu) that in 2011, I would Have More Fun.

The interpretation of such a sentiment seems fairly straightforward. Go out with friends more, do more interesting things in the city, see my family more, eat cupcakes more often, pause to relax and enjoy the things I love. And basically, focusing on having fun, instead of whatever I had been dwelling on, has been a pretty solid antidepressant. I think I'm even making some in-roads on the pervasive existential crisis that likes to linger menacingly around the fringes of consciousness and strike without warning when I let my guard down. Take that, Angst!

So when I am seeing success in my endeavor, my analytical side scrambles to isolate the mechanism, that I may synthesize it for future needs, and hey, even concentrate its potency for greater efficacy. I started looking, in excessive detail, at the things that make me happy, seeking the commonality as if it were some secret to joy in existence.

I have always loved the arts, so it's a logical place to start when I'm looking for a treat. My mother and I started a ballet subscription earlier this year (of which, much, much more later), and the performances we've attended have been astonishingly fantastic, giving me this electrifying sense of aliveness that's just thrilling.

We're also having a tremendous season of opera. We've seen what I believe are some of the best performances of opera I'll ever see in my life this year, truly magical moments. I got to meet with Plácido Domingo a second time, after he conducted a heartbreaking, staggeringly wonderful Roméo et Juliette. I also met up with the amazing tenor Joseph Calleja (my absolute favorite) after a powerful performance in Lucia di Lammermoor.

I know, I am spoiled rotten. And yes, there will be a surfeit of writing about opera to come soon.

I've been trying to take advantage of the unique opportunities that living in the greatest city in the world presents on a daily basis. One of the more excellent ways to spend a little window of time on a Sunday afternoon has been the series of organ recitals at Saint Patrick's Cathedral.

Any kind of live music tends to have a terrific curative property for me, and the amplification of the cathedral makes these especially good. Quite literally, pleasure that wakens the soul.

I've gone ice skating in Bryant Park, enjoyed some terrific dinners and drinks with dear friends, wandered at length in art museums and galleries, gone jogging along the harbor on the esplanade at the end of my street (though admittedly, not nearly enough), looked at trees and the sky and the moon, and done all the things I imagined I would do during a winter in the city. It has exceeded even my wildest expectations, and I'm having a blast.

I started volunteering with New York Cares, as part of a civic engagement requirement for one of my classes. I am so happy to have found this organization because I've always harbored a terrible guilt about not giving back, but I've struggled to find volunteering opportunities that fit into my schedule or skill set. I have a lot more to say about these experiences, but they are worth their own entry, so it should suffice to say I am finding volunteering to be intensely rewarding and fascinating, and it's making me love this city even more.

In private moments, I am drawing, all the time. I've been obsessing about Radiohead, as could probably have been expected as a consequence of their new album release. I finally moved a huge amount of my books from my parents' attic in New Jersey (where they've been since 2008) to my apartment, so I've been reading, all the time, on all the subjects that have interested me throughout the years. I've been cooking, knitting, sewing, writing, painting. hula-hooping, Smokey-petting, and doing all the lovely domestic things I enjoy so much at home. And though it doesn't seem like a pro at first, I've reached the point in my degree where it is legitimately intellectually challenging (if not overly so), and I've been working my ass off poring over my organic chemistry text book, wracking my brain to solve problems, think like electrons, write labs, and clamoring about for some grasp on what in hell I'm doing (which I love).

The thread that's run through all of this is almost disappointingly obvious. I've been Present. I'm paying attention to what I'm doing, showing up with my whole self and taking things in.

It sounds so simple, the first time everyone reads Ram Dass and grasps this mantra of Be Here Now, and yet, that's really saying it all, isn't it?

My approach to experience and existence tends to be overly cluttered with analysis and aesthetics, as I am constantly evaluating, judging, considering, comparing, and categorizing. I used to think that was a huge personal limitation of mine, that I was some sort of insipid, shallow person who could only go through life by accumulating experiences like objects and passing proclamations about them. But I've come to accept that this approach is actually kind of great, if I'm trying to be observant and contemplative, so long as I embrace the sense of wonder as a guide. I instinctively grab as much detail as I can fit in my memory, so my remembrances are populated with a symphony of scents, colors, textures, sounds, emotions, and specificity.

At long last, instead of feeling burdened and exhausted by all this information, I'm just letting myself enjoy what my brain does. And breathing. The result has been an acute sense of clarity, precise joys accumulated and multiplied in resonance, and that perfect pitch of beauty combined with freedom.

In this respect, Present is exactly how and where I want to be.

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