Vickilicious

I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up

2011-12-22T10:50:53Z

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

2011-12-15T10:11:24Z

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

2011-10-23T12:39:39Z

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

2011-10-04T10:14:45Z

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

2011-09-01T07:52:48Z

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

2011-07-23T04:25:47Z

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 thesis (includes my corollary statement)
Entangled, part of a series of paintings
Coming Apart, works on paper

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

2011-07-14T23:34:34Z

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

2011-06-12T06:23:32Z

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

2011-05-18T13:36:24Z

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.

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.

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

2011-04-22T08:22:21Z

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

2011-03-24T19:10:19Z

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

2011-03-23T06:28:32Z

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.

Great Moments in Twitter

2011-03-12T06:18:56Z

Apropos of basically nothing, here is a list of some of my favorite bits of wisdom and quotes by famous people collected in the past few months via Twitter. I always think a good list comprises seven items, so here we are.

- Being alive is the best thing ever! - David Bazan

- The one thing I'll never understand about calculus is how to do it. - Stephen Colbert

- IF YOU LIVE SIMPLY THERE IS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. - Jenny Holzer

- Music makes our otherwise insignificant moments....epic..!!! - Wayne Coyne (click on that for an awesome video)

- if i ever tell you "you know what i read somewhere?" it really means, "You know what i saw on tv?" or "You know what a stranger told me?" - Chris Pratt

- Chances are slim that you will die by being eaten by something. - Rainn Wilson (This one actually makes me reconsider my fear of the ocean RE sharks.)

- Italian may be the language of love, but English will always be the language of apologizing afterwards. - Stephen Colbert

One of my favorite aspects of Twitter is the unfettered access it gives to spontaneous, impulsive expressions. There is something so unabashedly charming about Mindy Kaling's random musings or Fabio Viviani's unbridled enthusiasm and joie de vivre.

If you know me in person, I've probably already extolled my love of Twitter at great and most likely excessive length. If not, please say hi @vickiboardman and we'll Tweet it up together!

Venison chili bowls

2011-02-06T00:56:24Z

I've been making an effort this year to re-domesticate myself (of which, more later). Part of that effort came in a New Year's Resolution to no longer order take-out if I was too lazy to go to the grocery or cook (which has meant a lot of sandwiches and soup for dinner lately), but I'm really trying to cook more, and better.

I spent some time while I was sick over winter break researching recipes that were easy and fast to cook and required a minimum of ingredients (because I'm working with a student budget and they don't exactly have a provision for artisanal cheeses). If you are interested in a similar project, I would definitely recommend digging through the archives of Cooking Light and Martha Stewart, with some of my very favorite recipes in the world to be found in the latter.

Perhaps most valuable of all, I spoke with my parents, at length. They spent over 20 years feeding a family in a budget- and nutrition-conscious way. They know a surprising amount of tricks for grocery shopping and cooking to take advantage of fresh ingredients without wearing out your energy or wallet.

One of the meals I always enjoy most at my parents' house is venison chili, a simple, warm comfort food that is surprisingly nutritious. Venison is high in protein and absorbable iron, among other nutrients, but it is incredibly lean and has much less saturated fat than beef (more nutritional information here). It's approximately equal to boneless, skinless chicken in terms of fat and calories, but provides the nutrition and flavor of sirloin or similar. It's somewhat difficult for the average American to find venison for purchase, but it's becoming a lot more available at Whole Foods and suchlike. Or I suppose you can make friends with my dad.

The recipe my family uses is cobbled together from Meta Given's (which is amazing), my grandmother, and my father's tweaks. Because my grandmother lived in Hawaii, we have always made chili in bowls, served over rice, with Cheddar cheese (and sometimes sour cream) on top. I was probably 25 when I learned that there was, in fact, any other way to eat chili.

Venison Chili Bowls

Ingredients

1-2 pounds ground venison (approximately a quart-size freezer bagful)
a few tsp oil (I like extra virgin olive oil but anything works)
1 medium onion
1 clove garlic, finely chopped, or 1-2 teaspoons jarred, chopped garlic
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
2-3 tsp chili powder
1 15-oz can dark red kidney beans (I like Goya)
1 32-oz can tomato puree
1 pot of rice (4-6 cups)
sharp Cheddar or another sharp cheese, shredded
dollop sour cream, if desired

Preparation

1. Start rice in cooker or on a pot in the stove. Please don't ask me how often I forget this step when cooking dishes with rice.

2. In a large skillet, sauté onion and garlic in oil until onions are soft and nearly transparent.

3. Add ground venison and brown, about 10 min. Break meat up into the size pieces you'd like. My father likes his chili chunkier, with bigger pieces of meat, whereas I like mine much smaller and more even. This is a topic of extensive debate in my family, but you can do as you please.

4. Add salt, pepper, and chili powder and mix thoroughly.

5. Rinse kidney beans thoroughly with cold water, to remove all the gooey stuff they come with when they're canned. I cannot emphasize the importance of this step enough - that goo is super nasty.

6. Add kidney beans and tomato puree to meat mixture and mix well. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer, for 30 min or more, stirring often. I find your kitchen stays cleaner if you cover it between stirrings. If chili becomes too thick, you can add hot water. If it is too thin, simmer longer, but for the love of God, don't add any kind of thickener (ask me how I know). While 30 min is the recommended time, your chili is done when it has reached your desired consistency and the beans are tender but not mushy.

7. Layer in a bowl: one scoop of rice, a generous scoop of chili and shredded cheese. Some people like to preserve the strata as they eat, but I am a big fan of stirring everything together. Enjoy!

This recipe makes a lot, at least 6 servings, and it can easily feed a family of four adults who really love their chili. The longer it keeps in the fridge, the more the flavors meld and intensify, so it's a good recipe to make and reheat throughout the week.

As you can see, this is not the fanciest or most elaborate chili recipe in the world. It is, however, incredibly inexpensive if you have access to venison, it's super fast and simple to prepare, and it makes for a truly delicious and satisfying meal. If you are inclined to add a bunch of peppers or spices, by all means, do. This recipe lends itself to tweaking and adjusting (for example, I add ground red pepper for a touch of unobtrusive heat) and can serve as a great base for whatever your chili imagination wishes.

As I continue with my reeducation in food and cooking experiments, I'll probably post recipes that I find particularly successful. If you have any recommendations for foods that are healthy, budget-friendly, or preferably both, please do share!

In the meantime, I think I need to reacquaint myself with the instruction manual to my rice cooker.

Why I am studying chemistry

2011-01-22T15:20:32Z

The most common question I get asked, by far, is why I'm studying chemistry, particularly why I've started a degree on the heels of finishing two master's degrees in art when I'm pushing 30. I've talked about this several times before, but that discussion has predominantly focused on the practical, applicable study of chemistry as it fits into my career plans.

(I no longer use hammers in the chemistry lab.)

I want to talk more about the magic part, the intellectual puzzle, and the extraordinary beauty that chemistry presents on a daily basis.

When I think about why I make art, it's pretty straightforward: that's how I understand the world. Art is a language and toolkit to process information and construct tangible responses and syntheses of thoughts and ideas. Also, it's a compulsion, and I can't look at things without observing their form, balance, color, line, thinking about how I would draw them, or imagining their image juxtaposed with others. When I need to understand something, I visualize it, and I use my hands to make those images part of my reality.

Chemistry, it would seem, is less tangible and direct in how it helps me make sense of the universe, especially at the very limited level I am at now. How does an exhaustive cataloguing of the interactions of types of molecules in organic chemistry help me get at the nature of existence or any kind of bigger truth or ideas?

Here is where I have to somewhat sheepishly admit that a lot of my world view deals with an adjusted sort of animism. I don't literally believe that objects all have souls in the mystic, spiritual sense, but I do believe that every being and every thing has unique characteristics that make it exactly what it is. These properties of existence, at an increasingly fundamental level, boil down to their molecular structure. Subatomic particles, for the most part, are identical, and so it is only the particular quantity and configuration of protons, neutrons, and electrons, that distinguishes a super reactive sodium ion from an inert noble gas.

Chemistry lets you see and understand the properties that make molecules and systems of molecules function the way they do. In essence, it makes sense of the material universe, and to me, that's amazing.

Another belief I have is that love is a construct based on understanding. What I mean by this is that there are only a few ways to love people. You either love them for exactly who they are, you love them in spite of who they are (which is really the same thing), or you don't love them. It's as simple as that.

The more you understand and know people, the closer you are connected to what they really are. It is this same approach that I take toward seeking an understanding of the universe - the more I can see and understand it, the more deeply and appreciatively I love it. And, in what I suspect may be the driving force of existence, my love for life makes me want to understand and know it more.

Chemistry, like most disciplines, is incredible at revealing mysteries. The more I study chemistry, the more keenly I realize how little I know or understand it, which makes it impossibly satisfying. The more predictable molecules seem, the more magical and astonishing the actual unpredictability of the universe becomes. The more I study chemistry, the more intensely I experience true wonder and amazement at all the clever and beautiful things the universe does.

I have had the privilege over time to talk with chemists who understand their discipline the way I understand painting, and it is a remarkably inspiring experience. They have access to an intimate understanding of all the elements and their particularities, the way I access colors and the feel of certain materials, and they are able to look at everything from batteries to cleaning products to psychotropic drugs with the same ability to ask and answer "why is that the way it is?" To me, that's nothing short of wizardry, and I am eternally awed and humbled by that level of familiarity with the world.

I'm oversimplifying my examples because I can't adequately describe the much more profound and luminous ideas the chemists I know actually talk about, but the point is that I want that. I want to be able to really know the paints I'm working with and the goo inside of leaves. I want to remove varnish with solvents and genuinely understand why they're working. I want to be able to see an illuminated manuscript or an oil painting as the miracle of science and molecular interactions it really is, and I want to be able to use that knowledge to get at some of the endless questions I have about the universe.

When I started studying chemistry, it was to supplement my career. The idea was that art conservation science was a more viable field than pure art conservation because in addition to making more valuable (and less likely erroneous) contributions to art restoration and preservation, I could work outside of my field and support myself with chemistry if need be (which I expect it will). I wanted to get a degree in a hard science because, as much as I personally respect the arts, our society at large really doesn't, and I don't want to rely on what I consider skewed priorities to be able to make a living.

It has been an extraordinary and shocking discovery that chemistry is directly related to the line of inquiry I've been following all this time with painting, writing, reading, and photography, and that in fact it is the only logical next step in my personal intellectual/artistic projects. I figured it would be interesting and an enjoyable challenge, but I never expected to find something that I love as personally and intuitively as art or music. I may have found the true love of my life, and I feel utterly undeserving to have stumbled into it so gracelessly and haphazardly. And yet, that's exactly the way I am.

I'm not really done answering why I study chemistry, but I am able to finally say "because I have to, because I love it," and that's an immensely satisfying and electrifying compulsion.